Final Thoughts on the 2012 Fresh Hop Season

Fresh hop season is the reason I started writing It's Pub Night a few years ago.  The first post here -- a copy of four emails I sent to my friend Lee which ended up as installments on his blog I Love Beer -- is kind of quaint reading five years later.  Highlights:

• Excitement over the fabulous first version of Full Sail's (really John Harris') Lupulin Ale (RIP).
• Visits to Roots (RIP), Laurelwood NW (RIP), and the New Old Lompoc (RIP).  Hopworks was not open yet (!) but I was mistakenly told that their IPA was a fresh-hop ale.
• Reports of new fresh-hop bottlings: Deschutes Hop Trip and Bridgeport Hop Harvest.
• I found around 12 fresh hop beers around town that year, and 4 more beers that I thought had fresh hops, but which I now know were made with 100% kilned hops.  Remember: dried hops are NOT fresh hops.

Now let's talk about the year 2012.  Here are some random observations from this year:

1. Best fresh hop strategy: Fresh-hop your flagship.

Look at the list of almost 70 fresh hop beers I tried this year (with approximate ranking from favorite to least favorite).  The standouts tend to be fresh-hop versions of already popular recipes:  Free Range Red (Laurelwood), Mirror Pond and Bachelor Bitter (Deschutes), and Total Domination (Ninkasi).  Makes sense if you think about it: the recipes are already proven winners, the brewers can make them in their sleep, and they probably have a good idea of which hops to add at what point in the brew.

2. Draft is better than bottled.

I often feel this way about beer, especially favorites: the draft version is noticeably better than the bottled one.  Current examples: Gigantic IPA and Oakshire Overcast Espresso Stout -- two fantastic beers which seem to suffer a little getting into the bottle.

With fresh hops, it's even more true that you'll get more of the distinctive flavor on draft.  A good example is Double Mountain's Killer Red, a must-try, stunningly good beer the last couple years.  The bottles I brought back from Hood River contained very good beer, to be sure, but not the mind-blowing elixir that flows from the taps.  Talking with Stan Hieronymous before the Hood River Hops Fest this year, he mentioned how much hop flavor escapes into the headspace of a bottle: volatile compounds which easily escape from the beer and vanish into the air when the cap comes off.  Yet another reason to drink local, wherever that happens to be.

3. Some people still don't get it.

I had a little aneurysm last week when I read Kris' report on Concordia Ale House's "Fresh Hop-A-Palooza".  Nothing wrong with the blog post, but Concordia's list of beers for their blind tasting showed an utter disinterest and lack of respect for the fresh hop style:

• Of 10 beers on the list, 2 were not at all fresh hop beers: Sierra Nevada Southern Hemisphere Harvest and Rogue OREgasmic Ale.  To add injury to insult, these two beers came in 3rd and 4th place in the people's choice voting!  Sickening.

• 3 of the 10 beers were incorrectly named on the list: Ninkasi Total Crystallization (should be Crystallation, but I'll give them a pass on that, I often make that mistake myself), Deschutes Little Freshies (Chasin' Freshies), and New Belgium Trip VII.  Kris says she learned that the NB beer was actually Trip X -- I hope not, since that was last year's fresh hop Trip.  This year's is Trip XIV.

• We're already at a 50% confusion level.  That makes me think the glass is half empty, so I have to question whether Concordia really laid their hands on fresh hop versions of 2 other beers on the list: Everybody's Head Stash, and the vaguely labeled "Hales Fresh Hop".  Now, if they have Hales Harvest Ale, that is made with 100% dried hops, even though the label in years past has deceptively said "fresh hop".  There were a couple of Hales entries at the Hood River Hop Fest, but what is in Concordia's keg?  And while there was a fresh-hop version of Head Stash this year, is that what the dingalings who screwed up everything above really were pouring?

• To sum up, between 20% and 40% of the beers in this supposed fresh hop showcase had no fresh hops -- including the 3rd and 4th place winners.  Another beer -- the 2nd place winner, by the way! -- might be from last year's crop.

The Sierra Nevada thing really galls me.  Here's a quote from SN's own description of the beer: "Like our Celebration Ale, the fresh hops in this beer are dried right after being picked".  Oh great, DRIED FRESH hops. (See also my rant on the subject from a few years ago).  Now, for the sake of argument, suppose you accept SN's lame posturing that the first kilned hops of the season are fresh, even though they are dried.  Even then, Southern Hemisphere Harvest was brewed months ago, when the hop harvest occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.  Not the ideal timeframe for the fresh flavors.

Too bad to end it on a rant.  Really it was a great year for fresh hop beers, and some of them are still rolling out.  But you better move fast, it's almost over.

Fresh Hops: STOP CALLING THEM WET HOPS

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.  Now that we are aware that some breweries -- most notably Sierra Nevada -- label certain products as "fresh hop beer" even though every hop in the beer has been dried, beer lovers often ask for clarification on whether a beer has "wet hops", and brewers often label their beers as such.

Stop it.  STOP IT!  Stop using this term "wet hops" which was only invented to give a cover to those who wanted to jump on the fresh hop bandwagon, but for whatever reason, did not want to mess with sticky, rapidly wilting fresh hops.  Stop giving cover to people who want to deceive, simply in order to elbow in on a beautiful thing.

I have ranted about this in the past, but let me state again some of the reasons "wet hops" is a ridiculous turn of phrase.  First of all, what other fresh agricultural product do you have to call "wet" to make sure someone knows you don't think it has been dried?  If you go to the grocery store and ask for fresh parsley, or fresh ginger, or fresh garlic, they will point you to the produce aisle.  Try telling them you don't want wet parsley, you want fresh-dried parsley.  And by the way, where is the wet ginger?  I'm making a stir-fry, should I put in dried garlic, fresh garlic, or wet garlic?  I see that you have fresh cucumbers and fresh lettuce on sale, but I was really hoping to make my salad with wet vegetables, not fresh-dried ones.

How about fresh fish?  Can that be dried?  Milk?  Eggs?  Better ask for wet fish, wet eggs, and of course wet milk.  On Valentine's Day you better remind the florist that you want wet roses, because a dried bouquet might convey the wrong message even if the vase says the flowers are fresh.

Furthermore, freshly-picked hop cones are not wet anyway.  Think of the roses I just mentioned -- they are vibrant and tender, but they aren't wet, and neither are hops.  You can't squeeze water out of them -- a potato is wetter than a hop.

Finally, crowdsourced wisdom at Twitter brings up this question:  what do you call it when you dry hop with wet hops?

Now, it is certainly no sin to have a mix of fresh and dried hops in a beer -- that's how most fresh hop beers are done:  dried hops for bitterness and fresh hops later in the process for aroma and flavor.  But to call a beer with only dried hops a "fresh hop beer" is completely unjustifiable.  Yes, the first dried hops of the season are the freshest ones you can use, and should make delicious beer.  However, the flavors in those beers are not what people expect when they ask for a fresh hop beer.  Most brewers that I have asked about this subject were completely dumbfounded to hear that some fresh hop beers contained only dried hops -- it had simply never occurred to those honest folk that anyone would tell such a ridiculous lie.

Go forth with the awareness that there are deceptively labeled fresh hop beers out there, and spread the word.  But do not give in to the falsehood.  Don't use the term "wet hop", and push back when you hear someone use it.  If you need clarification about a fresh hop beer, ask whether it has some hops that haven't been dried.

Let's Stop Calling It "Craft" Beer

The term "craft beer" annoys me.  I wrote part of this diatribe a long time ago, but since a lot of beer friends have headed to San Diego this week for the Craft Brewers Conference, it reminded me that I think it's a silly term.  Why?

• The Brewers Association promulgates a definition of "craft brewer" that excludes Widmer's parent company -- the ironically named Craft Brewers Alliance -- while including three larger breweries with similar product lines.  The reason?  Anheuser Busch owns a large stake in CBA.
• On the other hand, the Gambrinus Company -- parent company of Bridgeport, Shiner, and Trumer -- makes the BA's list of "craft brewers".  All right, Bridgeport fits in with what people think of as craft beer, but Trumer?  Everything from Shiner?  I say that with love in my heart -- Shiner Bock was the first beer I loved, and I will always love the Spoetzl Brewery and its beers.
• Many perfectly fine imported beers would fail the BA's size or ownership tests:  Spaten, Guinness, and Hoegaarden to name a few.
• Look at wine connoisseurs.  Do they talk about "craft wine"?  No.  They know there is good wine and bad wine, and it's clear from the context which kind they are talking about.

Lots of people have already made these points or similar ones about the term "craft".  I'm not claiming any originality here: Brian Yaeger had a good rant last year when he said I hate "craft beer"; a few months later Jeff Alworth slyly asked Is This Craft Beer? about some lovely bottles from Goose Island, which was thrown off the BA's craft brewer list after being bought by Anheuser Busch themselves.

A comment by Vasili Gletsos (now the Laurelwood brewmaster) on Jeff's post captures the matter so perfectly that it can't be paraphrased, and has to be reported in its entirety:

To me, the term is most useful as a historical movement to describe the resurgence of smaller breweries in a post-prohibition environment. We are now in a post-craft environment in which there is a wide variety of business models and ownerships in addition to a great depth of beer styles and experimentation.

"Post-craft environment":  what a great phrase. Let's move on and just talk about "beer" from now on.  If you need a word to distinguish beer from mass-produced macro-lager, turn the tables and call the latter "crap beer" as Brian suggested in his post.

Who cares how many barrels are produced, or what company owns a stake in the brewery?  If the beer's good, drink it. If it's bad, complain.

Portland Beer Carts

Today's Oregonian has a front-page article about the new Cartlandia food cart pod on 82nd applying for a liquor license from the OLCC.  Since the modern style of news reporting mandates that every story must convince you that you are in grave and immediate danger, the article sets the scene with phrases like "the issue has new urgency now", "waves of concern among Portland officials", and -- the pièce de résistance -- "they envision alcohol flowing from nearly all of the 700 carts across town, creating a new source of public drunkenness and neighborhood disorder".  Run!  You are in great danger!  Your neighborhood is being overrun by barbarians right now!

What the article glosses over is that there are already beer carts quietly operating alongside food carts, with no apparent ill effects.  Captured by Porches has been selling beer from their beer buses for a year and a half now, and Buckman Brewery (a.k.a. Rogue's Green Dragon) has a cart at the food cart pod just up Belmont from the Horse Brass.  The article does mention that "carts asked the OLCC about regularly selling beer and wine" two years ago, but it fails to point out that carts are already selling beer under temporary licenses, though the online version links to an earlier story about CbP's cart near 33rd and Division.

The online version has a fairly staid headline, but in the print edition today it is "Alcohol with food carts gives city indigestion".  What gives me indigestion is the podunk worldview of our local paper -- and friends, I lived most of my life in Oklahoma and Texas.  The Oregonian is an unending source of disappointment for me in many ways, though their declining beer coverage -- they're cutting back John Foyston's The Beer Here column in the Friday entertainment section to once every two weeks, and last year they referred to Colorado as "Beervana" -- seems ill-advised when the local beer culture is continuing to grow at a healthy pace.

I mentioned the CbP and Buckman carts.  Are there any other beer carts around town right now?  [Update: Jim points out in the comments that there is a Lompoc beer cart at 51st and Foster.]

Don't Cook with Expensive Beer!!!

Cooking with beer is nothing new, but the trend does seem to be taking flight as of late.  I have occasionally cringed to see recipes that use a beer that would be better put to use by drinking it -- say, making an ice cream sauce from Deschutes Abyss.   But the recent event that made today's rant inevitable was Beer Advocate's Thanksgiving installment of the Homebrew Chef, which counseled readers to brine their turkeys with 4 (four) 750 ml bottles of Allagash Tripel, and serve it up with cranberry sauce made from an even rarer Deschutes beer than Abyss:  The Dissident.

Beer can chicken is one thing, but soaking a turkey in $40-$50 worth of beer which then has to be dumped down the drain is just sick.  And no matter what your opinion is on extremely sour American takes on Belgian ales, can you see opening a bottle which is nearly impossible to get hold of right now, and pouring it into cranberry sauce?

Look, if you find that beer adds a flavorful dimension to your cooking, that's great.  But suppose a recipe calls for red wine.  Are you going to add 2 cups of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to it?  No, because it's an insult to a wine of that quality, not to mention a silly waste of money.  You'll use a good-enough table wine, and your food won't be any worse for it.

I suppose a Deschutes chef cooking with Abyss is just using what he has on hand, though I don't think the dish would have suffered any from the use of the less costly Obsidian Stout instead.  Here's a picture of Alan Sprints whipping up some chocolate-raspberry sorbet that includes some Hair of the Dog Adam.  It's not a cheap beer, but he's the brewer and it's what he's got.  Even so, I doubt he would pull out some of his barrel-aged creations and give them the same treatment.  [Oops! Matt points out in a comment below that Alan has made cheesecakes and ice creams with Cherry Adam from the Wood.  Now I don't have to feel so bad for making him the expensive-beer-cooking poster boy.]

I'm not the first person to inveigh against the evils of cooking with rare beer  Here's a year-old blog post from across the pond that gets it about right:  "Sometimes, it seems the point is to impress with big beer names. Regardless of the impact it actually has on the dish’s flavour."   There are also a couple of quasi-sensible comments about it on the Beer Advocate turkey-brining fiasco mentioned above.

Respect beer: don't cook with the rare stuff!

Governor of Beervana

The Lucky Lab Hop Harvest that happened Tuesday on the Lab's patio was another enjoyable time, just like every year.  If you ever get a chance to attend, it's a great experience that reminds you why we call this place Beervana.  Even Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber poked his head in on the operation, along with First Girlfriend Cynthia Hayes.

Yes, that's why we call this place Beervana, but the sleepyheads running the Oregonian's sad excuse for an editorial page evidently disagree.  This morning's O prepended "Governor of Beervana" to the headline of a George Will editorial about Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, who founded the Wynkoop Brewing Company brewpub in Denver.  I've come to expect more Portland bashing than boosterism from the Oregonian -- remember the idiotic non-foodie restaurant guide they put out last year? -- but conceding the label Beervana to another state is really over the top.  Not even the Denver Post added any beery honorifics to their headline for the same editorial.

Meanwhile, on Beervana, the Blog, Jeff Alworth goes on to critique the actual content of Will's editorial.  Hint: the editorial starts with a fictional quote from Benjamin Franklin, and doesn't stray too much closer to reality after that.

You can see from the photo above why Gov. Kitzhaber has a reputation for quiescence.  In my long-exposure photo, he is the only subject not blurred by motion -- and no one else is even moving!  I wish my good friend and noted hop connoisseur Marc Martin hadn't blocked the view of Ms. Hayes as he mesmerized the couple with an explanation of the humulone levels present in the fresh lupulin of various hop strains.  Despite my poor photography skills, I like it that I was able to squeeze Pub Night regular Lindsey into the frame, and I even see civic-minded beer man El Gordo hovering there in the background.

I asked the governor if he visited the Lucky Lab often, and he adroitly responded "Not often enough".  But Ms. Hayes covered for him and said that he does consume an adequate amount of beer at home.

John Foyston has some much better pictures in his report on the event.  He reports that a record 227 pounds of hops were picked this year.  Bravo!  And cheers to the real Governor of Beervana.

Honest Fresh Hops

The hop harvest season is upon us. This is one of my favorite times of the beer year, and it's the reason I started It's Pub Night in 2007.  The last couple of years, Deschutes' fresh-hopped batches of Mirror Pond have been so good that I can't shake the feeling that it is the best beer anyone in history has ever been privileged to taste.  This year they're actually going to bottle it, so people outside our little lupulin bubble are going to get to try it for themselves.

It doesn't stop with Fresh-Hopped Mirror Pond:  there are plenty of excellent fresh-hopped beers made in the Northwest and elsewhere.  Enjoy them while they're fresh!

Every rose has its thorn, however, and the thorn in fresh hop season are those breweries that label their wares as Fresh Hop beers, when 100% of the hops in those beers have been dried.  Sure, they're the first hops of the season.  Sure, most Fresh Hop beers contain some dried hops as well.  But if all the hops in a beer have been dried, don't call it a fresh hop beer.  Last year I got so worked up about this that I had to follow up my Attention! Dried Hops are NOT Fresh Hops with a second rant about fresh-hop fakery. The breweries that I know faked it last year are:

• Hales
• Hopworks
• Sierra Nevada
• Widmer

I got a hint from Widmer that they might do a true fresh-hop beer this year; let's hope Hopworks will also get it right. Sierra Nevada does make some of their Estate Harvest ale with fresh hops, but most of the Harvest Ale is done with hops that have been dried.  SN pushed it even further last year, labeling Celebration Ale as "A Fresh Hop Beer".  They make a sophistic distinction between "dried hops", "fresh hops", and -- this is clever -- "wet hops".  As I said last year, do you go into the grocery store and ask for "wet parsley", or do you ask for "fresh parsley"?  Wouldn't you be surprised if you asked for "fresh fish", and you were handed a dried cod?  "I'm sorry, I didn't know you wanted wet fish.  This one was freshly dried as soon as it was caught."

Talk to your local brewers, and insist on honest fresh hops.

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Lucky Labrador Hop Harvest

This coming Tuesday, August 30, 2011, you are invited to participate in one of the sweetest and most rewarding events you can attend in Portland: the Lucky Lab Hop Harvest.  It's basically a shucking bee held on the patio of the Hawthorne Lucky Lab.  People donate their homegrown hops for inclusion in the Lab's fresh hop beer -- aptly named "The Mutt" since its hop parentage is completely unknown and very mixed up.  This year's Hop Harvest starts at 5:30 PM, a little later than in previous years, so you don't have to play hooky to join in the fun. If you have hops in your yard that you don't plan to brew with, bring the vines in, preferably within a few hours of cutting them down.

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Hood River Hops Fest

The Oregon Brewers Guild teams up with Oregon Bounty each year to put on a few Fresh Hop Festivals around the state.  The first one is always the Hood River Hops Fest, and the selection in Hood River always seems to be broader than that at the following fests.  It's happening October 1, 2011, noon to 9 PM, between 5th and 7th Streets and Cascade and Columbia Streets in downtown Hood River.  Minors are allowed until 6 PM.  For being such a fresh-hop fiend, it pains me to say I haven't been to the Hood River fest before, but I plan to go this year.

Portland Pub Crawls

There's something I have to get off my chest: I invented the Portland Pub Crawl.



Jeff's helpful series on Portland Pub Crawls -- so far he's done part 1 (downtown) and part 2 (SE) -- is what set me off on this rant. Can you believe it? His downtown pub crawl only visits Deschutes one time. And skips Tugboat. That's not crawling, that's limping. Well, or whatever is less than crawling.

Angelo and Margaret have done a smashing job the last couple years with Brewpublic's Division Street Pub Crawl. But who invented that pub crawl? I did, here in 2009.

I would be remiss in my egotism if I didn't also take credit for Ezra and Lisa's Night of the Living Ales, which I invented a year earlier in this post about the not-yet-open Migration Brewing, just as an offhand mention of an alphabetical pub crawl along NE 28th. A freebie.

Now word comes from Nicole of a moving bicycle bar, making the rounds in NW Portland, in a watered-down version of the Biking Pub Marathon Dave and I did a few years ago. The rolling pub is a pretty cool idea, I hope an army of cloven-hoofed blood-sucking lawyers doesn't descend to make this kind of fun impossible in Portland. Also, watch out for those streetcar tracks, guys.

Here are a few more Portland pub crawl ideas for you:

• Portland Airport Pub Crawl
• Easy Bicycle Pub Crawl (unfortunately includes two pubs that are no longer around)
• Belmont Dive Crawl
• Planning Your Portland Bicycle Pub Crawl

Next week:  How I Invented the Beer Cocktail.

Vote Asheville for BeerCity, USA

First of May, First of May, BeerCity voting begins today! (Photo credit: rbatina.)

This thing is very simple.  For the last couple of years a bunch of people in Portland and a bunch of people in Asheville, North Carolina have all got their panties bunched up trying to sway the vote in Charlie Papazian's online poll to choose BeerCity USA.  Tiny Asheville always wins, and Portland always comes in second, and no other city in the country even notices.

Portland folks:  please don't take the bait this year and try to churn out PDX votes for this silly poll.  Even though Portland and the much smaller Asheville combined for about 14,000 votes last year, the voting was a non-event in much larger cities that have respectable beer scenes:

• Chicago (metro: 9.6 million): 190 votes
• Boston (metro: 4.6 million): 114 votes
• San Francisco (metro: 4.3 million): 171 votes
• Seattle (metro: 3.4 million): 362 votes
• San Diego (metro: 3.1 million): 884 votes

Portland is a great beer city.  Wherever you go in this town, from the crunchiest granola store to the dingiest gas station, from the humblest dive to the snootiest restaurant, if there is beer at all, there is something good on the list.  Asheville must be pretty nice also.  But to say that either of them is 50 times better than the cities I've listed above is simply ridiculous.  This year, let's bring Portland into the ranks of the other great beer metropolises by minimizing the number of Beer City USA votes we get.

One reasonable approach for Portlanders is to ignore the poll.  But just to make sure we don't lose by a hair as in past years, I urge you to do as I've done:  cast a strategic vote for Asheville, NC, for BeerCity USA.

Fresh Hops 2010: Second Report

Last Monday I listed the fresh hop beers I had tried so far, and promised more updates along the way.  I thought I might be able to pull off the stunt of trying a different variety each day, but Monday and Tuesday already fell through for me.  The earliest beers came out much sooner than the parade of them that is starting to emerge now.

I think there are enough things out now, that if I can schedule things right, I should be able to keep a streak going now for a couple of weeks, maybe until the Portland Fresh Hop Tastival Oct. 9.  Remember, if you see a fresh-hop offering that's not on the Fresh Hop Map, drop me a line so I can update it.

Here's my current list of must try/should try/don't bother from what I've seen so far:

Must try:

• Deschutes Fresh-Hopped Mirror Pond
• Full Sail Lupulin (right now it's the First Gold variant)
• Rock Bottom Hop Harvest
• Bridgeport Hop Harvest
• Lompoc Crystal Missile

Worth a try:

• Sierra Nevada 2010 Harvest Ale
• Fort George Hopstoria
• Issaquah (Rogue) Wet Frog
• McMenamins Thundercone
• Pelican Elemental Ale

Don't get distracted:

• Hale's Harvest Ale (all dried hops)
• Hopworks Gayle's Pale (all dried hops)
• Deschutes King Cone
• Hopworks Goldilocks (all dried hops)

I had complained that the Fresh-hopped Mirror Pond was not as good as last year's, but I have to take that back.  I tried it again Friday, and it was just how I remember it.  I don't know which of us -- me or the beer -- was having a bad day when I first tasted it, but I'm back on board with saying it is the most important beer you will ever taste in your life.

People have been raving about the hard-to-find Pelican Elemental.  I don't get it.  It is a solid beer, with unmistakable fresh-hop goodness, but it has a few too many other flavors going on to make it into my first tier.  Instead, I would seek out the Lompoc Crystal Missile, which is a light, easy drinker just perfect for showing off what we like about these fresh-hop ales.  It reminds me of the first of these that I tasted a few years ago.

The McMenamins Thundercone I tried at the Crystal was not bad.   A little light on the hops, but they had the idea.  McM's threw a curve ball at my plans to keep the Fresh Hop Map complete:  this beer was brewed at every McMenamins brewery, and is served at every pub.  Well, after adding two of the locations to the map, I realized I wasn't going to cover them all.  If you taste a batch that was especially fine, contact me and I'll add that location to the map.

Rant:

Why do I put "all dried hops" next to some of the beers to avoid? Why not just leave them off the list? Because these beers are promoted as Fresh Hop Beers.  Oh, the hops are "freshly dried", but they're not "wet hops".

That is ridiculous.  If you go to the grocery store and ask for fresh parsley, or fresh ginger, or fresh garlic, they will point you to the produce aisle.  Try telling them you don't want wet parsley, you want fresh-dried parsley.  And by the way, where is the wet ginger?  I'm making a stir-fry, should I put in dried garlic, fresh garlic, or wet garlic?

Hopworks is selling "fresh hop beers" brewed with 100% dried hops. Gosh, maybe we better go over their food menu. Hmmm... that fresh romaine lettuce, is it wet lettuce, or fresh-dried? What about the fresh spinach and fresh basil -- are you sure those were dried freshly at the farm? I'm not sure about the fresh cucumbers on that salad, is it possible to get it with wet cucumbers?

Don't fall into this trap of talking about "wet hops".  Those are fresh hops.  All other hops are dried hops.  Calling dried hops "fresh" is pure deception.

Attention! Dried Hops are NOT Fresh Hops

I'm going to milk this month of fresh hops for all it's worth. Partly because I love fresh-hop beer; partly because I don't have time to generate original content for you.

A commenter on the Fresh Hop Map said:

I sense the level of confusion rising between fresh hop (freshly dried hops) and wet hop (freshly picked hops).

Some people might be confused about this, but those of us who have tasted the delights of Fresh Hop beers are not confused.  Hops that have been dried are not fresh.

What the hell is a "wet hop"?  A hop that slipped and fell in the bathtub?  A hop that got rained on?  If you've ever touched a hop on the vine, it's not wet, in fact it's kind of papery and rough like a cat's tongue.  But it isn't wet like a fresh tomato or a fresh berry.

If there's any damn confusion, it might stem from Sierra Nevada, who promotes their Southern Hemisphere Harvest thusly:  "the fresh hops in this beer are dried right after being picked" (emphasis mine).  Are you kidding me?  Do you consider beef jerky to be fresh?  Dried apples?  Evaporated milk?  Powdered garlic?  Let's put this another way:  what other dried item do you think of as fresh?

Fresh hops have not been dried.  Accept no substitutes.

More ranting at the bottom of this post.

Your Thoughts on Yelp

During the spring when we took a short family trip to San Francisco, we needed a quick breakfast one morning. We didn't know much about the city, so we consulted yelp.com for help. Luckily, it found us an inexpensive mom-and-pop cafe right around the corner that rated 4 stars, and had fairly positive reviews about the coffee, pastries, and friendly service. Sounded like what we needed for a low-key start to the day. Of course, like everything on yelp, there were a couple of disgruntled reviews, but I tend to filter out the ones that sound like they're from the kind of person that can never be satisfied.

The cafe we chose was pathetic. Flavorless coffee, crumbly dry baked goods, dingy atmosphere -- we would have been better off at Starbucks. It got me thinking that -- while yelp might be useful for getting some crowdsourced opinions about places you haven't been in your hometown -- it's not trustworthy enough to guide you during the priceless days of a vacation.

Search yelp for "beer bar" in Portland, then sort by "highest rated". It's a mixed bag: sure, there's Bailey's at #2, but apparently the #1 rated beer bar -- Leisure Public House -- has 5 beer taps. Then there are a couple of wine bars listed, followed by Ground Kontrol (!) and Beermongers; Hop and Vine shows up at #10. OK, click on the "Pubs" category link that's attached to Bailey's, and the list starts to look a little more reasonable, except that Leisure is still #1, and three run-of-the-mill McMenamins -- not even the best McMenamins pubs in town -- get onto the list well ahead of Horse Brass at #10.

I conclude that yelp is not at all useful for finding the real attractions in an area. It might be useful if you knew you were going to choose between two or three specific places, and you could get a few quick opinions on those.

So I ask you, what are your thoughts on yelp? Anyone want to defend it? Or tell me how to use it properly?

Planning Your Portland Bicycle Pub Crawl

A few months ago Google Maps added bicycling directions as one of the options for how to get from A to B on their maps.  There's a warning that "bicycling directions are in beta", and some of the early routes I tried were very silly, like going 4 blocks out of the way to end up going the wrong direction on the Hawthorne Bridge sidewalk.  There is a link you can click on every map to report problems, and they have been dutifully swatting them down as people send them in -- for example, the Hawthorne Bridge issues got taken care of pretty quickly.  I'm sure that eventually the Google biking directions will be an incredibly useful tool, but they're not ready for prime time yet.

If you're planning some Portland bicycle pub crawls this summer, your best resource is Metro's Bike There map, because some of the Google directions are more dangerous than they have to be, and others are just physically impossible.  Another option which is better than Google right now is byCycle.org, though it too is labeled "beta", and hasn't been updated for three years.

One route Google can't seem to get right is one of my favorite bugaboos -- biking to Hopworks Urban Brewery.  Powell Boulevard is never a fun place to bike, even for hardened urban riders, so a year and a half ago I made a custom Google map describing some of the best approaches to Hopworks. Because there's no road to the pub from south of Powell, at some point you have to be eastbound on Powell, or possibly westbound on the south sidewalk (and if you're doing that, I hope you're walking your bike).  If you're approaching from the north and want the least amount of hassle with Powell, the crosswalk at 28th Place pictured here is your best bet -- sneak up to it through the McDonald's parking lot.

Now consider the Google biking directions to HUB, which currently insist on a right turn on Powell at 31st -- even if you start out northwest of Hopworks -- with the final instruction being "Destination will be on the left".  That might be reasonable, if the directions had you take the crosswalk at 31st, and walk your bike against traffic on the far sidewalk. But if you weren't familiar with the area, you might think you could take a right and then merge over to the turn lane and wait for an opening to make your left.  It's theoretically possible, but you'll sure need a beer after you pull it off.  Take my advice, use the It's Pub Night map to Hopworks instead.

Another brewery destination that is currently bungled in Google bicycling directions is Upright.  Suppose you decide to bicycle from Hopworks to Upright.  Amazingly, the Google directions (pictured at the top of this post) send you across the Hawthorne Bridge, eventually onto Naito Boulevard, turning right -- no, left -- whoops -- onto the Broadway Bridge.  I suppose you could carry your bike up the steps to the bridge, but that's probably not what you had in mind.  If you already kind of know the route, you can drag the lines around to eventually get a map that keeps you on the east side of the river.  But no amount of fiddling would get it to take the most natural route past the Rose Garden -- in the Wheeler bike lane instead of Interstate -- maybe because that involves a little bit of sidewalk action against traffic.

Even no-brainers like the route from the Horse Brass to the Lucky Lab are not very good yet.  Most people would stay on Taylor when Google sends you to Salmon at 41st, since the pedestrian stoplight gives you more chances to cross Cesar Chavez (39th) than you'd get on Salmon, and then there are no stop signs on Taylor until it dead-ends at 35th.  Later on, Google meanders you off of Salmon when it's at its bicycling best, between 20th and 12th.  Those are just little annoyances, but if you reverse the directions and go from the Lucky Lab to the Horse Brass, Google sends you right up Hawthorne to 41st.  You might do that very late at night, but even then, Salmon/Taylor is the nicer route.

Interestingly, even though byCycle.org has been dormant for years -- and is far from perfect -- it passes the tests above better than Google does today.  It chooses the correct routes both ways between the Brass and the Lab, at Hopworks it gives you a right turn off of Powell instead of a left, and it keeps you on the east side of the river if you're headed to Upright.  Its Upright directions are not great -- even with its "safer" setting it puts you on SE 12th for a mile or so -- though if you're headed south from Upright, it correctly finds the bike path along the Eastbank Esplanade.

The Google biking directions are getting better all the time, and will someday be very valuable.  But don't count on them this year.  As I mentioned above, what you really want is the Bike There map.  There's a new edition out this year, and it will never put you in the suicide lane on Powell Boulevard or make you fly up to a bridge from the road underneath it.

Beer City, USA

The laughable spectacle of Charlie Papazian's online poll to determine Beer City, USA has ended in only the second-worst outcome for Portland.  The most terrible thing that could have happened would have been for Portland to edge Asheville, NC by a few votes, so that it would have been us wearing the propeller beanie and not them.  (Photo credit: rbatina.)  In a contest to see who has the most insecure beer fans, it's better that we should come in second place than to suffer the humiliation of actually winning the prize.

Please, please, please, I beg of you Portland beer people: don't take the bait next year.  If this poll was moored in reality, you would have seen more people voting for one of the larger population centers with a decent beer scene.  Instead, it was just a wankfest between 7400 people in North Carolina and 6600 from hereabouts.  Check out how much interest this thing attracted in other beery places:

• Chicago (metro: 9.6 million): 190 votes
• Boston (metro: 4.6 million): 114 votes
• San Francisco (metro: 4.3 million): 171 votes
• Seattle (metro: 3.4 million): 362 votes
• San Diego (metro: 3.1 million): 884 votes

If Portland had barely lost to a real adversary, like any of the cities listed here, or even had we been blown away by one or two of them, there would be some honor in that.  Instead, we only look pathetic, jumping up and down for attention on the internet.  The only consolation is that tiny Asheville -- which for all I know is a fine place with wonderful beer -- looks even more pathetic than we do.

The Bomber Price Penalty

The thing that got me started comparing and tracking beer prices was the observation that it usually costs you more -- ounce for ounce -- to have your reusable growler filled at a brewpub than it does to buy disposable bottles that have gone through packaging, wholesaling, and retailing.  This growler price penalty is apparently due to the fact that bars have a different business model than bottle shops and groceries.  But there's a related pricing issue that doesn't make any sense at all:  the disparity between the retail prices of 22-ounce bombers and 12-ounce bottles sold in 6- or 12-packs.

Don't start in on me with comments like "if you want it, just pay the price, otherwise shut up".  I'm not saying that no bomber is worth the price.  But it is worth pointing out that: 1. The exact same beer costs more in big bottles than in small ones, and 2. Similar products such as soda pop or liquor are priced in the opposite way -- bigger packages cost less per ounce than smaller ones.  To illustrate the point, I'll show you the price difference for a few beers I saw recently at a big grocery store in Portland, and also a similar comparison of Coca-Cola prices (Pepsi prices were identical).  We'll use the legal tender of It's Pub Night: the U.S. dollar and the Six-Pack Equivalent (SPE).

• Anchor Steam:
  
  • bomber: $3.39 (SPE $11.09)
  • 6-pack: $9.29
  • penalty: $1.80
   
• Deschutes Mirror Pond:
  
  • bomber: $2.89 (SPE $9.46)
  • 6-pack (sale): $5.99
  • penalty: $3.47
   
• MacTarnahan's Amber:
  
  • bomber (sale): $2.69 (SPE $7.43)
  • 12-pack (sale): $12.99 (SPE 6.50)
  • penalty: $0.93
   
• Sierra Nevada Pale Ale:
  
  • 24 oz. bomber: $2.89 (SPE $8.67)
  • 6-pack (sale): $6.99
  • penalty: $1.68
   
• Widmer Hef:
  
  • bomber: $2.99 (SPE $9.79)
  • 12-pack (sale): $11.99 (SPE $6.00)
  • penalty: $3.79
   
• Coca-Cola:
  
  • 2-liter bottle (sale): $1.67 (SPE $1.78)
  • 12-pack (sale): $5.00 (SPE $2.50)
  • discount: $0.72

For each of the above beers, I took the lowest big-bottle price and compared its SPE to that of the lowest small-bottle price. That highlights another aspect of the bomber trickery: bomber prices are marked down less frequently than 6-packs or 12-packs, which are on sale almost every single day at big groceries. In case you're worried about apples-to-apples comparisons, even if I use non-sale six-pack prices for those matchups where the bombers weren't marked down, the bomber penalty is still 80 cents for Deschutes and $1 for Widmer, though Sierra Nevada did fall into line with about a 52-cent discount.

Nor was the Coke pricing a fluke -- there was a similar discount at several groceries around town. By the way, even though I translated the cola prices into SPE, the grocery shelf tags at most stores give you comparison prices in pints. Kind of backwards -- I usually think of cans of pop, and pints of beer.

Spread the word about the bomber price penalty. The fact that no other product is priced with a volume penalty instead of a volume discount leads me to believe that bomber pricing is simply a swindle.

San Francisco vs. Portland

While waiting in line at the Rooftop Coffee Bar at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this week, I couldn't help but overhear a young lady nearby ranting about -- of all things -- how pretentious Stumptown Coffee is. She was talking to a somewhat older gentleman -- her father? her art professor? -- and seemed particularly offended that Stumptown's cafes serve French-pressed coffee instead of drip coffee. "Of course," she added with disgust, "Stumptown is from the most pretentious city I've ever been in: Portland."

Interesting.  She's enjoying a visit to a museum that currently exhibits not just one rectangular painting of a uniform gray but also a second such work, yet she thinks coffee presses are pretentious. Not to mention the fact that the Blue Bottle cafe we were standing in serves an espresso drink designed by kitsch-meister Jeff Koons, whose porcelain Michael Jackson is also on display at SFMOMA. I mean no disrespect to the museum or the art world, but isn't irony delicious? As I stood there pretentiously sporting my Hawthorne Bridge T-shirt, I turned to ask the Stumptown hater, "Portland is more pretentious than San Francisco?". "Well," she replied, "it certainly has a higher ratio of pretentious to non-pretentious people."

Oh well, Portland will always have its detractors. In fact, the girl at the art museum reminded me in a way of cranky Portland beer blogger Dr. Wort, though instead of finding us too pretentious, he thinks things are too sloppy here, and he pines for the more refined San Francisco beer scene he experienced as a lucky denizen of the Bay Area. Though conceding that SF has a relatively small number of breweries and brewpubs, the Doc fondly remembers them as places where -- this is a quote -- "the gastronomic delights abound". It's tempting to pick apart the doctor's fawning over some California places that he would excoriate for their blandness if they magically appeared here in Portland, but I think I better get on with my own report of this week's trip to San Francisco.

It was a family vacation, so there weren't any late nights or beer-soaked days, but Carla and I made it out to a few beer places. Sunday evening we swooped down on our San Fran man Andy, who hiked us from his apartment to Zeitgeist and then Toronado, neither of which I had been to before. Toronado was smashing -- an interesting, well-rounded selection of draft beers, reasonably priced. It's got a little bit of a dive bar feel to it, in the sense that you could sit there in the dark and be perfectly at ease. The place is famed for bartenders with attitude, but I thought the service was good, and they even forgave me a faux pas when I accidentally slammed my empty glass down on the zinc bar with a loud bang. The delicious cheap sausages from Rosamunde's next door were the icing on the cake. Kind of ridiculous I'd never been to Toronado; now I'll make sure and get there every time I'm in the city.

On the other hand, Zeitgeist was a disappointment. In his recent report on San Francisco, Ezra said Zeitgeist has about 40 taps, but Sunday at least 25 of those were blown -- the Sierra Nevada Imperial Stout blew with my order. My wife only gets IPAs anymore, and there wasn't a single IPA or even Pale Ale left when we were there. She ended up with a so-so amber called Poppy Jasper from El Toro. The Zeitgeist beer garden is set up pretty nicely, but it was way too crowded. We found a vacant place to sit, but had to wait awhile for the empties from the previous occupants to be bussed, and forget about a rag to wipe the table. Of the 500 people in the yard, 350 were smoking cigarettes and another 25 were openly smoking pot. I've got no particular beef with those activities, but it wasn't our scene.

On other nights we made it out to 21st Amendment and the Thirsty Bear, both walkable from our Market Street hotel. It had been a few years since I'd been to 21A, so I was glad to get the chance, but the taplist was a little disappointing -- IPA, Amber, Red, Light Golden, Watermelon Wheat... ho hum. The Smoked Imperial Porter was the standout, though it bore a cruel California price tag of $7 for 10 ounces, plus tax. Of course Carla went with the IPA, and it was very tasty -- the hop aroma would remind you of orange blossoms or apricots. The food we tried was quite decent, if a little spendy for what it was -- a brick-oven pizza and a loaded cheeseburger (no tater tots).

We didn't try any entrees at the Thirsty Bear, but the oysters with avocado granita and sea salt were brilliant. I enjoyed the abbey-style Belgian ales (one golden, one "amber") that were on as seasonals, although we found the cask IPA to be a little humdrum. It's an odd place -- they get a lot more business from the convention center nearby than from any kind of regular local crowd. It's worth a visit if you're in the area.

I realize that this post meandered around quite a bit, and might not have all that much to do with the headline. For me the main beer lessons of this trip were: first, Toronado goes a long way toward redeeming the sparsity of San Francisco's beer scene; second, be it ever so pretentious, there's no place like home.

The 24-Hour Beer Cycle

Politicians and pundits decry the 24-hour news cycle: modern communications drive an unquenchable thirst for information, as media outlets strive to keep new content in front of their audience. When I appointed myself as a beer blogger, I put myself into the whirlwind of the 24-hour beer cycle -- the internet deluge of blogs, tweets, emails, and Facebook updates about beer. It's exhausting.

Here in Portland alone, there's at least one beer event happening every single day. Even if there were no special events, there are so many new or interesting beers a short bike ride away that it's sometimes hard to think about anything else. When Bob Noxious and his family were visiting us last summer, Bob shook his head as we settled in at the third stop of some pub crawl and said, "How could you keep from becoming an alcoholic in this town?" Fair question. As much as it hurts, you have to let some events pass you by, sometimes even cherished traditions like the Lucky Lab Barleywine Festival that I missed this last weekend.

In beer as in everything, the internet amplifies the amount of information, and keeps it coming throughout the day.  To keep up with local news and to avoid duplicating someone else's rant, I read about a dozen active Portland beer blogs, and a few others from around the country or other English-speaking nations.  But Twitter is the real killer.  The first tweets I read in the morning might be about @thebeernut's evening libations in Ireland, followed a few hours later by live reports of beer drinking in Boston, then Chicago and Austin.  Then when the dozens of nightly tweets from around Portland start rolling in about various bottles opened and pints drained, how can it not make you thirsty?  Not just after a hard day's work, but morning, noon, and night.  It's the 24-hour beer cycle.

For all of that information, there's some that I don't get around to: the excellent Northwest forums at Beer Advocate, the beer radio shows, beer podcasts, and beer videos are too much for me. I have a day job, a family, some exercise routines, and a dwindling number of outside interests.  I have to let a lot of beer info -- and a lot of beer -- get away from me.  Which means that sometimes the blog just gets fed a filler post like this one, instead of the substantive, hard-hitting beer analysis you expect from It's Pub Night.  Hey, not so different from the effect of the 24-hour news cycle on the news media.

Beulahland Strikes Out

During the fall I became infatuated with Beulahland, the "Coffee and Alehouse" at 28th and Couch. I biked my daughter to soccer practice Thursdays at DaVinci Middle School, and noticed that I could take refuge at the happy hour just down the street. On my first visit I was impressed by the beer choices -- one of the ten taps was a Lompoc fresh-hop ale, and the place even had a nitro tap and a cask engine. They also have about a dozen house-infused vodkas and bourbons; I've yet to try any of them, but they have some interesting-sounding flavors like habanero whiskey and watermelon vodka.

But I have to say, when our Pub Night crawled over there this week after a visit to Spints Alehouse, Beulahland struck out:

• Strike one: The cask engine is gone.
• Strike two: The chalkboard and bartender both concealed the best beer tap from me.
  
• Strike three: My beer was served in a cheater pint glass!

It wasn't until our second round that we noticed the telltale Terminal Gravity tap handle and found out that the delicious TG Festivale was on tap. It wasn't on the chalkboard, and the bartender didn't bother to point it out to a crowd of obvious beer geeks. That's the kind of action I expect from Henry's, not from the divey local.

Those first two strikes are no big deal. But cheater pints? Now you're adding injury to insult. Check out the picture above, and you'll see the giant boot in the bottom of the glass of Festivale on the left. That's as thick as the glasses I wore in fifth grade! I'm glad that the Honest Pint Project is starting to move the finer pubs to use glassware with fill lines on them. Cheater pints are a fraud that must be stopped.

On the plus side, the city has installed one of the new bike-parking corrals on 28th right by Beulahland, so there's plenty of two-wheeled parking. And the jukebox has a brilliant variety: Black Sabbath's first album, Duke Ellington's Money Jungle, and -- stroke of genius -- Hasil Adkins.

I still enjoy the atmosphere at Beulahland, and I would like to check out those infused boozes. This last visit cooled my ardor somewhat, but I still consider it a little-known gem in that area.

I Whine Hard about Henry's Tavern

On the previous post about the new taps at the Green Dragon, someone commented that their 50 taps must be one of the largest collections in the city. The Horse Brass just barely squeaks past them because of their 3 cask engines, and Patrick pointed out that the Dublin Pub in Hillsdale has over 50 taps (59 according to their website).

But the reigning champion in Portland is clearly Henry's Tavern, with about 100 taps. Let me pull out some cliches to describe Henry's Tavern. The large, well-chosen tap-list is like casting pearls before swine (most patrons order macro lagers or cocktails). A beer there will cost you an arm and a leg. Henry Weinhard must be rolling over in his grave to have Henry's Tavern using his name and his building.

Enough cliches. I would love to love Henry's, with its massive beer list and great historic location. The first bar I ever went into -- as you can see by my identification card -- was a tavern owned by my Uncle Henry. The finest honky-tonk in Austin used to be Henry's Bar and Grill on Burnet Road (now an AutoZone parking lot, grrrr...). But Portland's Henry's Tavern always manages to annoy me in one of the following ways:

1. The servers know nothing about the beers.
2. The beer list doesn't list prices or serving quantities.
3. The servers don't know the quantities.
4. The beer list is often out of date.
5. The servers can't tell you any additions/subtractions to the list.
6. The beer is expensive.

Every few months I torment myself with a trip to Henry's, but there's always some annoyance. Either the first three beers I order turn out to be unavailable, or a beer of normal strength comes to the table in a small goblet after the server assures me it is served in pints. One time when Brian and I were having lunch there, I pointedly asked our waitress if there were any new beers that hadn't made it onto the list. She said she'd check with the bartender, then came back and said there weren't. And yet when the beer buyer came by and recognized Brian, she recommended we try a new release from Ninkasi that was not yet on the list. Brilliant.

Henry's probably has the most expensive pints in town -- well, maybe Higgins or Rogue can beat them, but those places at least give a damn about the beer they're serving. And since the prices aren't posted anywhere, you just take your chances until the check arrives.

That's one thing, and I'll admit to being kind of a tightwad. Nevertheless, I would patronize the place more if not for the total lack of respect for beer there. It could be a kind of beer-geek heaven with just a little bit of creative management. For example, the Tap House Grill in Seattle is a similar establishment, but a nod is given to beer fans, and the servers know their stuff.

Don't hold your breath: I think Henry's has done the calculation on what kind of customer they are angling for, and it's corporate restaurant diners, not beer geeks. The giant beer list attracts a certain chest-thumping contingent, but they are mostly oblivious to the genuinely interesting variety on the list.