Tag Archives: oregon beer news

Follow-up posts are like newspaper corrections: only a tiny percent of the people who saw the original error will ever notice the correction. Nevertheless, the conversation following that post along with Stan Hieronymus' comments convince me there's another juicy bite to be had from this apple. I erred in using Zoiglhaus as the point of refere ...

Update: I finally had a chance to correct that egregious typo in the title. So many apologies. Yesterday afternoon, San Francisco's Speakeasy Brewery shuttered their doors. A tweet came out followed by this announcement: "Speakeasy Ales & Lagers has been forced to immediately cease brewing, packaging, and tap room operat ...

Over the course of the coming year, I hope to post these kinds of things from time to time. Below is a short audio clip of Kurt and Rob describing their first sale. It captures the rawness of experience, both of young brewers and also bars used to dealing with familiar distributors, but also of a different time in Portland. I spent a bit of tim ...

For the most part, modern beer is a European expression. The styles available in nearly every commercial setting issue from a handful of countries in a plot of land that would fit inside California. So any time an American or New Zealand or Japanese company makes a beer, they are (pick one) borrowing from, referring to, or ripping off the cultu ...

Yesterday afternoon, I tansferred two half-batches of beer to into kegs. They contained a pale ale--and an experiment. One had been infused with two ounces of Simcoe hops (pellets), one two ounces of Yakima Chief's soon-to-be-released hop product called lupulin powder from Simcoe hops (backgrounder here). The notion is simple (though it to ...

Scientists long ago figured out the mechanism through which hops turn beer bitter: the alpha acids in the lupulin glands become isomerized over the boil--a process that allows the bittering compounds to become soluble. There's a mathematical curve that demonstrates the process, and the amount of bitterness is a direct function of alpha acids pl ...

The Oregon Beer Awards were handed out last night, and there were a few surprises. The first came when Wolf Tree (Seal Rock) won the first gold medal. Wait, who? That happened several times throughout the night, as obscure breweries took home medals: Freebridge (the Dalles), Back Pedal (Portland), Salem Ale Works, and Wild Ride (Redmond). Wol ...

Each year, General Distribution's Jim Fick closely tracks the sales of Oregon beer in Oregon, and he very graciously forwards me the spreadsheet with the numbers. Frustratingly, the OLCC, which tracks these numbers, has gotten fairly lax and the figures aren't terribly reliable. One obvious example is that they somehow don't capture CBA's sal ...

If you were to name the four or five hottest breweries right now, measured in beer geek coolness points, Boston's Trillium Brewing would have to be on that list. They are makers of many different types of beer, but are famous for being one of the charter members of the New England IPA movement, with all the requisite rarity and excitement. Well ...

Periodically--too infrequently, if you want my opinion--a friend of the blog will feel inspired to send me beer from their distant location. When breweries send me beer, I make no promises to review or ever even comment on them (though I will drink them; I'm not a halfwit), but when a person spends hard-earned cash to purchase and send beer fro ...