Craft beer and the state of Oregon go hand in hand. With so many great beers coming out of the state, which ones should you drink?
If you’re not located close by, here is a list I put together just for you of 10 Oregon beers you need to try.
Some you may be able to find in your local bottle shop, while others you will probably only find if you come visit or get a friend to send you some. One thing I’m sure of though is that they are all delicious and are worth a drink.
Note that there are so many great beers in Oregon, many more could have been added to this list. Let me know what I missed.
Hair Of The Dog Adam- An amazing dessert beer that is perfect for drinking while sitting around a fire late at night.
There is something glorious about watching sharks devour whatever is in their path. They are incredible animals that seem so full of mystery, power, and beauty all at the same time. Every year the Discovery Channel puts together Shark Week, which is 7 days full of shark packed TV. Today we are in the middle of shark week and I figured it is necessary to share some good beers that should be in your hand while watching sharks do their thing.
From Port Brewing Company, this is a classic West Coast-style imperial red ale brewed with medium crystal malts, centennial and cascade hops. The ABV is 9.5% so I’d probably not suggest drinking it before going swimming in shark infested waters. It would probably pair best with watching the Top 10 Shark Attack Videos.
From The Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka, CA, Great White is a refreshing witbier style ale that is light and extremely easy to drink on hot days. It carries 5.0% ABV, so feel free to have a few while you watch some great white sharks demolish a few hundred pounds of tuna.
While owned by Anheuser-Busch (I know, I guess not technically a craft beer), Land Shark isn’t to bad, especially on really hot days. If you happen to be watching Shark Week without any air conditioning, this may just be the beer you should choose if you have absolutely nothing left in the house to drink.
I’m just back from a successful, if not wet and chilly, Kate The Great Day at the Portsmouth Brewery in beautiful Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And what a wild & crazy morning it was. Josh Christie (of BrewsAndBooks.com fame), a few mutual cohorts and I piled into the car this morning around 3:50am and departed from Portland en route to Portsmouth for The Portsmouth Brewery’s Kate the Great Russian Imperial Stout – the beer which is considered by many to be the best beer in America (and is towards the top of just about every list for sure).
The bottle "lines" at about 8:40am
If you’re unfamiliar with the way “Kate Day” (as it’s called) works, there are a total of 900 bottles of the infamous Russian Imperial Stout for sale one morning each year. The first 450 people in line get a single page from a page-a-day calendar (well, calendar and a half). When the pages are all handed out, the beer is essentially gone. Folks then mill around downtown Portsmouth in search of warmth and breakfast until they start letting people in to pick up their bottles (limit 2 per person; $10 a bottle) in order of month beginning at 9:00am.
Our carload arrived right around 4:45am and got December 28-30 of the first year. By 5:25 all of the 450 pages were gone. Reports said that folks began lining up at 1:00am last night when the bar closed and stood in line overnight until they began handing out pages at 4:30 this morning (so all the bottles were spoken for in less than an hour).
If you miss out on a calendar page and aren’t able to pick up a bottle, not all hope is lost. The Portsmouth Brewery opened for lunch at 11:30am and promised to have a couple of kegs of Kate on tap. However, when we left with our bottles at 9:30, the lunch line was already down the street and around the corner, two hours before they opened. Our rough estimate was that if we had gotten in line at that exact moment, we might have been eating by 3 o’clock. And the brewery was sure to kick all of their Kate kegs before the day is out. Pure insanity.
Look at all those bags of Kate The Great!
However, if you’re within striking distance of Portsmouth, Kate Day is a definite don’t-miss, at least once in your drinking career. I do wish they would host the event on a slightly warmer day than March 1st, but I guess standing outside in the cold and the rain adds a bit to the mystique.
Did you make it down this morning? What’d you think? And if not, I’ll see you there next year (BlogAboutBeer.com Kate Day Party Bus anyone?). Oh, and I won’t be trading either bottle so don’t waste your time. Sorry!
In case you missed the BeerAdvocate.com Extreme Beer Fest (EBF) this year — don’t worry, so did I — the folks at FloridaSPL.com shot some video interviews with a few of the brewers on hand discussing the extreme beers their brewed for the festival. Watch them and feel like you were there. Or even more bummed that you missed it. Either way, they’re good for a watch (more related videos linked at the end of this one):
I’m a sucker for lists. The Top 10 This, the Best 5 That. So I had a bit of fun when I got my hands on the latest issue of Beer Advocate magazine (yes, they have a magazine. And it’s actually pretty good. I’d never pay for a subscription, but if you can find one of their free drop spots, pick it up) a few days ago which includes six “top 25″ lists in the “Beer in Review” section. The lists are the “All-Time Top Beers on Planet Earth”; the top 25 “Most-Wanted Beers”; the “Top Beers That Get No Respect” — these are the 25 worst-rated beers on the BeerAdvocate forums and include the likes of Bud Light (1), Natural Ice (15), Icehouse (20) and Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chili Beer (7) — the “All-Time Top Brewers” (which should read “breweries” in my opinion and not “brewers”, since they list the breweries themselves and not the names of the people who formulated each recipe, etc.); the top 25 “Places to Have a Pint” (which includes Maine’s own Ebenezer’s Pub (1) in Lovell, and Novare Res Bier Cafe (21) here in Portland); and lastly, the “Alstrom Bros’ Top Beers” which “made us stop, think and drink in 2009″. Six of which were brewed in New England, and two of which here in Maine (Vagabond from Allagash and surprisingly, Local Harvest from Sebago).
Cross-checking the lists with my own drinking experiences, I’ve personally had more than half (14, if my count is right) of the “All-Time Top 24 Beers on Planet Earth” and 8 of the “25 Most-Wanted Beers”, including the top 3. Not bad since probably 80% of the beers and the breweries on all of these lists (except the list of swill) aren’t available in Maine. Here are the All-Time Top 25 and the 25 Most-Wanted (after the jump… just click it). How many have you had?
Craft beer and the state of Oregon go hand in hand. With so many great beers coming out of the state, which ones should you drink?
Hi and welcome to Blog About Beer. My name is Logan and I live just north of Portland, Oregon, a city that has more craft breweries than any other in the US. I'm a full time marketer, blogger, and dad to the most beautiful girl in the world. I'm also a homebrewing and craft beer fanatic.