Thinking About "Classics" and "Bests"
Portland’s alt-weekly, Willamette Week, has a big beer-focused issue out this month corresponding with the announcement of the Oregon Beer Awards. In it they review every brewery in Portland. (They listed fifty breweries, but that number isn’t definitive—counting breweries is a mug’s game.) Nineteen of these they “highly recommend,” and six they describe as “world class.” Arts and Culture editor and longtime beer writer Andi Prewitt summarizes their thinking:
Star ratings: ★ Highly Recommended , ★★ World Class
Our rating system for all Portland breweries in this collection is modeled after the Michelin Guide. Stars are not awarded solely for the quality of the beer, but also for ambience, distinctiveness and overall experience. A single star denotes a brewery is highly recommended and its beers are worth going out of the way for. Two stars indicate the experience is exceptional, which means you should not delay planning a special journey.
I do a regular feature called The Making of a Classic, and anyone interested in beer is surely aware of Michael Jackson’s old framing of “world classic” (even if they’re not familiar with Jackson). All of which put me in a ruminative mood. It’s one thing to call a two hundred year-old brewery that makes the exemplar of a certain beer style a “world classic.” But what does it mean to call a ten year-old brewery that?
To sweeten the pot, let’s look at which breweries WW called highly recommended and which breweries they called classics. First up, the recommended ones: 10 Barrel, Baerlic, Culmination, Ecliptic, Grand Fir, Great Notion, Level, Little Beast, Occidental, Old Town, Steeplejack, Threshold, Zoiglhaus. Next, the world class: Breakside, Rosenstadt, Ruse, Upright, Von Ebert, Wayfinder. Bonus list; those they didn’t star at all: Away Days, Cascade, Deschutes, Gigantic, Grains of Wrath, Living Haus, StormBreaker.
Obviously, your mileage may vary. In a couple months, I’ll release my own list of Portland’s best breweries for 2023, and it won’t look like this one. Feel free to comment on their list, the surprises, the snubs, and the arguable choices. All lists have them!
But let me conclude with my own comment about world classics. It’s not language I would use. I understand the Michelin analogy here, but it doesn’t quite work for me for beer. Restaurants and breweries are different. The Michelin system highlights skill and quality (or in their language: “quality of the ingredients used, mastery of flavor and cooking techniques, the personality of the chef in the cuisine, harmony of flavors, and consistency between visits”), but doesn’t address historical or cultural importance. In beer, those things are really important. The language of “world classic” means different things in different contexts, but since the beer world has been using this term for decades, it’s hard to replace the meaning while keeping the words.
On the other hand, I do think it would be nice to come up with a term that described breweries making the best beer in the world that didn’t include cultural/historical impact. No one doubts how important American brewing is today, or how influential certain breweries and beer are. I’d guess the US is home to 50-100 of the very best breweries in the world today. That is, breweries making no bad beer, an extremely high level across all their beers, and a few, or at least one, exceptional signature beer that, given a few more decades, might finally become a world classic in the original sense. How many of those breweries live in Portland? Probably not six. (But certainly more than zero.)
So consider this an open call to discuss bests and classics, to offer your own criteria and your own nominees, whether in Portland, Oregon, or the US more broadly. It’s all subjective, so there’s no wrong answer, but the discussion helps us refine our thinking so when we evaluate beers and breweries, we have at least a slightly more focused critical apparatus.
Updaate: As Peter Bailey pointed out, there’s a substantial difference between world classic and world class. I’m working on a print article today and slapped this up pretty quickly. That distinction is an important one, and a more thoughtful me in a different timeline might have written a more nuanced post. But I didn’t!