Your Thoughts on Where to Drink Beer in Portland

Somehow on Tuesday's post about Bridgeport, the comments veered off on a tangent of what beer places to recommend to out-of-town visitors to Portland.

My top three recommendations to anyone are always:

• Horse Brass: great atmosphere, great beer, decent food
• Deschutes: great beer, good food
• Lucky Lab (Hawthorne): perfect Portland vibe

One of the commenters yesterday suggested Hopworks as a great place to take visitors, and even though it isn't the first place that comes to my mind, there is nothing but solid beer there, and guests I've taken to HUB have always been very impressed (especially if they have young kids).

I think pub crawls are also a great way to show off the town, since there are often several good pubs within easy walking distance of one another.  If you can get your guests on a bike, so much the better.  I've written about a few Portland pub crawls, but several of them are out of date due to openings and closings, so you might want to check out Jeff's series of pub crawls on Beervana.

What about you?  Where do you insist on taking out-of-town guests for beer, and why?

Your Thoughts on Holiday Beers

Deschutes Jubelale has been a special obsession of mine these nine winters I've spent in Portland, and this year's version is really good, seems better to me than the last couple years, not that they were bad.  (Jeff at Beervana has the inside scoop from Deschutes on why it's a little different this year -- and he disapproves of the change.)  The 2011 Sierra Nevada Celebration was tasty when I tried it a couple weeks ago.  Bridgeport's Raven Mad is a treat -- an imperial porter with part of it barrel-aged, only a hint of bourbon, which is a nice respite from the usual vanilla onslaught of similar beers.

But my favorite right now is Full Sail Wreck the Halls.  I've had it a few times on tap and on cask, and I'm really loving it right now.  Haven't had a bottle yet; maybe I'll just keep getting it fresh.

Everyone is talking/blogging about winter beers right now -- here's a local thread on Beer Advocate -- so it leads me to echo Sanjay's question:  what's your favorite holiday beer right now?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Your Thoughts on Alcohol Counseling

This is a weird question that I hope doesn't sound like a cry for help.  Do you have any good recommendations for alcohol counseling?

It's this friend of mine... No, actually, it's this blog itself.  The page on It's Pub Night that gets Googled the most -- I'm going to describe it obliquely so that the hits keep going there and not to this post -- is this one that describes a bad interaction between a common store-bought headache remedy and the intoxicant found in beer (click the link if that's too confusing).

What does that have to do with alcohol counseling?  Because that post comes up in a lot of (possibly remorseful) web searches, I got an offer earlier this year to insert paid text links into it, pointing to a website that purports to find you help with substance abuse.  It was easy to turn down the offer, because the website carefully obscured who was behind it, putting the ball in your court to either telephone them or send them your personal info.  On one level or another it was obviously a scam and not a professional service.  At best it would mechanically hand you off to someone in that line of work in exchange for a finder's fee; at worst it is a phishing operation.  No way to tell.

But it put the idea in my mind that I could put links to reputable rehabs or counseling services on my oft-searched page.  It would be purely a public service, not a paid advertisement, but only if I can find links that would truly be helpful to someone who wanted help with a drinking problem.

Got any recommendations?  Or is my whole idea ridiculous?

Your Thoughts on Sharing Tastes

Here, try this.

I'll probably never live this post down, but here goes.

With the beer festival season about to get into full swing -- don't forget to go to the first-ever Portland Fruit Beer Festival this weekend -- it seems like a good time to ask a question that I've been mulling over for a while.  How do you feel about passing the glass around a group of friends, to let everyone have a taste of this really good OR really bad OR really rare beer?  I don't mean splitting a bottle or a pitcher, I mean actually handing over your glass and saying "Try this".

• Are you worried about passing germs around?
• How well do you have to know someone before you'll share?
• Suppose you're just recovering from a cold or flu yourself:  how long do you quarantine yourself? 

Personally, I'm a libertine about sharing and accepting tastes, and of course alcohol doesn't just disinfect, it dis-inhibits.  But sometimes in the despair of a wintertime fever, my paranoid side wonders if I would still be on my feet if I hadn't taken so many sips from other peoples' glasses.

Any thoughts?

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.

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?

Your Thoughts on Beer Publications

Here you are reading a beer blog. It's unlikely that It's Pub Night is your only Internet source for beer information, so I assume you read other blogs, maybe online forums, or maybe you even subscribe to an antiquated email discussion group.

But what about printed media? Do you find any of these worth your time:

• Beer Advocate
• Draft Magazine
• All About Beer
• Brewing News
• Beer Northwest

I'm sure I left off some important publications.  There, I've admitted my own ignorance, you don't have to bring it up again in the comments, but please do fill in the blanks if there's another magazine or tabloid out there that you enjoy reading.

What got me thinking about this question was a comment on my San Francisco vs. Portland post.  The Bay Area correspondent for the Northwest Brewing News recommended the February/March 2010 issue of the paper, which had a cover story called Bay Area Alehouses.  As it happens, I had indeed read that article before my trip to San Francisco, but had not found it useful or memorable.  Why not?  For starters, it only mentioned a handful of places in downtown San Francisco, and I had no plans for going further afield.  Moreover, as I read the article, I noticed that it didn't mention any specific beers served at any of the bars, but it did mention the name of the owner or manager of every single place.  That must be fascinating information for a local insider, but for a tourist or dabbler it was useless and actually quite annoying to read such a tour de force of name-dropping.  So annoying that I put down the article and never gave it another thought until Mario brought it up.

It put me in the mood to write a blog post lambasting the NWBN for being such a lame publication.  Scanning the Feb/Mar edition I found another annoyance:  an article on beer pricing with a section headed "Let there be Honest Pints!", which didn't mention Jeff Alworth's Honest Pint Project.  But even though I was in a nasty mood, I couldn't find much else to complain about in that issue or the subsequent April/May issue (well, the Beer Bitch column is a joke that stopped being funny a long time ago).  Instead, I'm going to make a point of picking up the NWBN whenever I see a new issue; there's plenty of good information in there, especially about other areas I'm less up-to-date on.

This train of though also got me thinking that I need to put my money where my mouth is and subscribe to Beer Advocate.  The magazine itself never knocks me off my feet, but the BA website is an invaluable part of the community and I want to pitch my dollar into their tip jar.

So I ask you, gentle readers.  What are your thoughts on dead-tree beer publications?

Beer Tipping Etiquette

Last week I asked you "How much should I tip the bartender?", and a bunch of people fired back with useful information. I especially want to thank Jeff over at the Beer Cave -- yikes, another interesting Portland beer blog? -- for some great insight, but really all the comments were appreciated, even the somewhat long-winded ones from Hugh "Doctor" Johnson. As promised, here is a summary of how you can win friends and influence bartenders by tipping appropriately:

• Tip $1 per beer minimum.
• Tip 20% minimum on a big tab.
• Pay the tip with cash.
• Tip for bad service, too.
• Even if the owner serves you, leave a tip.
• Kick in some more for special favors, like samples.

A lot of you are probably stunned to hear that your 50- or 75-cent tip is no longer in style.  I sure was.  It's why I asked the question in the first place.  Don't take it personally, just breathe deep and enter the 21st century.  If your inner banker gives you a hard time about it, compare good and bad tips to the total tab.  For instance, if you buy 3 beers for $3.50 each, tipping 50 cents a beer brings the total to $12, versus a total of $13.50 if you tip $1 a beer.  Hopefully you got a couple hours enjoyment out of your investment, so don't split hairs on the final $1.50.

What about when you don't enjoy your visit to the pub, because the service is bad?  Short answer: tip normally anyway.  For one thing, if you plan on visiting the establishment again, you don't want to get a reputation as a non-tipper.  For another, failing to tip doesn't fix the problem. The remedy for bad (or rude) service is to let management know -- on the spot if that is convenient or comfortable for you; otherwise later on with an email or a phone call.  Not tipping the front-line employee isn't going to teach them a lesson -- if anything they might feel justified in their treatment of you -- and the message isn't going to reach the manager who could do something about it.  A competing school of thought says to leave a symbolic insulting tip like one penny.  That only seems like an option if you know you'll never be back, but it's also very petty.  Don't be petty.  Be big and then wash your hands of the place.  Another thing to consider: people don't stay in the same service jobs forever, and the surly bartender you stiff today might show up at your favorite haunt tomorrow.

Another thing I was curious about was the etiquette of tipping the owner of a bar.  In the comments, Jeff set me straight pretty quick about that:  tip the owner normally.  For one thing, if the owner is working a shift behind the bar instead of relaxing by the pool, he or she is probably working for a lower hourly figure than the employees.  Secondly, some of that tip money goes to the other employees on duty at the time.  And finally, if the proprietor finds you to be too generous, it's within his or her power to make it up to you -- or, to put it another way, why wouldn't you try and get on the good side of the owner of a bar you like to go to?

Finally, there's the question of cash.  Forget about the tax angle -- let's assume that our bartenders are honest citizens who will pay whatever taxes are due on the tips.  There are two issues with cash.  First of all, on the previous post, Ezra pointed out that the surest way to make sure that your tip goes to the server you want to flatter, is to put your cash on the barrelhead.  In his experience, the credit card tips are averaged for the week and distributed based on the number of hours worked.  Furthermore, as I've pointed out before, more of your money stays local if you pay in cash, instead of having the bar pay roughly a 4% tax to out-of-state credit card processors.

Thanks again to everyone who chimed in on the earlier discussion.  Tip your bartender, and tell 'em It's Pub Night sent you.

Your Thoughts on Tipping

I've been meaning for a while to ask for your thoughts on tipping at pubs. A few weeks ago I was having a beer with Charles and casually posed the question of how much to tip. Without hesitation, he said "a dollar a beer". Turns out that's pretty standard -- here's a Beer Advocate screed that recommends the same thing.

Confession time: that's toward the upper end of my tipping habits to date. Long ago my wife whipped me into shape on restaurant tipping, so that I go a little over 20% unless I've really been abused. When I run a tab at a bar, I apply the same formula. But if I step up to the bar and pay cash for two or three beers for the table, I tend to cover the whole trip with one dollar, or maybe a dollar and some change.

For a single beer, 50 or 75 cents seemed reasonable to me. Now that I've been corrected I will amend my skinflint ways, but some questions still come to mind:

• Tip one dollar for one beer whether the beer cost $2 or $6?
• How much for a pitcher?
• How much for three or four pints?
• Same tip for walk-up service as for table service?
• Same tip at dive bars as at nicer places?
• What is your remedy if the service is bad?
• Tips are meant to supplement slave wages.  Do you tip differently when the bar's proprietor is serving you?  (Geoff, Sara, et al., please don't hate me for this question.)
• How much do you tip when a bartender fills a growler for you?
• When running a tab, is 20% good, or should you still do a dollar a beer?

Please leave a comment if you have answers for any of those.  I'd love to get the perspective of current and former servers and bar owners.  If I get any good stuff, I'll write a summary next week. [Update: here's the summary.]

Your Thoughts on Cask Ale

If you're a good beer geek -- in the U.S., anyway -- you are always on the lookout for beer "on cask". You hope for a more flavorful experience: warmer, flatter beer that the bartender has to laboriously pump into your glass with the big porcelain handle mounted on the bar.

Two recent internet articles have me pondering the state of cask beer. One is by Ted Sobel -- the brewer/publican of Brewers Union Local 180, an all-cask-ale brewery in remote Oakridge, Oregon -- explaining on his blog why he won't let the beer he brews out of his sight. Shortly after Ted's post, Beer Advocate asked its readers for their opinion on this question: (paraphrasing) is cask beer done right in the U.S., or are those pumps just a gimmick?

In Great Britain, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) promotes this particularly English way of producing and serving beer. There's special emphasis placed on the condition of the beer: the publican has to cellar it while it finishes fermenting, then let it settle after he jostles it up to the serving area, then make sure it is served at the right temperature, while it's still fresh.

Here in Oregon, there are cask engines in more and more pubs, even places that don't cater exclusively to beer nerds, for example Beulahland and Bar Avignon. Ted's post was skeptical about such cask offerings:

The contents of the kegs are dubiously named cask-conditioned beer, which in many cases simply contain ale destined for keg that has been drawn off from the fermenter and primed in the cask (keg).

Now, to my mind, that's good enough. It would not be good enough if it were just an ordinary keg of beer, not re-fermented in the keg. But if the keg is conditioned, it's legit, right?

Bridgeport immediately came to mind as a place in town that serves cask-conditioned beer, and is probably doing it the right way. So I emailed Karl Ockert to ask him about their process. He replied:

We currently have three engines pulling from firkins at both our brewpub on NW Marshall St and the Alehouse on SE Hawthorne. Our cask ales are my beer of choice when I go down at the end of the day to our pub for my pint. And yes we have the stillage racks, spiles, keystones, cask breathers, etc.

And Bridgeport's cask ales are definitely a treat.

But I'd like to hear from all of you out there, especially if you work at a brewery or a pub that serves cask-conditioned beer. My questions are:

• What places in Portland serve cask ale correctly?
• What places in town are faking us out?
• What places have cask ale, but in poor condition?
  
• Can "ale destined for keg" qualify as cask-conditioned?
• What about Beer Advocate's question: is cask just a gimmick?

Your Thoughts on Beer Prices?

I'd like your input on an idea I've been kicking around for a little over a year. After I published the map of Portland growler prices, Jeff Alworth suggested the notion of the Growler Price Index, or GPI. He figured that the average cost of a growler around town was $10, so if you saw one cheaper than that, it was a good deal.

Taking Jeff's idea one step further, I'd like to compute quarterly price indexes for beer in Portland, so that we can watch price trends over time. It seems like the following indexes would be interesting:

• Retail six-pack index
• Retail bomber index
• Pub pint index
• Pub happy-hour pint index
• Pub pitcher index
  
• And, yes, growler price index

The retail prices will be the average of non-sale prices of a collection of year-round Oregon beers, at a few representative Portland outlets. Similarly, the pub prices will be taken from a few beer bars, based on the usual price of a pint. For instance, an imperial pint is usually $4.50 at Bailey's Taproom, though of course some selections cost more. Pub prices will be normalized to six-pack equivalents, using either the fill line on the bar's glassware, or by taking the volume of the glass and subtracting two ounces for head/air.

Ideally I would gather these prices 4 times a year, on the solstices and equinoxes -- the upcoming equinox is what motivated me to finally ask for help. With the caveat that this has to be a doable chunk of work for me, and it can't be all things to all people, I would like your advice on the following matters:

1. Which beers go into the retail six-pack index and bomber index?
2. Which retail outlets do I gather the prices from?
3. Which bars do I gather the prices from?
4. Do brewpubs go into a separate category than non-brewing pubs?
5. Is the happy hour price the lowest pint price at the place (e.g. Roots $2.50 Tuesday) or the daily happy hour price (Roots $3.50 happy hour)?
   

Here are my proposed answers, please comment and let me know what you think:

1. Six-packs: Bridgeport IPA, Deschutes Black Butte, Full Sail Amber, Terminal Gravity IPA, Widmer Broken Halo. Bombers: Hopworks IPA, Laurelwood Red, Lompoc C-Note, Ninkasi Total Domination, Rogue Brutal Bitter.
2. Retail stores: Beermongers, Belmont Station, Fred Meyers, New Seasons.
3. Bars: Bailey's Taproom, Belmont Station, Green Dragon, Horse Brass, Vincente's Pizza.
4. Brewpubs: Barley Mill, Bridgeport, Deschutes, Hopworks, Laurelwood, Lucky Lab, New Old Lompoc, Roots, Widmer Gasthaus

What changes would you make, either to the details or to the whole scheme?

Your Thoughts on the Spring Beer Fest?

What is it about the Spring Beer and Wine Fest that turns Portland beer snobs off? Is it the:

1. Flea-market vendor list, as Jeff says? Vinyl windows, violins.... Someone's been thumbing through the Yellow Pages.
2. Boring beer offerings, as Dr. Wort says? Blue Moon?!?
3. Houston Intercontinental Airport atmosphere of the Convention Center?
4. Monosyllabic festival moniker? It's really called a "fest", not a "festival".
5. Easter weekend dates, as Mary Sue says?
   
6. All of the above?

It's coming up this Friday and Saturday, April 10th and 11th. It seems unlikely I'll go, unless I happen to be walking down the street in front of the convention center when it's open. That's the excitement level.

One spark of interest: there are three breweries on the list I'd never heard of. The Beer Mapping Project was able to inform me about 10 Barrel Brewing (Bend, 2006; not sure how I missed them) and Lang Creek Brewery, but not even the mighty Google can tell me what's up with Lat 44, who is bringing their -- wait for it -- IPA to the festival. The SBWF website doesn't have links to exhibitor websites -- anyone know anything about Lat 44?

[Update: I emailed the promoter about Lat 44. He replies: "It's from the folks at Miller/Coors. Think upscale Henry's. It is made at Hood River though." Ugh.]

What about you? Do you go to the SBWF? If so, enthusiastically or begrudgingly? 10 Barrel's Sinister Black Ale looks interesting -- are there any other beers on the list worth going to check out?