I’m interested in whether “legend” is a final stage of brewery evolution, a beery transcendence that can’t be revoked once achieved. Can a brewery become a legend and then survive even while backsliding into something un-legendary?
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It’s the competition time of the year, when beer writers send their best work off to peers at the North American Guild of Beer Writers. I had to dig through the archives for the pieces I was most proud. Here they are.
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Gavin Lord, one-third of the ownership team that recently launched Living Haus, has a new side project. The news that the former pFriem head brewer is opening his own brewery is perhaps less interesting, however, than his journey getting there.
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Writers are, more than anything else, the deities of small worlds—they feel compelled to create these universes of imagination. The stabbing of Salman Rushdie illustrates just how real those imaginary worlds can become.
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For recent brewery openings highlight a trend that is increasingly common in brewing: new companies taking over the breweries of departing ones.
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Hop terroir is real, as a new paper from Oregon State University documents. But you don’t have to tell brewers that—they already know that hop selection is at least as important as variety, given the different expression state-to-state and even farm-to-farm.
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As a periodic reminder, regular beer people basically have no idea what the words on a beer label mean. (It’s one reason they grab the IPA.)
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Technology like the internet didn’t really change beer. The evolution we’ve seen in styles, processes, and ingredients looks totally normal by historic standards. But the way we interact with beer is radically different.
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An old document on my hard drive from the Oregon Brewers Guild contains a list of all the breweries active in Oregon around the turn of the 21st century. Slightly less than half are still around—but compared to regular US businesses, that’s really good.
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Three Washington-state breweries have sued Oregon over the right to self-distribute to the Beaver State as well as ship beer to Oregon consumers directly. They have a really good case.
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A stroll through a forested gorge festooned with ten waterfalls followed by a cold one poured literally in the middle of the trellised fields from which its hops were harvested? That’s called Saturday here in Oregon.
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On July 1, New Jersey’s alcohol regulatory issued rules limiting what breweries could do in their own taprooms. They were comically draconian, and outraged New Jerseyans have been filling the internet with disgusted memes. Is it really the case that NJ wants these taprooms to fail, and if so, who benefits? I spoke to one man with some answers.
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in my Sightglass posts, I typically write about a subject of mutual interest with Reuben’s. Today I'm pivoting the spotlight on my partner in the series. Reuben's has become a leader in Northwest brewing, and today I take a closer look to see what makes them tick.
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Portland’s local alt-weekly newspaper, Willamette Week, holds an annual “best of Portland” survey. Among the categories is one for podcast. The Beervana Show, with absolutely no help from its hosts (and by that I mean Patrick, whom I blame entirely for this failure), finished second. Second!
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In the lifecycle of any successful brewery, there are phases of growth and cultural currency—but also stumbling and mistakes. Stone’s sale to Sapporo gives us one of the most potent cases in point.
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The rise and fall of most styles are mysteries we must chalk up to “cultural” forces. In one case, however, we might blame Ena Sharples.
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Global breweries can be optimized to make beer of exceptional quality; they almost never make the most interesting beer. For that, we look to small and quirky breweries, the protectors of tradition and the tinkerers and experimenters.
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In the finale of Portland Travel Week, I offer you my annual list of Portland’s best breweries. This should be a handy guide for visitors—and, given how many breweries the city has and how few days in the year, possibly locals as well. See who made the list this year!
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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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