Stories of Breweries and People
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Stories of Breweries and People
Somehow, Portland’s Upright Brewery has been around 15 years. Despite reaching its mid-teens, Upright has remained one of the most inventive, interesting, and unexpected breweries in the the country. As we hit this big milestone, let’s revisit what owner/brewer Alex Ganum has accomplished.
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.
I managed to get inside the old brewhouse at U Fleků yesterday, and offer this illustrated peek inside.
Is it possible that the most unusual brewery in America is the one that just makes two beers? Brienne Allan and Michael Fava are certainly making a compelling case with Sacred Profane, their year-old project in Biddeford, Maine.
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.
If you are an average human—I was, it turned out—you will stop dead in your tracks and goggle at the massive abstract harp sculpture that floats over the central bar. It has churchy swoops and rises, recalling a pipe organ, and, like a cathedral, draws the eyes up.
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.
Just six months since it launched, Living Häus is making some of Portland’s best beer. In this post, I talk to Mat Sandoval and Conrad Andrus to see what makes it tick.
Did you know there were two Kona Breweries? Both make Big Wave and Longboard Lager. Both have the same evocative island art and the same motto (“liquid aloha”). Yet the original one on the Big Island is now independent and has nothing to do with the stuff made on the mainland.
When Yvan De Baets and Bernard Leboucq installed their brewery in Brussels in 2010, it doubled the number in the capital city. Since then, a number of new breweries have followed, but none have focused so single-mindedly on creating hometown beers.
For obvious reasons, accomplished brewers don’t love people constantly focusing on their gender. Any brewer who manages to work their way up from keg washer to celebrated brewery owner deserves attention and respect, and yet it’s something of a watershed moment for Portland to see a woman do this.
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!
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.
Portland’s Von Ebert pulled off the singular trick of winning gold at both the GABF and Oregon Beer Awards for Volatile Substance, their IPA. A year earlier, their IPA Nothing Noble took bronze at GABF. It was high time I spent some time at the brewery to figure out their secrets.
Hammer and Stitch has been open seven months, but debuted in October, just as the pandemic entered its most debilitating phase. For most people venturing out with the spring sunshine, it is a brand new brewery. Here’s a first look.
In May, Pelican Brewery turns 25. For the whole of its life, it has reflected the vision of its longtime brewer, Darron Welch. Yet unlike so many legacy breweries, Pelican is growing and thriving. There’s an important lesson here.
Cloudburst’s hoppy ales are at once familiar yet distinctive. They shimmer with hop particulates, but don’t look hazy, exactly. They feature saturated juicy flavors, appreciable (but far from violent) bitterness, and a spectacular quenching dryness that make them dangerously drinkable.
A lot of breweries make weissbiers, and some are served worldwide. Yet if we go looking for the classic example, the ur-weiss of the modern era, all roads lead to Kelheim.
Now, of course, amber and brown ales are rare—blonds proliferate. This seems barely worth mentioning, since it mirrors the trends everywhere else, but consider this: The radicals at the forefront of this evolution in Belgium were Trappist monks. In particular, the ones brewing at Westmalle.
At Brouwerij t’Verzet, the young men may look like craft brewers, but they’re not interested in “innovation.” Here in West Flanders they plan a kind of restoration—making oud bruin, the regional specialty, a beer as broadly available as it was in the 1970s and ‘80s.
The lineage of brewers making the traditional tart weissbiers of Berlin seemed to end when Schultheiss made the last example in the early 2000s. A tradition shared from one generation of brewers to the next, the thread seemed to be broken—until Ulrike Genz found that last brewmaster and went on to found Schneeeule.
As British drinkers are increasingly seduced by hazy IPAs and other “craft” offerings, some of the old breweries continue to make characterful, handmade ales in an older tradition. Harvey’s Brewery in Sussex is an exemplar.
American beer fans have become too insular. Even if one only wants to deepen their appreciation of IPAs, it’s important to see the places our tradition started.
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.