Last night, the Oregon Beer Awards were handed out in a joyful celebration. A few notes on some of the winners, and how the mood of the night may suggest a transition in the beer industry.

Brewery acquisitions rarely warrant celebration. But the news that Schneider, the famous Bavarian weissbier brewery, had acquired a nearby monastery brewery with a thousand-year brewing lineage, was certainly one of them

As the beer industry hits a rough patch, one brand stands apart as a huge success story, with healthy sales and its own social media craze. How do Guinness do it?

With the apparent permanent closure of Rogue Ales, it’s time to consider the legacy of this early craft brewery. It may surprise many drinkers who today think of Rogue as tame and boring to learn that it was once a radical experiment. And that’s how we should remember it.

Founder Alex Ganum is one of a handful of the most gifted brewers I’ve encountered in my travels around the world, and on a number of occasions, tasting his beer left me startled by its originality and accomplishment. With its singular vision and personality, Upright was an irreplaceable brewery.

For reasons no one can quite identify, a disproportionate number of brewers have decamped from Detroit to Portland, where they founded some pretty impressive breweries. For Montavilla Brew Works’ 10th anniversary, they’re doing a cool collaboration.

Assembly Brewing, Portland’s first and only Black-owned brewery, is closing. After just six years, it had become one of the city’s landmark breweries, and owner George Johnson became one of Portland’s most engaging and interesting brewers. It’s a terrible loss. 

It’s taken pFriem 13 years to expand from their original location in Hood River. On Monday, April 7th, they take their next step, with a beautiful, expansive new pub and restaurant in the old City Hall building in downtown Milwaukie, just south of Portland.

Herein lies one of the more interesting ironies of our times: there is a distinctive New England school of IPA. It is characterized by strength, sweetness, lack of bitterness, and high residual sugar. But maybe the haze is negotiable.

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. 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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!

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.

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.