So you’ve come to Portland and are overwhelmed by the choice of breweries. Don’t sweat it—I gotcha covered! Here are a half dozen walkable crawls that will make for a wonderful day out.
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Today's post kicks off Portland Travel Week. To get things started, I’ll offer an overview of the Rose City, a bit of beer-centric history, and some of the key features of the local drinking culture. Craft breweries follow a familiar model, and if you just go from one to the next, you might miss some of the character behind all that steel.
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In its final chapter, Stone Brewing ends up in the hands of a multinational beer company as a diminished brand selling a lime-flavored Mexican lager. That’s certainly not how Greg Koch drew it up when he was selling Arrogant Bastard all those years ago.
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One of the more remarkable stories in the beer world is the incredibly long process of developing a viable commercial hop variety, and the long odds any single seed has of becoming a winner. In this piece, I examine HBC 1019 to see how it all works.
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After revolutions in hop breeding and product development and micromalting, yeast is getting its moment in the sun. A proliferating number of yeast labs offer organic and genetically-modified strains that do things like ferment without diacetyl or finish in half the time.
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“Old Portland” is dead. Long live Old Portland!
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Pew Research just released a report on journalists’ attitudes about their profession. There’s just one problem: Pew apparently thinks we all write about politics.
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We know it’s impossible to keep track of all the breweries in the country, never mind their individual beers. I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math recently and was startled to learn just how many beers they actually make. That plus a look at the world’s largest beer company. It’s really large!
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On my recent, short visit to Seattle, I managed to pop in to six different breweries, but here are three that illustrate the range and diversity the city now boasts.
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Old breweries compact time and preserve it. The hands of old brewers are evident in every dent and scuff. Their habits are preserved in the movements of the brewers they trained. When I stepped into Caledonian’s brewhouse, wort steaming and foaming in weird bespoke coppers, it might have well been 1869.
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In the wake of the news Trappist monks at St Joseph we’re closing their Spencer Brewery, I have happy news. Father Martin confirms Oregon’s Benedictine Brewery is thriving.
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Do you subscribe to my weekly digest emails? If not, you’re missing some good stuff.
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This half-mile jaunt through Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood will take you past nine breweries (and a cidery). Surely no place has more breweries per linear foot than this?
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