I was recently sipping a cask Bachelor Bitter at Deschutes Brewery and I started reflecting on its excellence and influence. I hope it becomes one of those grand old breweries future generations enjoy and celebrate.
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I am compiling a database of breweries in Oregon for a website that will launch soon. It needs to be up-to-date and comprehensive, which means I’ve been poring through websites and social media accounts to find out which breweries still exist. The result? A lot fewer than I expected.
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No top ten breweries list this year. But I can’t leave you entirely in the lurch, so here’s Portland’s brewery of the year. As a fun factoid, it has never appeared on one of my top-ten lists, either. Who says beer isn’t exciting anymore?
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Winning awards and accolades isn’t enough to make a beer a classic, like Harvey’s Sussex Best or Saison Dupont or Schneider Weisse or Pliny the Elder. It takes decades of time, thought, and refinement. pFriem’s Pilsner is a case study in that unfolding process, and why it’s such a long journey.
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In celebration of Upright’s 15th anniversary, I asked founder/brewer Alex Ganum and three other friends of Upright to describe memorable beers from the brewery’s run.
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Somehow, Portland’s Upright Brewery has been around 15 years. Despite reaching its mid-teens, Upright has remained one of the most inventive, interesting, and unexpected breweries in the the country. As we hit this big milestone, let’s revisit what owner/brewer Alex Ganum has accomplished.
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Detroit native George Johnson founded Assembly Brewing in 2019, bringing the authentic pizza from his hometown to Portland. Over the weekend, he opened a second location. It is a great opportunity to revisit the tale of George’s incredible perseverance.
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I managed to get inside the old brewhouse at U Fleků yesterday, and offer this illustrated peek inside.
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Is it possible that the most unusual brewery in America is the one that just makes two beers? Brienne Allan and Michael Fava are certainly making a compelling case with Sacred Profane, their year-old project in Biddeford, Maine.
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It seemed like such an unlikely, almost perverse idea—right there at ground zero of the biggest craze in the 21st century, where people were spending hours in lines to buy thick, very sweet, intense ales, here was a brewery making elegant, clear, crisp lagers.
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There aren’t too many bright spots in the beer industry right now, but I discovered two projects in Chicago that have the capacity to expand the market for craft beer. They involve unusual business models and entrepreneurs targeting communities who haven’t yet discovered good, locally-brewed beer.
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If you are an average human—I was, it turned out—you will stop dead in your tracks and goggle at the massive abstract harp sculpture that floats over the central bar. It has churchy swoops and rises, recalling a pipe organ, and, like a cathedral, draws the eyes up.
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After twelve years, Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider is ending its run. But founder Nat West isn’t sad about it and he doesn’t want his fans to be, either. Here’s the story, and the legacy the cidery leaves behind.
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What makes an iconic brewery? I wonder if sometimes it’s the distance from a major city so many of them seem to reside. Living out on the high desert of Eastern Oregon has given Barley Brown’s the freedom to make beers with a definite identity.
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I enjoyed a lot of wonderful beer in my visit to Oklahoma, but the IPAs Jake Keyes is making at Oklahoma City’s Skydance really stood out.
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Whether or not you have been to Oklahoma or ever plan to go, it’s worth taking an ethnographic look at a young and developing beer scene that contains its own character and lessons. You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!
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Two breweries joined a small wave opening in Portland in the past year, and even in a very crowded market they bring something eaters and drinkers won’t find elsewhere.
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Oregon’s De Garde Brewing, possibly the only brewery outside Belgium exclusively making spontaneously-fermented beer, turns ten next month. That decade charts big changes in the fortunes of wild ales in the US.
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Just six months since it launched, Living Häus is making some of Portland’s best beer. In this post, I talk to Mat Sandoval and Conrad Andrus to see what makes it tick.
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Did you know there were two Kona Breweries? Both make Big Wave and Longboard Lager. Both have the same evocative island art and the same motto (“liquid aloha”). Yet the original one on the Big Island is now independent and has nothing to do with the stuff made on the mainland.
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