Piss and Vinegar on the New School

I'm excited to report that I will be contributing a monthly column to my friend Ezra's blog/online magazine The New School.  The column, called Piss and Vinegar, will be a monthly rant about some beer subject or another.  The first installment is called Beer Confusion, where I give a few anecdotes of a beer geek's worst nightmare -- when the bartender or server at a multi-tap beer bar doesn't know the important details of the beer being served.  Beer Confusion went up yesterday on The New School; go check it out and share your own anecdotes about clueless service in the comments.

Once a month blogging is the kind of project I can get behind.  For the first four years of It's Pub Night, I enforced a quota on myself of about two posts a week (95 a year or so).  That worked well, but it was becoming less fun for me as time went on.  In order to still enjoy blogging, I dropped the schedule, and now only blog when I feel like it.  I missed a couple of months entirely in 2012, and it felt great.

The New School is a natural fit for me.  Ezra has become a great friend over the years, and we originally met because he was an early reader of It's Pub Night.  Early on I told him that he was the one who should be blogging, since he gets out a lot more than I do and has many more industry connections.  He said other people had told him the same thing.  Eventually he did start The New School, and it has become a much bigger deal than I imagined.  Not that I didn't have high hopes for it -- here's how I introduced it in a post here almost exactly three years ago:

Ezra is so plugged in to the Portland beer scene, that the New School is going to be a must-read blog for getting the latest information.

I'm feeling pretty good about that quote, especially when you consider that of the four new beer blogs mentioned in that post, The New School is the only one that is still being updated regularly.  It didn't just survive, it is expanding.

Oh yeah, the new column.  Anyway, I chose the name Piss and Vinegar to encourage the idea that I'll be writing ranty, bitter pieces.  You can kind of think of piss as a backhanded pet name for beer, and I also like to think of myself in the role of "piss-taker" -- someone sarcastically mocking his subject, but all in fun.  Go check it out as I become the oldest pupil in The New School.

Au Revoir, Angelo!

I almost never blog about bloggers, or blog about blogging, since this is a beer blog, not a blog blog.  But the departure of Brewpublic founder Angelo De Ieso from Portland deserves special mention.  For the last few years, during this great beer explosion in Portland, Angelo has been in the thick of it:  writing about it, staging events, and most importantly, enjoying Portland beer.  He's so much more than a blogger, he's one of the beer people that makes this place great.

Angelo's off to start a new life with his new wife Ashley -- a.k.a. The Beer Wench -- in the Bay Area.  At least he didn't head to Maine or Michigan or someplace I'd likely never see him again.  But he will be missed here.

I remember meeting Angelo -- and then-girlfriend Margaret Lut -- for the first time at the 2008 Lucky Lab hop harvest.  I'd read some of Angelo's beer writing before that, but he and Margaret mentioned that they were about to launch Brewpublic.  Can you remember a time before Brewpublic?  There are more and more good beer blogs in Portland all the time, but if Brewpublic and/or the New School had been around in December of 2007, I would never have started It's Pub Night, because they document our beer scene the way I wanted to do it -- only better than I ever could.

Three generations of Portland beer writing

Brewpublic's Killer Beer Fest 3.5 last Sunday at Bailey's was an appropriate send-off to Angelo, with great beers at great prices, including the delicious and hilariously-named De Ieso Spades from Hopworks (it's a dry-hopped version of The Ace of Spades IIPA).  Angelo, don't be a stranger, you're welcome back to Portland any time!

To get Angelo's story in his own words, read Sanjay's recent interview with him. I'm sure Brewpublic will keep going, either with a new California focus, or staying Oregon-oriented with its solid roster of local contributors.  Now, if any of you Brewpublic writers want to switch loyalties and become writers at It's Pub Night, I'm happy to poach you, just send me an email.

Portland-based Lambic Blog

Portland has a great pool of beer bloggers.  As Brady noted a couple weeks ago, the Wikio blog-ranking website currently thinks 4 of the top-10 beer blogs in North America are from Portland.  Take that with a grain of salt, of course, but it is a symptom of our blogging prowess.

So, it was with some amount of surprise that I found a Portland-based blog that I had never heard of, that has been updated pretty regularly for about two-and-a-half years, with in-depth, well-written content:  Lambic and Wild Ale.  I don't think I'm alone in my ignorance:  I can't find links to this blog on any other Oregon beer blog.  Talk about flying under the radar.

A little googling finds that the blog's author, Aschwin de Wolf, is a native of Holland whose other interests are cryonics -- yes, freezing dead or terminally ill people for future resuscitation -- and philosophical anarchism.  Uh... wow.  And I thought drinking fancy beer made me somewhat intellectual.

I'm not completely in love with sour beers myself, though I'm expanding my palate a little bit in that direction.  But I'm stunned at the quality of content on Lambic and Wild Ale.  Check it out, especially if sours are your thing.

Master of Malt: Caol Ila 30 and Highland Park 13

The British whisky retailer Master of Malt sent me a couple more samples from their Drinks by the Dram program that I wrote about back in January.  Drinks by the Dram is a slick way to try some scotches you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, or that you might splurge on if you knew you were going to enjoy it.

That's pretty well illustrated by these two recent samples, bottled under the store's own label.  First up, an unusual single-cask 30 year-old Caol Ila.  I love Caol Ila's standard bottlings, especially the 18.  On the other hand, the little exposure I've had to really old scotches has led me to believe they aren't necessarily for me.  This fits the Drinks by the Dram model really well:  I wouldn't risk $135 on a bottle of it, but I can't deny that I'm curious how it would taste.  Similarly with the second sample, a single-cask 13 year-old Highland Park.  In this case, I'm not a huge fan of the distillery, but this is a non-sherried expression -- it was aged in bourbon barrels -- so again, my curiosity is piqued.  And the $5 sample price is tough to beat.

Dave next door is at least as big a peat freak as I am, so I took the samples over the other night so we could talk them over.  (The picture above is a glass with my half of the Caol Ila -- double that to get an idea of the sample size.)  We agreed that the Caol Ila was stunning, but neither of us was very impressed by the Highland Park.

Here are my notes on the two:

Caol Ila: Pretty hot and intense: 57% ABV. As expected for 30 y.o., a little dusty and astringent at first (maybe even a pine tar sensation), but it opens up on the tongue, for a long, complex finish. Smoky, but not overpoweringly so, less than my recollections of "regular" Caol Ila. If you can bear to add a drop of water -- literally a single drop -- it takes a little of the initial astringency off. Very good dram.

Highland Park: Not a huge fan of the distillery, but it's interesting to have a non-sherried sample. Very sweet in a surprising way. I miss the sherry; I think it would help with a vegetal or mushroomy taste that's present. I wouldn't recommend it except for someone who is a Highland Park follower that wants to try something quite different from the usual expressions.

By the way, as part of my half-hearted attempt to make some money off of It's Pub Night, I've enrolled in Master of Malt's partner program, because I think it's a pretty good service they're offering, plus U.S. customers can request a VAT refund on orders -- effectively a 16% discount.  Master of Malt will give me a kickback if you buy something after arriving there from the links in this post, or from the links to them I've put in the blog sidebar (with a few other moneymaking schemes under the "Monetize Me" headline).  I don't expect to make a dime off it, but if you're going to buy something from them, click one of my links so they'll know I sent ya.

Website Recommendations

Here are a few websites that I've been geeking out on recently, and that I think you should check out:

• White Beer Travels
• Silly Wine Tasting Notes Generator
• A pint for Dionysus

Let me explain:

White Beer Travels: We are hoping to take a family vacation to Europe this summer, and as I googled around for information on the Cantillon tour in Brussels, I landed upon the charmingly 90s-flavored webpage of White's Beer Travels.  The content hasn't been updated since Mr. White's unfortunate demise in 2007, but there is a ton of good beer information there, mostly focused on Europe.  There is absolutely no rational organization to the website, and the narratives and photo credits are innocently homespun in the manner of George Herter's cookbooks, or your oldest male relative's holiday videotapes.  If you must have some structure to your web activities, start on the beer hunts page, or the "pub of the month" entries for Bamberg, Bruges, Uerige, or Denver.

Silly Tasting Notes Generator: I'm very proud of my Beer Review Generator, and every now and then someone StumbleUpon's or Reddit's it, bringing an extra thousand visitors to the blog for a brief time.  Along the lines of the BRG, but for wine, is Greg's Silly Tasting Notes Generator.  It recently caught New York Times critic Eric Asimov's attention, who tweeted it to the rest of us.  Good stuff.  Try it out on your wine friends.  And don't forget the BRG when you need a silly beer review.

A pint for Dionysus: There are many excellent beer blogs in Portland. Man, that's a weird thing to say -- why would any town need more than a couple of good beer blogs?  There's only a certain amount of gossip and current events to report upon.  It's true, and yet the varying interests of the different bloggers still makes for a pretty interesting ecosystem.  Then there is A pint for Dionysus.  I don't want to ghettoize Dan by putting his blog outside that ecosystem, but there is something so refreshingly different about his writing style that it sits outside the mundane concerns of the rest of us.  Or -- I'm confused -- are Dan's concerns so timelessly mundane that they make good reading whether they're about beer or not?  You'll have to decide for yourself, but if you're not already following Portland's Studs Terkel of beer, I recommend you start with some of his bar reviews:  The Agenda, The Nest, Angelo's; or peruse his year-long project of checking out The Local.

Your Thoughts on Beer Podcasts and Beer Video

I read a fair number of beer blogs, and pick up beer magazines when they're laying around free, and now I've gone and subscribed to Beer Advocate magazine -- more as a way to support beeradvocate.com than as a cover-to-cover read.  But the frontier I haven't really crossed is beer multimedia.  Podcasts, youtube/vimeo clips, and the latest spate of beer-related movies and TV shows -- I rarely watch or listen to them.  The reason is simple:  in the time it takes to listen to one podcast or watch one video, I can scan hundreds of blog headlines, and read my fill of interesting articles.  And even when a blog I read inserts a video interview, I almost never watch it.

What are your thoughts on beer audio or beer video?  Are there any podcasts that are so chock-full of goodness that you recommend watching or listening to every edition?  What about videos on blogs -- do you click the "play" button, or do you skip over them?

Do you follow any of these regularly?

• Beer O'Clock
• Behind the Pint
• Brew Happy
• Craft Brew Cast
• The Brewing Network
• Two Beer Queers
• Two Guys Drink

About half of these I only know about because I'm friends with the people involved.  Are there any important beer podcasts out there that I should be aware of?  Don't tell me about the really stupid ones, I'm sure there are thousands of those.

I've had it in mind to pose this as a "your thoughts" question for awhile, but it was reading Jeff's article about the Beer West/Digimarc partnership that got me stewing about it again. If your smartphone can get useful information out of a magazine, that makes sense to me.  But if it just leads you to hours of low-information video, it doesn't seem very useful.

Anyway, fire away with your comments.

Master of Malt: Drinks by the Dram

Almost all of my alcoholic beveraging is beer these days, but I do have a soft spot for a few distilled spirits, especially single malt whiskies. My involvement peaked a few years ago when my neighbor Dave and I got into an Islay arms race at about the same time we fell in with a poker and Scotch group that included some prodigious collectors who were very generous with their whisky hoard.  Below is a picture of the buffet at my house one night -- the collection was often twice as large if we were playing at the chief instigator's house.

Scotch and Poker Night, 2006

Hanging with a crowd like that, I got to try a range of bottlings much broader than any bar would ever stock.  But in the quest for novelty you sometimes end up with a pricey bottle of something that sounded special but that doesn't really suit you that well.

So I was definitely intrigued when I got an email from British spirits retailer Master of Malt, touting their Drinks by the Dram program, where you can order 3 cl samples of many of the whiskies they sell, for prices mostly in the range of $3.50 to $8.50 (at today's relatively favorable exchange rate of £1 = $1.56)  all the way up to $122 for a rare 1952 Glenfarclas. Now, I'm not likely to go for that 1952, but in a moment of weakness I might part with $28 for a taste of the Glenfarclas 1966 -- distilled the year I was born.  The real usefulness of Drinks by the Dram is to get a reasonably-priced sample of something you might want to buy a whole bottle of -- for example, plunking down $7 on a 19 year old Laphroaig bottled by Signatory before taking a $95 chance on a full bottle.

Master of Malt recently sent me 5 free samples from Drinks by the Dram.  The samples were packaged in little screw-top vials that are then sealed with red wax.  If 3 cl doesn't mean anything to you, consider that bars usually pour you a 4 cl dram of whisky or brandy, and airplane/minibar liquor bottles are 5 cl. The picture at left shows one of the samples poured into a Reidel single-malt glass: slightly smaller than what I'd normally pour myself from the bottle, but enough to get a good idea of the taste.

The prices of the samples ranged from $5.43 for MM's 12 year old Islay from an anonymous distillery (Bruichladdich is my guess) to $13.31 for Johnnie Walker Blue, but if you're ordering from the U.S. -- or anywhere outside the EU -- request a VAT (value added tax) refund in the delivery instructions when you place your order.  VAT is 20% right now, so your refund is effectively a 16% discount on the list price.  For example, a dram listed at $6 will get you a $1 refund.

The total cost for my shipment would have been $34.08 ($40.56 before the VAT rebate), plus $15.68 for shipping to the U.S., which should take a week or so.  It's a little pricey per ounce, but a very economical way to try some hard-to-find stuff.  Consider that bars here in Portland would charge you $8-$12 for a dram of Scotch, and the total cost for the Drinks by the Dram pencils out to be about the same or maybe less, especially if you are tipping correctly.  You'd get a little more whisky at the bar, but your selection would be much smaller.

It's especially nice that the more expensive the bottle, the more reasonably priced the sample is as a percentage of the cost.  For example, the Johnnie Walker sample at $13.31 is about 6% of the $209 price of a 70cl bottle, but the house-bottled Islay sample was almost 10% of the price of a full bottle ($56.71).

OK, enough about the pounds and pence, I'll tell you about the whiskies I got to try as part of this deal.  Dave is at least as big a whisky hound as I am, so he came over and tried them with me.  Neither of us had tried any of them before, so chalk one up for novelty.

• Johnnie Walker Blue - Blended whisky is so far off my radar that I didn't even know there was a Blue label JW.  Apparently it's the top of the line, and it showed.  It was impressively smooth, with just a hint of smoke in the finish. Quoth Dave: "I could drink gallons and gallons no problem".
• Tyrconnel 10 y.o. Sherry Cask - Irish single malts are also a new concept for me.  This one had a nice caramelly sherry palate, followed by an aromatic finish that had me thinking "hairspray", though not in a totally disagreeable way.  Worth a try if Irish whiskies are your thing.
• Master of Malt 12 y.o. Islay - Intense smoke over a full malt body, followed by a light touch of iodine. Like one of the smoky Bruichladdich bottlings.  I love this style of whisky, but $56 plus shipping for a 700ml bottle isn't a great deal for US buyers.
• Edradour 10 y.o. cask strength - Hot, woody, and dusty. A little bit of a wine flavor. Tastes a lot like a 25- or 30-y.o. (i.e., too long in the barrel).  Not my thing, but if you like that dusty flavor of a long time in the barrel, it might be for you.
• Zuidam 5 y.o. Rye Whisky - From a Dutch distiller better known for his traditional gins (genevers).  This whisky is smooth, understated, quite dry. The fruity rye flavor takes a while to hit you. Dave says it's like sucking on a honeycomb -- not sweet, but dries your tongue out like that.  If you're a rye whiskey person and want something a little mellow, it might be for you.

Anyway, Drinks by the Dram is an interesting service.  As I said, I'm not the whisky man I used to be, but I can definitely imagine myself ordering a few samples to satisfy my curiosity about a given distiller or bottler, or to try something special I wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.

Beer Around Town R.I.P.

About a year ago I wrote about how many new Portland beer blogs were popping up, and there have been even more since then. But sometimes they return to dust, and I'm sad to report the demise of Beer Around Town. Derek told me a few weeks ago that he was going to discontinue it, since Romanian hackers kept hijacking the blog and he didn't have time to keep up with it. But its absence didn't really hit home to me until this morning when I noticed that someone has put up a sham click-magnet page at his old address of www.beeraroundtown.com. If you have links to it in your blogroll, you might as well delete them, to avoid giving Google juice to the spammers.

I know he'll still be "around town" -- I ran into him at Hair of the Dog just a couple days ago -- but I'll miss Derek's fine photography, thoughtful beer reviews, and entertaining homebrewing anecdotes. I call dibs on him for guest blogging.

Some Portland blogs that have sprung up since the previous post about new blogs (well, the Beer Cave was lurking there a few months earlier but I hadn't noticed it):

• Beer Cave
• Pints, Bottles, and Bombers
• The Not So Professional Beer Blog
• Brewmance

The cycle continues. Hmm... those are all blogspot blogs. Is Wordpress losing ground?

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?

Support Your Local Beermapping

If you're traveling, one of the most useful tools to help you find good beer away from home is the Beer Mapping Project. The maintainer -- Jonathan Surratt, aka Beerinator -- has put together a database of breweries, beer bars, and beer stores with a nice interface to Google Maps, and is very responsive to contributors who send in new locations.



There's a way that you can help with beermapping.com. Every location on the map has a review page, like this one for Belmont Station. If you look at the project's city map for Portland, you'll notice that locations in our town are rather sparsely reviewed. And that's the gist of my appeal to you today: please get out there and add some reviews! Here are some Portland favorites that have not yet been reviewed:

• 5th Quadrant
• Bagdad
• Barley Mill
• Beermongers
• Bridgeport Ale House
• Hedge House
• Laurelwood Pizza
• Lucky Lab SW
• Moon and Sixpence
• Produce Row 
• Upright

That's just a sampling of places that it seems like we should explain to out-of-towners.  Don't limit yourself to those places; in fact, even the Portland locations that have been reviewed could benefit from more reviews, or from pictures if you have a mind to share.  Look at it as an easy way to be a Portland beer ambassador.  By the way, Google is now picking up beermapping.com reviews in Google Maps searches, like this one.  All you have to do is register on the beermapping forums, and you can start adding reviews to the site.  Tell 'em ItsPubNight sent you.

Migration Darts and Happy Hour

Tuesday I finally made another visit to Migration Brewing, thanks to a pub night call put out by Ezra. Two items of good news: the two dart boards are up on the wall behind the bar, and Migration has a cash-only happy hour all day Tuesdays -- $3.50 pints instead of $4. Read about it on their blog. Yet another reason to carry cash when visiting your local establishments.

The dart setup looks a little cramped -- the line you stand behind is just a couple feet from the wall. But a couple of guys throwing darts there said even though they were skeptical when they first saw it, that it worked fine for them. I'll try it out myself soon. (Darts trivia: that "line you stand behind" is called the oche, pronounced like "hockey" without the H.)

Colin said they've got approval to start brewing in the building now, so expect Migration's first house brews to be pouring by May. The first batch of Migration Pale Ale brewed at Lompoc sold out in a matter of days -- I didn't even get to it myself -- but they have another batch in the works at Three Creeks in Sisters.

Even though today is April Fool's Day, all the stuff in this post is true. Luckily someone in town has the spirit, and took the time to cook up a hilarious send-up of Ezra's The New School blog -- The Newest School. If you've been reading The New School it will crack you up.

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.

New Portland Beer Blogs

This beer blogging thing is a pretty competitive business. I leave the country for 10 days, and four new Portland beer blogs start up:

• New School: Pub Night bud Ezra's excellent new blog
• 999 Beers: daily beer-tasting project from Champagne of Blogs' Dave Selden
• Daily Pull: slick-looking blog by recent Portland arrival Brady Walen
• Portland Beer and Music: new blog reported by Jeff at Beervana
  

Ezra is so plugged in to the Portland beer scene, that the New School is going to be a must-read blog for getting the latest information. I'll go ahead and take credit for the birth of that blog: I've been encouraging Ezra to start a blog for about the last year and a half. At first I think he worried that it would conflict with his job at Belmont Station; now that he's moved on from there I guess he feels more free to express himself. So far he's been cranking out close to one post a day -- I hope he doesn't burn out, because he turns up lots of good material.

Speaking of burning out, Dave Selden is going to write about one beer a day until September 26, 2012. Haven't you heard of the kid in the candy shop, Dave? I hope he can pull it off, although it would have made much more sense to wrap up the project at the end of the Mayan calendar on the 2012 winter solstice. I'm usually skeptical about beer-a-day projects like this, but I like it that it highlights Dave's low-tech beer app 33 Beers.

I was beginning to wonder if Facebook and Twitter had killed blogging, but it looks like it's alive and well. There must be about a dozen good Portland beer blogs that I follow now.

I Won a Major Award!

Even though I try to decorate every post on It's Pub Night with a picture of some kind, I have to admit that my photography skills are probably not what keeps this enterprise afloat. Now I have received official recognition of my deficiency -- I was dubbed the Grand Loser of the Yuletide Photo Contest on Alan McLeod's A Good Beer Blog.

It was the picture above -- of a kegerator sitting next to the dug-up floor of the future Migration Brewing pub -- that pushed Alan over the edge and made him create a new prize category for the worst photo submitted. He claims it's the ugliest picture ever to appear on A Good Beer Blog. Gee whiz, it's probably one of the 20 best photos on It's Pub Night -- at least it wasn't taken with the 1.4 kilopixel camera on my old cell phone. Well, different bloggers have different standards.

Speaking of which, you may recall that in past years two other Portland beer bloggers have actually won the real Grand Prize in Alan's contest, Dave Selden (Champagne of Blogs) in 2006, and Matt Wiater (portlandbeer.org) last year. Matt is a photographer by trade: take a look at his collection of Portland beer photography on his Flickr page. Not only are the pictures stunning, but they are a great document of the local beer scene.

Getting Ready for the Fresh Hop Tastival

The Portland edition of the Fresh Hop Tastival is this Saturday at Oaks Park. Despite its goofy name -- can we call it a "Wastival" next year? -- I'm really looking forward to it, a frenzied climax to the fresh-hop season. To get you even more excited, the OBG has published the tentative list for the Portland fest.

Last year's festival in the small Hopworks parking lot was way too crowded. Holding it at Oaks Park is a great idea -- a pleasant bike ride down the Springwater Corridor and you're there. There's another excellent beer event Saturday night: Brewpublic's first anniversary party at Bailey's Taproom. Angelo has lined up a bunch of possibly once-in-a-lifetime beers -- including six fresh-hop ales -- so pace yourself at Oaks Park and save some room for Bailey's.

Carla asked me yesterday morning how many fresh hop beers I've tried so far this year. I came up with 13, but I'm not a morning person, so there were 7 more that I forgot about until later. Then I applied myself at Belmont Station last night to bring the total up a little more, to 25. That's without the aid of a Fresh Hop Tastival -- I didn't go to the Hood River Hops Fest last weekend. Here's what I've tried so far:

• Deschutes Fresh-hopped Mirror Pond
• Full Sail Lupulin (Crystal)
• Laurelwood Hop Bale Pale
• Walking Man Fresh Hop IPA
  
• Bridgeport Hop Harvest
• Deschutes Fresh-hopped Hop Henge
• Full Sail Lupulin (Cascade)
• Widmer Hopturnal Emission
• New Old Lompoc Crystal Wheat
• Lucky Lab The Mutt
• Barley Brown's Roadside Fresh Hop
  
• Upright Fresh Hop of Belair
• Double Mountain Killer Green
• Hopworks Bike Beer
• Oakshire Harvest Ale
• New Old Lompoc Crystal Missile
• Deschutes Hop Trip
• Laurelwood Fresh Hop Organic Goodness
• New Old Lompoc Millenium IIPA
• Sierra Nevada Harvest Ale
• Rogue Chatoe Wet Hop
• Deschutes King Cone
• Hopworks Sodbuster Pale Ale
• Hopworks Fest of Fury
• Oakshire Conundrum Cascadian Dark Ale

Not one of those is a bad beer. I suspect that the specialness of doing a fresh-hop beer means that extra care is taken with these batches, which raises the quality level. Still, with such an embarrasment of riches, I can get a little picky, and say that Hop Trip and all the beers above it on the list are the beers that show the most fresh-hop character. The beers at the very top of the list are highly recommended: make every effort to try them before they're gone.

I'm proud of what I've been able to accomplish so far this season, but looking over the list, I see quite a few beers that I will set my sights on this Saturday at Oaks Park:

• Ninkasi Nugg E. Fresh
• Caldera Alpha Beta
  
• Three Creeks Santiam Hop Harvest
• Lucky Lab Das Moot Pilsner
• Fort George Cohoperative Ale
• Rock Bottom Hoodwinked
  
• Astoria Hoptimus Prime 2.0
• Amnesia Fresh Hoppalata
• Cascade Cascadian Fresh Hop
  
• Pelican Elemental Ale
• MacTarnahan's Fresh-hopped Amber (why not?)
  

What, no Roots? I guess I'll have to stumble down to the pub to check out this year's Hoppopotamus. And a couple years ago Mt. Hood Brewing brought a reasonable fresh-hop ale to the Tastival; I wonder why they've dropped out. Hopworks and Double Mountain have a couple more fresh-hop brews -- Crystal Method Pale and Fresh Vienna -- up their sleeve. I hope I have enough stamina to get to those also.

Are there any good fresh-hop beers out there I missed? Anything that really grabbed your attention?

Taplister Launches

Last night there was a party at East Burn to celebrate the official launch of Taplister, a website that intends to offer up-to-the-minute information on what beer is on tap at various bars and restaurants around Portland. My grainy non-iPhone picture is of the four founders of Taplister: Kevin, Ken, Kerry, and Scott. The ultimate goal is to have webcams pointed at the bar's own beer list or menu. The webcam operation is still ramping up -- right now only two "live" images are available, this Saraveza taplist, and this one from East Burn. I put "live" in quotation marks, because as I write this the images haven't changed since I first looked at them last night.

While the camera system is still in its larval stage, Taplister is using Twitter to provide pretty reliable crowdsourced info. You can use your Twitter account to add to the beer listings, or to ask where to find a certain beer. To contribute a listing, add "#ontappdx" to a tweet, like this: "Mmm... Full Sail Grandsun of Spot at Vincente's Pizza #ontappdx". To query Taplister, follow @ontappdx, and send it a tweet like this: "@ontappdx where Double Mtn IRA?" In a few minutes, the Taplister robot will reply to you with any establishments where the beer is on tap. It's a clever setup.

The Twitter interface works best when the bar itself tweets in the #ontappdx info, because with one update they can say that one tap is replacing another. Bailey's Taproom is a good example of that, check out their Twitter feed. You can also tweet in that a beer is "off". As this thing becomes more popular, there will undoubtedly need to be more safeguards added to the system. For instance, with no authentication I was able to click an "off" button on the website to purge the East Burn list of a beer called "Your Mom" -- which later investigation revealed to be a joke tweet from Hopworks' Ben Love (sorry Ben, I clicked before thinking).

If you're an iPhone person, there's a Taplister app called Beer Signal to help navigate the lists. The rest of us can content ourselves with the website and the Twitter interface. There are also a couple of blog sections to the website: one a compendium of Portland beer blogs (including It's Pub Night), and another with original material including slick video interviews with local beer personalities.

Taplister is pretty nifty already; it will be really cool when more pubs around town start to host their webcams. Hopefully there's enough money in it to keep it afloat -- personally I think Google ought to snap it up while the founders could be tempted by something less than nine figures.

Portland Blog Recommendation

Surprisingly, I seem to be the only Portland blogger -- maybe the only blogger anywhere -- to link to one of the brightest new beer-related blogs in town, A Pint for Dionysus. The author, semi-anonymous like many of us, signs his name as either "DM" or "grotusque", and he's at his best when he frames his beer adventures in a kind of confessional narrative, like this gem about an outing to a neighborhood dive.

Ah yes, neighborhood dives. I sense a kindred spirit in Grotusque, someone who prefers the high life, but who can also enjoy a High Life. To illustrate what I'm talking about: he has taken on a "52 weeks" project to report on a different craft beer every Monday at Bailey's Taproom, yet he has a fair number of posts about Portland dives, like his recent writeup of the Slingshot. I hope he follows up on the hints that he's going to map out the Foster Road dive scene for us.

The articles in A Pint for Dionysus seem about evenly divided between craft beer reports, dive bar investigations, and homebrewing anecdotes. A pretty good mix; about the only base he doesn't have covered is bikini bottle-opening tricks. I also like the idea of naming your blog after a capricious Greek god: after all, bloggers are self-appointed by divine right.

Blog readers, put Dionysus into your mix. Blog authors, give some juice to a new voice. Grotusque, keep up the good work.

Respect Beer

There are so many communities of beer lovers in the world, that you can't fully participate in all of them -- I do my best to keep current with beer events I can walk to from my house in Southeast Portland. One worthy community is the group of beer aficionados that has coalesced around the magazine Beer Advocate and its well-organized website. Beer Advocate's motto is "Respect Beer" -- you better not argue with that. The website holds thousands of thoughtful reviews of craft beers from around the world.

The BA community has also spawned a culture of beer trading, allowing a wonderful cross-pollination of zymurgical culture as people ship beer across the artificial boundaries of bureaucracy. My crippling fear of the post office keeps me from participating in such activities, but this past weekend I was lucky enough to go to an imperial stout tasting at Brian and Sharon's house, fueled partially by Brian's impressive beer cellar, partially by contributions from Brian's local acquaintances from Beer Advocate.

Here are some of the amazing stouts opened at Brian's on Saturday (most of them unavailable in Oregon):

• Brooklyn Brewing Black Ops: big and good
• Skagit River Trumpeter: malty goodness
• Avery Mephistopheles: 16% awesome
• Southern Tier Imperial Oat (2007): smooth and malty
• Schlafly (St. Louis) Imperial Stout (2006): flat but rich and tasty
• Voodoo Black Magick: heavy whisky dark stout -- nice but too much
• Goose Island Bourbon County: nice, smooth and strong
• Terrapin Beer Coffee Oatmeal: good and coffeeish
• Bell's Expedition Stout: very nice
• Three Floyd's Dark Lord (2008): big, sweet, minute-long finish
• Dark Lord (2006): same but darker flavor
• Port Brewing Old Viscosity (2007): stouty and delicious -- awesome
  

Forgive my simple-minded descriptions: I'm not a wine guy. Those were some fantastic stouts, but perhaps more impressive was the great camaraderie and friendliness of the Beer Advocates at the tasting. There was a sincere interest in all things beery, and a great generosity in sharing some hard-to-find bottles. I was pleased to meet local blogger dabeers of Beer Around Town, who is active in the Beer Advocate scene. I actually held off a few days on this post, thinking he'd beat me to a writeup. Oh yeah, the Old Rasputin Cheesecake was a thing of beauty also -- nice work, Les!

Now I need to make it to one of Ezra's tastings...

Best Routes for Biking to Hopworks

The sun is shining on me, and it looks like there's a break in the weather for the next few days. You might have a mind to hop on your bike and hit a pub or two this weekend. Seems like a good time to trot out this Google map I made to show the best bicycle approaches to Hopworks.


View Larger Map

The Hopworks website links to a (huge) hard-to-read map from the city that doesn't even have the pub marked on it. I proposed this map to Christian Ettinger as a replacement, and we exchanged a couple emails, but nothing ever came of it, so I'm releasing it into the wild. (HUB folks, feel free to link to the map or this page.) If you click over to the Google map, there is a column of text explaining the markers and lines on the map.

Of course, we're not talking Tigard or Gresham, but by inner-Portland standards, Hopworks' location on Powell Boulevard is not that great for bicycling. The map tries to show routes from north or south that would be comfortable for most Portland bicyclists. Very experienced cyclists might brave the left turn onto Powell at 26th, and even stay on Powell for the short stretch to Hopworks. I've done that myself, but that left turn can be a problem in busy traffic. So I list a couple of other options for more cautious riders, or those traveling with children.

One weakness of this map is that it really only helps you if you're already on the Eastside. Put yourself in Christian's shoes: he lives in Southwest, so to get to his pub he rides his bike on the sidewalk across the Ross Island Bridge. That's got to be a nasty ride. My hat's off to him.

Have fun enjoying Portland's beer and bike cultures! Be safe out there. Follow the traffic laws -- they're there to maximize everyone's peace of mind -- and don't terrorize the pedestrians.

It's Pub Night 2.0

Happy New Year! With a couple weeks off from work, I've been tinkering a bit with It's Pub Night. For instance, the ugly banner that used to take up a third of the screen has been replaced by an ugly banner that only takes up about a sixth of the screen. But what I'm really excited about is updates from Twitter posted to the blog, and notification of new blog posts going out as Twitter updates.

I set up a Twitter account back in April, but I didn't really participate in it. I didn't follow anyone, so when I went to my Twitter account, I only saw my own infrequent boring updates. For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, to "follow" someone is to see the short messages they post on Twitter. Those short updates are called "tweets", and you can send them from your computer or as a text message from your cellphone.

It was starting to look like I would only use Twitter to keep a record of bruises, so later when I wondered where a particular bruise came from I could log on and find the tweet for it. Then a few things lit a fire under me. I had admired a couple of beer applications of Twitter: the Beer Mapping Project's geocoding that allows you to map your tweets, and the Champagne of Blogs' Twitter feed. And then on one of our snow days, after tweeting that the Bridgeport Ale House was closed, one of my 3 stalwart Twitter followers -- Ezra the Samurai Artist -- replied to my tweet. Holy Cow, my first reply! I have a social network! Ezra encouraged me to raid his "following list" for more Portland beer types. That's the key to the whole business: Twitter doesn't make any sense until you start following a few friends, acquaintances, and pubs. I finally get it.

Let me give you a tour of some of the exciting features of the Twitter feed in the sidebar, which is produced by a script supplied by Twitter. The first red circle in the picture is around a link created by a Twitter "@" reply. It's a link to the page for the person I'm replying to -- in this case to Dave Selden (Champagne of Blogs guy) -- so you can check out that person's tweets if the reply piques your interest. Even better, I hacked the Twitter script so that tweets tagged with a Beer Mapping Project location ID get a "map" link -- the second red circle -- that takes you to the BMP's page for that location (Deschutes' Portland pub in the picture).

The third red circle takes you to my Twitter page, where you'll get a chance to follow my tweets and get messaged every time there's a new post on It's Pub Night. Last but not least, is a link to a Beer Mapping page that maps the most recent tweets that I bothered to tag with locations.

I try not to make blog posts about the blog itself, and I don't plan to make a regular practice of it. But I was so excited about the recent geekery that I wanted to explain what it was all about. If you get half as much enjoyment out of it as I do, then I'll get twice as much as you.