Tag Archives: oregon beer news

It doesn't make any sense.Belgium is such a tiny country that it usually surprises people to learn that there were several regions within its cramped boundaries with distinct brewing traditions.  Even today, when you consider the wheaty beers associated with Hoegaarden and Brussels or the rustic farmhouse ales in the south, you see vestige ...

What is that deep rumble I hear shaking the earth like a refrigerator-sized subwoofer?  Why, it's the sound of beer trucks trundling toward Tom McCall Waterfront Park for the annual Oregon Brewers Festival.  And as surely as those trucks make their trek, so do I journey deeply into the database of beers to provide you with a by-the-nu ...

Gilroy Was Good For Guinness David Hughes Liberties Press, 256 pages $40 hardcover How about a nice off-speed pitch?  Today's review touches only tangentially on beer.  Almost everyone, beer fan or no, is familiar with the iconic ads from the twenty years on either side of midcentury: My Goodness My Guinness, ...

July used to belong to just one beer fest, the giant kegger-by-the-river that kicks off in five day’s time.  Then the international beer fest muscled its way onto the calendar (though this year it’s coming in August). That made room for other fests, big and small (Puckerfest, Belmont Station’s celebration of sour beers, is still one of the best).  This …

The Craft Beer Revolution Steve Hindy Palgrave Macmillan, 250 pages $25 Steve Hindy's new book is a serious and important work.  It contains some incredibly revealing details about the long history of brewing--particularly the history from 1988 onward, after Hindy co-founded Brooklyn Brewery and entered the history books.  I ...

There's a lot going on in the world of books.  I've received a raft of interesting tomes recently, just at the moment when this whole Hachette-Amazon battle has put publishing square in the spotlights.  And that in turn raises an interesting discussion about how Americans get their information in 2014 and what the future of reading lo ...

The new world wasn't much for beer for the first 250 years Europeans lived here.  The barley and hops weren't spectacular, and we had liquor instead.  That changed when Germans started immigrating in huge numbers in the middle of the 19th century and brought their tasty lagers with them.  I have a wonderful little history book ca ...

It has been a long time since the word "slatepitch" entered our vocabulary, and the practice is now common.  For those who do not follow the minutiae of media trends, a slatepitch describes a story that takes a contrarian or counter-intuitive perspective, like "Why Sarah Palin is a closet liberal."  Slate Magazine remains the king and ...

A couple-three weeks back, Zymurgy magazine released its annual poll of readers' favorite commercial beers.  Homebrewers do not in any way represent the average beer drinker, but they have been, since the 1970s, on the cutting edge of American brewing.  They were the first to use American hops, it was from their ranks that the first c ...

We glide now into those several days when humans bask in the sunshine, far away from the blue light of computer screens.  If you do happen to find yourself away from the yellow sun and staring into the blue light, I'll leave you with a couple of places to direct your attention. Stan on Grodziskie Stan Hieronymus has  made another ...