Portland vs. Austin: Beer Festival Edition

Wow!  Word out of Austin is that the bad feelings left by a botched beer festival last weekend is partly to blame for the cancellation of another festival there that was scheduled for later in the month.

Don't take what follows as gloating -- I swear it's not.  But reading about the failed Austin Beer Festival -- described on a Beer Advocate thread as a complete disaster -- is a surprising reminder to me of how good we've got it in so many ways in Portland.  I lived in Austin for almost 20 years, and I while I still love that town, I can say confidently that moving to Portland 9 years ago was the best thing that our family ever did.  I love returning to Austin for visits, but it's a place I could never live again.  Naturally there are more reasons for that than the beer festival situation, although reading the links above underlined some other differences between the two towns:

• It was 90 degrees there Saturday (Portland's high was in the low 50's)
• Everyone attending a Texas beer festival drives there in a car.  OK, 99%.
• The organizers of the ABF aren't really plugged in to the beer community -- it's just another business to them

On the last two points, think of the central locations of Portland's big beer festivals, all well-served by multiple forms of public transit and easy to reach on a bicycle (granted, I used to occasionally bike out to Decker Lake where the ABF was held, but even then it wasn't a particularly nice ride).  Think also of the grassroots origins of all of the Portland festivals, and how they are staffed in large part by volunteers (which it sounds like was not the case in Austin).  And how about the 2 ounce sample size at the ABF?  I guess bike lanes are not the only proof that not everything is bigger in Texas.

This seems like a good place to mention that Portland's red-headed stepchild of beer festivals, the Spring Beer and Wine Fest, is happening this Friday and Saturday.  In the past I've been somewhat critical of the SBWF, though I attend almost every year, as I will this year.  This time, though, I'll think how bad it could be, and I'll consider my taster glass half-full instead of half-empty.

If you share my interest in watching train wrecks and you didn't yet click on the ABF stories above, they are interesting reading.  Glad I didn't get wind of it on April 1st or I would have thought it was a prank.

Draft vs. Bottle

I've been pretty sure for a while that I prefer draft beer to bottled -- it sometimes seems to me that beer loses some flavor in the bottling process -- but I've never tried the same beer side-by-side from bottle and keg. Until now. Over the weekend we had a keg of Deschutes Jubelale at a party, and I decided to do a blind tasting of the draft vs. bottles.

This was in a pretty casual atmosphere, and lately my blind-tasting skills have been questionable. In this case I didn't take very good notes about peoples' preferences between the bottled and kegged samples, though most people seemed to find the draft Jubelale to be mellower. Personally I found the bottles showed more of this year's "tannic" harshness decried by Jeff and Pete. I actually like this year's stronger taste -- it seems to me to come from extra hop bitterness or maybe some darker malts -- but it was more muted and easier to approach on tap.

In my jubilant mood, the silly thing I focused on in the blind tasting was whether people could guess which glass had beer from the keg and which from the bottle.  Almost universally, people guessed wrong, including myself.  Ritch Marvin got the question right, and Brian and Bryce might have also, but there was some possibility that their samples were swapped (those questionable skills of mine at work again).

Which was better, tap or bottle?  In this case they were nearly identical, though I still think the draft Jubelale was infinitesimally better.  There was much less of a difference than I expected, which makes me wonder if my bias is wrong, or if it is based on some other factor like out-of-date bottles.

Seattle Fresh Hop Throwdown 2011

Fresh hop beers have exploded in Portland the last few years, and they are also catching on more and more in our sister city of Seattle.  This past Saturday, Geoff Kaiser of Seattle Beer News (he's also a regular columnist at NW Brewing News) curated 15 fresh hop beers for a mini-festival at The Noble Fir, a relatively new tavern in the Ballard neighborhood.  The place quickly filled up, and had a line running down the block.  There were eight beers from Washington and seven beers from Oregon, so before the doors opened about a dozen beer mavens from the two states took part in a blind tasting to choose the best of the lot -- and to decide which state turned out the best fresh hop beers.

Oregon won the blind tasting decisively.  Scoring out of 25, where anything above 13 was a good beer, and 19 and above indicated a good showcase for fresh hops, the Oregon beers averaged 16.2 vs. 15.7.  That's hardly a landslide, but the top four beers went to a second round of judging for best in show, and Oregon beers took gold, silver, and bronze:

1. Laurelwood Fresh Hop Cavalry IPA
2. Deschutes Fresh Hop Mirror Pond
3. Double Mountain Killer Red

Fourth place was taken by a Washington beer:  Two Beers Fresh Hop Ale.  I wasn't involved in the final best-of-show judging, so of the four finalists, I only scored Double Mountain and Two Beers.  If it's any consolation to fans of Washington beer, I preferred the Two Beers to the Killer Red, though both were excellent.  Afterward I did have my first taste of the Laurelwood Cavalry.  I had been hearing good things about it from people who had already tried it in Portland, and it was indeed a top-tier fresh-hopper.

The other beers that were poured at the throwdown were:

• Oakshire Triune
• Iron Horse Fresh Hop Loco Red
• Schooner Exact Fresh Hop IPA
• Full Sail Hopfenfrisch Pilsner
• Snipes Mountain The Hooch
• Seven Seas Hop Prophet
• Hopworks Give Me Liberty...
• Ninkasi Fresh Hop Tricerahops
• Big Al Harvest Ale
• Big Time Fresh Hop Bhagwan's Best
• Paradise Creek Alpha Madness

On that list, I judged the six from Oakshire down to Seven Seas, and that's the order in which I had them scored (after Two Beers and Double Mountain).  I foolishly left the bar before the festival opened for real and was then stuck outside because of the crowd, so sadly I missed trying the last three Washington beers.  Still, it was a great experience, and I am grateful to Geoff for inviting me to take part.  Further reading: Geoff's official report on the Throwdown.

If you're not familiar with the Noble Fir, it's a nice place that's worth a visit if you're in the neighborhood.  Fifteen beer taps, plus two nitro taps, and a pretty good selection of bottles; no kids allowed.  The food menu consists of small plates, including vegan options:  you can pick an assortment of 3, 5, or 7 items for $10, $15, or $20 respectively (if I remember right), which seems pretty reasonable.  It's not reflected in the name, but there is a travel theme to the restaurant:  one wall is lined with travel books and laminated maps for your reading pleasure while you're having a beer or some snacks.

Westvleteren vs. St. Bernardus

One of these things is not like the others...

Disclaimer: this tasting didn't go how I wanted it to.  Not the results, the tasting itself.

A few weeks ago there was a multi-birthday party at the home of our friends Brett and Debbie.  Since lots of our beer-loving crowd was going to be there, I decided it was time to trot out the bottles of Westvleteren 8 and 12 (one of each) that I brought back from Belgium this summer.

To make it more interesting, I decided to make it a blind tasting, comparing the Westy 12 with St. Bernardus Abt 12.  Westvleteren 12 is one of the world's rarest and most sought-after beers: it is only distributed at the Abbey St. Sixtus where it is produced.  St. Bernardus is very easy to find: I bought the bottle for this tasting for $4 at the CVS on East Burnside.  The two beers are often compared to one another, and have some history in common.  I had tried them side-by-side in Amsterdam, but I knew which was which, so I was probably biased in favor of the rarer, more expensive Westvleteren.  This blind tasting -- with a lot of experienced palates -- would be a great experiment.

But the best laid schemes go oft awry, and so it was with this tasting.  See the bottlecaps in the picture?  I popped the blue bottlecap from the bottle of St. Bernardus and poured some samples into small glasses, and then popped the Westvleteren bottle with the blue bottlecap and divided up that beer.  Westvleteren bottles don't have paper labels, so the bottlecap was my indication of which style was in each bottle.  In my excitement about what a fun tasting this would be I let the color fool me instead of reading the numbers, which means that instead of comparing two similar quadrupels, I had pitted  Abt 12 against the dubbel Westy 8 -- also a fine beer, but quite a bit subtler than the 12.  I didn't realize the mistake until all the glasses had been passed around and drained, and I went to open the third bottle as Act Two of my show and tell.  "OK, now try the Westvleteren eigh... uh oh."

Not too surprisingly, the Abt 12 handily defeated the Westy 8 in the blind tasting, 5 votes to 2 -- hey, a couple of people enjoyed the more subtle pleasures of the dubbel, anyway.  Before I knew about the mix-up, I was perplexed by how different the Westvleteren was than my memory of it from a few weeks earlier.  And I was even more disappointed because the Abt 12 seemed a little cloying to me that day, not worthy to knock off such a sought-after beer.

We did share the Westy 12 around after that.  It was as spectacular as I remembered it being, and in my opinion was better than a 3 year-old Westy 12 that Angelo generously shared with a few people back in August.  Cellaring beer is fun, but sometimes your best bet is to drink things fresh.  At the party, I think most of us agreed that the Westvleteren 12 was indeed a notch above the St. Bernardus.  But by then the damage had been done -- it wasn't a blind tasting anymore.

Almost forgot to mention: it was this tweet by Matt at portlandbeer.org that inspired me to finally write this up!

Ebay vs. Beer

Yesterday on Beervana, Jeff commented on a Washington Post article about Ebay's black market for beers.  He really got it stirred up, 31 comments and counting.  Jeff thinks the brewers shouldn't be whining about the black market, they should raise their prices to eliminate it.

I'll go into why I disagree with Jeff below, but first some facts about beer sales on Ebay:

1. Ebay doesn't allow the sale of alcoholic beverages.
2. There is a loophole for collectible bottles, if the seller posts a disclaimer that it is the bottle that is valuable, not the beer inside.
3. For rare beers of recent vintage, that disclaimer is obviously a lie.
4. If the seller is willing to lie about the value of the beer to make a few dollars, how can you trust them to treat you honestly in the sale?
5. If you don't like to see beer scalping on Ebay, you can report beer auctions by clicking on the "Report Item" link on the page.  They usually take reported auctions down.
6. Just for fun, check out the time I auctioned an empty Abyss bottle on Ebay.

Occasionally I will report a beer auction on Ebay, just to strike a blow for honesty in the world.  I am not puritanically opposed to people doing what they want, but if you don't like Ebay's rules, you should find some other way to sell your beer.  Today Ebay took down a Dark Lord auction I reported, but it looks like they are going to leave up an auction by one of their "Top-Rated Sellers" of Stone's Framboise for the Cure, which was one of the scalped beers mentioned in the Washington Post article.

Part of the controversy would disappear if Ebay would simply drop their restriction on beer auctions.  Brewers couldn't complain about profiteering -- they would be free to participate in it if they wanted to make more money off of their products, or distribute to a wider audience.  It would also open the door for honest resellers to develop a reputation for properly handling a somewhat delicate product. Of course, Ebay doesn't drop their beer prohibition because they are constrained by a fractured regulatory system in the U.S., where every state has different restrictions on sale and delivery of alcohol.

Jeff's idea that raising prices will eliminate the black market is ridiculous.  This faith in a magical Market that can correctly determine the price of goods is part of the insanity of our times.  At best, it works in a circular definition sort of way:  the market determines the correct price at any given second because the correct price is what someone will pay.  But it doesn't work in any sort of predictive way:  based on this level of supply, and this level of demand, and this attribute of the product, the price will be such-and-such.  Since it can't predict anything, but can only rationalize what happened, this efficient-market model that modern Americans apply to everything has much more in common with religion than with science.

Given the fact that no one can predict ahead of time the market price of something traded in billions of units -- say, common stock of the Intel Corporation -- how is a small brewery supposed to calculate ahead of time the market price of a beer they made 5,000 bottles of?  Simply put, they can't calculate that.  So they set a reasonable price based on their costs, prices of similar products, and their past experience of what their customers will pay.  Of course they want to make a good profit, but there is also value to them in selling out fast -- they don't have to sit on an inventory, and they can devote more space in their operation to the next production run.

Further reading:

• Jeff's post
• Patrick's followup on Beeronomics
• Yesterday's Beer Advocate thread on the Post article
• A Beer Advocate Ebay thread from 2008

It's interesting how much more pro-Ebay the BAs have become in three years.

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.

Dragon Stout vs. Dragonstooth Stout

Usually when I travel I find some excuse for a beer-blog post along the way. Our family vacation to Jamaica earlier this month was an exception. In the places we were, the only beers I saw were Red Stripe, Guinness, and Dragon Stout. For the final three days of our trip, we were imprisoned at a cheap beach resort and the only beer choice was Red Stripe. But during the week we spent roaming the country before that, local Dragon Stout was my occasional beer of choice.

Dragon -- from the same company as Red Stripe -- seemed like a decent stout, not unlike Guinness, so I brought a few bottles home for further study. Wasn't Dragon Stout available in the US in the pre-microbrew days? I'm pretty sure I remember being able to get it in Austin in the mid- to late-eighties.

Today when I was at Beermongers looking for a stout to compare Dragon against, I noticed a bottle of the lovely Dragonstooth Stout from Seattle's Elysian Brewing. Suddenly the world started spinning, and in an attack of deja vu, I found myself back in 1986 standing in front of the beer cooler at Wheatsville Food Co-op in Austin. I want a nice big beer tonight -- I can't afford the $6 for a 750 of Chimay, so should I get a Steinlager, a Dragon Stout, or a Tooth's Sheaf Stout? Something dark... Dragon? Tooth? Dragon? Tooth? Dragonstooth?

Did Elysian name Dragonstooth after that pair of international stouts? Whatever the case, I didn't need a flashback to convince me to pick up a bottle of Dragonstooth. It's good stuff. (And speaking of Tooth's, last year Jeff Alworth "rediscovered" Sheaf Stout, much to his delight).

Now let's compare Dragon and Dragonstooth. As you can see from the picture above, the Dragonstooth is pitch black; the Dragon is dark but reddish when the light shines through. They both weight in with nearly the same strength, 7.5% for the Jamaican vs. 7.45% for the Washingtonian. Let's see which is the champion.

Dragon Stout: very sweet, like Malta or cola, moderately thin mouthfeel, but lots of syrupy legs on the glass, little hops. As it warms, a little of stouty roastiness and a hint of molasses come in to join the original cola flavor.

Dragonstooth Stout: roasty almost charcoaly aroma, creamy mouthfeel, delicious toasted-grain flavor with a nice bitter wallop that lingers on the tongue. Also very leggy, but not nearly as sweet (a good thing).

Really there's no contest. Dragonstooth is a much more flavorful and polished beer than Dragon, which is too cloyingly sweet. But to give Dragon some credit, I later popped open a Guinness Extra Stout and found it much closer in flavor to the Dragon Stout than to Elysian's beer, though not nearly as sweet. And of course, if you find yourself on a tropical vacation where your drink choices are Red Stripe, rum punch, or vitamin-enhanced wine, Dragon Stout sounds just fine.

By the way, we had an excellent time on our vacation. We timed it to attend the annual Maroon Celebration in the town of Accompong in the interior of Jamaica. The Maroons were a group of escaped slaves that waged an 80-year insurgency against the British colonial powers, until the British relented and signed a treaty granting them self-rule in 1739 (the rest of Jamaica belonged to Britain until 1962). They celebrate the occasion of the treaty in Accompong every year on January 6th. This year's was the 272nd annual celebration -- the Maroons have been independent from England for longer than we have. It's a fascinating bit of living history, and also a great party.

Alcohol vs. Acetaminophen

My Tylenol bottle thinks I drink too much.

Well, it's not every day that I drink three or more beers, but I drink some amount of beer most every day, and if I have one I usually have two. And, like anyone who likes to drink, I sometimes have way more than three.

It's great fun to make liver jokes -- the liver is evil, must be punished -- but I have a feeling that liver failure wouldn't be much fun. We all know that chronic alcohol abuse is bad for the liver. But did you know that acetaminophen poisoning is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the US? Apparently the recommended daily maximum dosage -- which the FDA is about to lower -- is only about half of the dosage that starts to overwhelm your liver, and the way over-the-counter remedies sprinkle in a little of this and a little of that can get some people over the line without them even thinking about it.

The combination of alcohol and acetaminophen can have immediate bad effects on the liver. First thing to remember: do not take Tylenol after heavy drinking. Like the next morning, when your head is pounding. I am not a doctor, but it looks like ibuprofen (Advil) is a safer bet for hangover help. Ibuprofen, like aspirin, is rough on the stomach -- take it with food. There's a place for each pain reliever, just don't combine alcohol and Tylenol. Furthermore, if you drink every day, only take half the maximum acetaminophen dosage (2 grams a day instead of 4 grams a day), even if you stopped drinking when you became sick. Here's a pretty good explanation of that, despite having been written by a lawyer.

Tylenol has made my life bearable the last few days, with this damn flu I've got. I'm looking forward to getting back to some beer drinking, though.

OBF Lineup: 2008 vs. 2009

The list of beers that will be at the 2009 Oregon Brewers Festival [Warning: noisy website!] is out. Hopefully Jeff at Beervana will soon give his traditional style analysis and recommendations, but the first thing that catches your eye is the number of breweries that will be at the festival this year but weren't there last year. In fact, there are twenty-six breweries which did not participate in 2008, but will be at the 2009 festival. It's a "drink locally" list: almost two-thirds of them are Oregon and Washington breweries. Here are the 26:

• Astoria Brewing
• Ballast Point Brewing
• Beer Valley Brewing
• Cascade Lakes Brewing
• Chuckanut Brewery
• Dogfish Head Craft Brewery
  
• Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom
• Elysian Brewing
• Firestone Walker Brewing
• Fish Brewing
• Great Northern Brewing
• Laht Neppur Brewing
• Lazy Boy Brewing
• Marin Brewing
• Moylan's Brewing
• Mt Shasta Brewing
• North Coast Brewing
• Oregon Trail Brewery
• Pike Brewing
• Port Townsend Brewing
• Riverport Brewing
• Scuttlebutt Brewing
• Southern Oregon Brewing
• Three Creeks Brewing
• Vertigo Brewing
• Victory Brewing

Now, some of those simply didn't exist or were brand new last year, for instance S.O.B., Three Creeks, Vertigo, Chuckanut. Others must have been to past OBFs but didn't come last year: Pike? Elysian? Cascade Lakes? And I can't believe Double Mountain wasn't there last year, but they're not in the 2008 program -- well, all I can say is "Welcome!". There is some good stuff on that list.

Last year there were 72 breweries at the OBF (plus the Oregon Brew Crew/Widmer Collaborator project). This year there are 80, a welcome increase, but not enough to absorb the 26 new ones. The 18 breweries that exhibited last year but won't in 2009 are:

• Allagash Brewing
• Bell's Brewery
• Dick's Brewing (surprising)
  
• Electric Brewing
• Four Plus Brewing
• Goose Island Beer
• Hales Ales Brewery and Pub (surprise)
  
• Iron Horse Brewery (one-hit wonder?)
  
• Lang Creek Brewery
• Mad River Brewing
• Pelican Pub and Brewery (huh?)
  
• Roots Brewing (uh-oh...)
  
• Russian River (now that Pliny is in Oregon)
  
• Sacramento Brewing
• Sierra Nevada Brewing
• Steelhead Brewing
• Surly Brewing
• Wild River Brewing

Only a third of the missing breweries are from Oregon or Washington, the reverse of the new-in-2009 list. Still, Iron Horse had one of the buzz beers last year -- why'd they drop out? Pelican? They're supposed to be one of the pillars of Oregon beer. And it can't be a good sign that Roots -- with rumors swirling of its ill health -- isn't coming. Roots' 2008 beer -- summery Calypso, flavored with apricots and habaneros -- was a strange and wonderful creation, one of the reasons to attend festivals like the OBF.

Another thing I'm looking forward to at the 2009 OBF is the "Buzz Tent". From what I understand, special beers will be served for limited times at the tent. Anyone know what some of those specials are? [Update: A partial list of the Buzz Tent beers has been released. Take a look over at portlandbeer.org.]

The 2009 list looks great to me. Apart from the missing locals I'm not too troubled by any of the dropouts. What do you think of the additions and deletions?

[If you're an out-of-towner coming in for the fest, you might want to read the guide to the OBF and nearby attractions that I wrote last year.]

Drifter vs. Grifter

Isn't it strange for MacTarnahan's to come out with a beer called "Grifter" a couple months after Widmer came out with one called "Drifter"? I couldn't find a snifter for my Drifter and Grifter picture, so I photographed them in the pint glasses my brother-in-law gave me.

I'm a big Widmer booster, but Drifter Pale Ale is not going to be a regular for me. It starts off nice: a pretty copper-colored beer, with a beautiful -- really amazing -- smell. The smell is a combination of floral and citrus -- something like grapefruit peel and orange blossom. Unfortunately, it's downhill from there. The taste is a little bit of a letdown after the wonderful aroma. Still, it's not bad... at first. What bugs me is that the taste suffers as the beer warms up, which is not how good ale is supposed to be. By the time it gets to room temperature, the hop aromas and bitterness are all gone, and there's not enough heft to take up the slack.

That's my opinion, but a lot of people seem to really like it. The reaction on Twitter has been mostly positive, on the excited side. The Beer Advocate average grade is B+, which I guess is pretty good. But most of my friends are as underwhelmed as I am. Charles said he's been adding the remnants of his six-pack to pots of beans as he cooks them. Over at Beervana, Jeff panned it very diplomatically, blaming the "catty" flavor of the Nelson hops used in the brew. I did like it a little better on tap than from a bottle, but that's not surprising. Final verdict: Drifter is not a terrible beer, but drink it cold. Maybe they should sell it in 7-ounce bottles.

On the other hand, the curiously-named Grifter exceeds expectations. You won't switch from your favorite IPA, but give it a shot if it's served at a sporting event or you see it on sale -- I couldn't resist when I saw it for $7 a six-pack. It's a respectable Northwestern IPA: nicely hoppy and bitter with a decent body to back it up. And the flavor holds up as it warms. MacTarnahan's hasn't impressed me during my 6 years as a Portlander, so it's nice to see them come out with something solid. They're calling it a summer seasonal, but hopefully they'll make it a regular.