Meet the Champion Brewmaster

Tuesday night's Meet-the-Brewer at the Green Dragon was extra-special. The meetee was Bend Brewing's Tonya Cornett, who won the Champion Brewmaster award in the "small brewpub" category at the 2008 World Beer Cup. She brought along her trophy and some excellent beers: Hop Head IIPA, Axe Head Red Ale, Paulina Pale Ale, and Blackjack bourbon-aged Porter.

The Hop Head was the clear winner with our crowd -- a thick, hazy, hoppy treat. The Red Ale was very good, less dangerous to drink than the big IIPA. Speaking of dangerous, that's a good description for the strong, dark Porter, which was tasty but very bourbony, so watch out if you don't like that.

It's not just Tonya's recent award that made the session special; it's the fact that you can rarely find any of her beers in Portland. And that's not likely to change: there are no plans to start distributing them. She said that occasionally someone from the Green Dragon or Bailey's will be passing through Bend and stop in to buy a keg. But that's it.

A few years ago Dave and I stopped in to Acme at SE 8th and Main Street (it's since been aptly renamed "Plan B"). They had a couple of beer taps named after the bar, I don't exactly remember the names, something like Acme Amber and Acme Pale. We knew they weren't brewing there, so we asked what the beer was. It was like "Who's on first?" because neither Dave nor I had heard of Bend Brewing at that point.

• "You make your own beer?"
• 
  
• "No, it's from Bend."
• 
  
• "Which brewery?"
• 
  
• "Bend."
• 
  
• "Yeah, which brewery?"
• 
  
• "BEND!"
  

I'm pretty sure Plan B doesn't still serve them, and given Tonya's comments on distribution, it looks like Bend Brewing ales will be a rare treat for us around here. Take advantage of them when you see them. For further reading on the Champion Brewmaster award, here's an Oregonian article that came out shortly after she received it.

Happy 25th, Barley Mill

Every year the Barley Mill celebrates its birthday right around the summer solstice. This year Carla and I finally stumbled the six blocks from our house, figuring the 25th anniversary was special enough to show up for. As befits the Barley Mill, it was a pretty low-key event, at least when we were there around 2 PM, but we did get some birthday cake and pints of this year's version of the wacky Anniversary Ale as we withstood our dose of live Grateful Dead recordings.

McMenamins' pubs operate on a kind of buddy system, each pub with a brewery supplying beer to a single non-brewing pub in the chain. My understanding is that it's done that way to most profitably comply with the helpful regulations the state of Oregon has set up to protect its citizens from drowning in locally-made beer. Although the Barley Mill was the first pub in the ever-expanding McM empire, it opened before on-premises brewing became legal, and it was never a brewery. Instead, it is supplied by the chain's first brewpub, the Hillsdale Pub.

Right on the company website, it says "the pub's the thing". There are excellent brewers working for McMenamins', but the beer itself takes a back seat to real estate and atmosphere in the country of McMen-istan. Thus, the Barley Mill isn't where you go to revel in Oregon beer quality; rather, it's where you can take your kids and their grandparents for lunch and keep everyone happy without breaking the bank. Personal anecdote: my daughter chose to have her sixth birthday party at the Barley Mill. It was our first year in Portland, and as someone who grew up in the Bible Belt it felt a little strange to me that we were inviting a handful of kindergarten girls to have dinner at a bar. But why not? It's non-smoking, serves tater tots, and it's dripping with colorful artwork and crazy things for kids to look at.

The past year has brought a few changes to the Barley Mill. The dartboard is gone! It was in pretty bad shape and poorly lit, way back in a corner, but it occasionally came in handy and I hate to see the demise of any steel-tip dartboard. Also, for some reason they have draped a huge Grateful Dead flag over the excellent back-wall mural of old-fashioned Germans drinking Miller Beer under the protective gaze of a reclining nude woman. Everyone should hate to see the demise of any mural with a nude woman. And the menu seems a little different, though the only change I can put my finger on is that the Triple Play -- soup, salad, and garlic bread -- is gone.

Because the focus isn't really on the beer, the McMenamins' standards aren't of great interest to beer snobs -- though the CAMRA guide to the West Coast puzzlingly singles out Terminator as the best example of a West Coast stout. But it's not all bad. Corey Blodgett has a loyal following out at the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse for his imaginative beers. I was also impressed the other day at Ringler's by the Belgian Trippel and the Decent IPA (which supposedly got its name after one of the weekly papers complained that McMenamins' didn't brew a decent IPA). And for the last couple weeks the Barley Mill was serving an interesting little number called "Hemmerhoeff'd": the Hammerhead recipe brewed with a Belgian yeast.

That brings us to the Starvation Army Pale Ale, the pleasantly fruity pale brewed up for the anniversary. John Foyston has an entertaining article [Confidential to John: who does your spell checking?] about the ritual gathering where each participant adds something -- beer, wine, spirits, herbs, pieces of paper -- into the mash. And you know, it turned out pretty tasty.

The state of Oregon would be a far different place if there were no McMenamins'. That's especially true outside of Portland, where they serve as lifesaving oases for caravaning urbanites. Even here in town, the landscape would be far different with no Kennedy School, no Bagdad, no Crystal Ballroom. And it all began right here in Southeast. Happy Birthday, Barley Mill!

Sample Stunt Follow-up

I'm always willing to blog a dead horse, so I'll write a little more about the brewed-on-premises marathon that Dave and I put ourselves through last Sunday. That's partly out of necessity: I don't have any new beer experiences to blog about. I was so tired of beer by the end of the marathon, that I didn't even consider having one for the next three days.


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Clarifications

The duration of our pub sprint was 6 hours, first pub to last, but we were out of the house for 6 hours and 35 minutes -- sorry Jill, it took me 4 minutes longer than Dave to get ready. According to Google Maps, the route between pubs was 6.7 miles, not 6 as I reported. But remember, I rounded down the number of samples we had in front of us. I counted 78, but we also sampled:

• 1 Bend-brewed beer at Deschutes
• 6 Hood-River-brewed beers at Full Sail
• 1 mix of Ruby and Hammerhead at Ringlers
• 2 duplicates at the Lucky Lab
• 3 cask/nitro/keg overlaps here and there
• 1 cider at New Old Lompoc -- there oughta be a law against that.
  

That makes 91 beer samples -- forget the cider, which they added as the 8th sample because they had no seasonals on. So depending on how you look at it, our velocity in beers-per-hour was between 78/6.5 = 12 BPH and 91/6 = 15 BPH.

Highlights

I actually wrote down some kind of comment about every single beer we tried, though by the end my notes get a little confusing -- at Hopworks I wrote that the Original Organic Red was "stiffly OK" and that the 78 Steam was "as dribbly as Anchor", whatever that means. Since Jeff asked what beers stood out, I'll recap the highlights:

• New Old Lompoc: We were surprised at how good Fool's Golden Ale is -- Dave called it "Kolschy" -- though of course the classics are still tops: C-Note and Lompoc Strong Draft.
• Lucky Lab Quimby: Amazing variety: the 5-Ton Lager was dark, delicious, and 8.5 ABV. Black Sheep was a smoky black IPA which I liked almost as much as the Mai Bock. Dave liked the Baltic Porter, but I found it too syrupy.
• Bridgeport: Their beers are so much better on tap than bottled. ESB and IPA were the faves.
• Ringlers: The Belgian Tripel was sweet and nice. The Decent IPA was underwhelming at first, but grew on me as it warmed up.
• Rock Bottom: My comment on the cask IPA was "Whoa", and I stand by that. Delicious, hoppy, and rich. American Dream IPA was very nice also.
• Full Sail: The Nut Brown was just the right temperature from the cask, chocolaty and good. Everything else was good, too, especially the excellent Prodigal Sun IPA. Cheeseburgers for $1.95 at happy hour will give you the strength to go on.
• Hopworks: Isn't it cool that we tried 78 different Portland beers, and at the last brewery they have a beer called "78 Steam"? And 78 is divisible by either 6 hours or 6.5 hours.
  

A word about Rock Bottom. One evening when we were first in Portland, Carla and I decided to try out Rock Bottom, but we were shooed away from the outside tables by a snooty hostess. That led to a years-long boycott until my fresh hop quest last year. On that visit, my waiter didn't know what I meant by "fresh hop" or "harvest" beer, even though it was one of the seasonals, and he went so far as to bring me the wrong beer at first. Of course I had heard that Van Havig -- the head brewer at the Portland RB -- is one of the most respected brewers in town, but those two chain-pub experiences kept me away. Sunday was only my second time there, but it won't be my last -- Havig is brewing some seriously good beer there. Just avoid the restaurant side and go straight to the bar -- the beer guys will take good care of you.

Alternate Realities

A sub-stunt that I wanted to pull, was to save a tiny amount of each sample, all mixed together in a growler. That was unlikely to taste good, but it would be an interesting conversation piece. Unfortunately I got slapped down at the very first stop: the New Old Lompoc bartender enlightened me about the OLCC beer-to-go rules. Beer to-go containers have to be filled to the top, by the establishment. Rather than bring the law down on the 12 breweries nearest my house, I let that little project go.

Maybe we could have gone for bigger numbers. When I told Dave we had actually sampled 91 beers, he was a little bit angry with me. "Why didn't we go for 100?" The short answer is because we had families to get back to, and we were already over our time limit. But more to the point, it was a long way from Hopworks to someplace new that brewed on site. We had paused for food about halfway through, and we were very diligent about keeping hydrated -- we drank about twice as much water as beer. We might have been able to make it up to Laurelwood, but I don't think we could have safely made it home from there.

Originally I had the route starting at MacTarnahans, about a mile from New Old Lompoc, but decided that a mile was too far between stops. Maybe if we had started at Mac's, and if we had tried more Bend beers at Deschutes, we would have cracked 100. Or we could have picked up various other Portland brews at Bailey's, Henry's, or the Green Dragon.

Whatever the case, I'm content with the 15 BPH pub sprint. If you try it yourself, be careful, drink lots of water, and be prepared to forsake beer for a few days afterward.