An Apology to John Foyston

Something I wrote a few months ago has been nagging at my conscience, and I want to correct it. I put up a rant that took John Foyston to task for his article in the Oregonian that called Hopworks the "bikiest" brewpub in Portland. I wrote that "anyone who could describe HUB that way has obviously never arrived there by bike".

My main point was that HUB's location on Powell is not very bike-friendly. But the dig at John was not only unnecessary, but absolutely untrue. Of course he goes there on his bike; he even has a picture of his bike at Hopworks in his article about the recent Fresh Hop Tastival. In fact, he's rolled up on his bicycle the last couple of times I've run into him somewhere.

It's easy for me to get all hyperbolic when writing my opinion about a subject near and dear to my heart. Usually I keep the negativity pretty low, and confined to matters of taste, like "this beer doesn't taste green enough", or "I hate the word 'Tastival'". But that time I screwed up, so John, please accept my apology. Your consolation is that not many people read the rant anyway.

The Beer Mapping Project

From time to time I cobble up a Google map to illustrate a post here, such as the map of Portland Growler Prices. It's easy to add your own locations with a little bit of text, or to add lines showing some route or the other.

But my puny maps are child's play compared to a beautiful website put together by a genius known as "beerinator": The Beer Mapping Project. Kept up-to-date by user submissions, photos, and reviews, it's a very powerful tool. Here's a map from the BMP that shows the beer-related sites within a 3-mile radius of the Lucky Lab:



[Hmm... this map doesn't show up in Google Reader. Click over to the blog if you can't see it.] You have to zoom out to see the full radius, but you get the idea. Click on one of the markers, and it will give you a balloon of information about the place, including some internet linkage.

The BMP site has over 40 U.S. and Canada city maps, plus regional maps of Europe, North America, and Australia. In addition to brewpubs and breweries, it lists beer bars, beer stores, and homebrew shops. The Portland map is in pretty good shape, but there are a few gaps that some of us motivated beer geeks could help fill in -- I feel a little guilty because the only location I've submitted is Vincente's Pizza, and that was months ago.

There are other goodies available, such as an interface with Twitter that will let you map out your beer wanderings. If you're really gung-ho, beerinator generously offers an API that lets you build your own application on top of the beermapping.com database. Or if you're only partially gung-ho, there's a push-button HTML generator that lets you embed BMP information on your blog or website -- either maps like the one above, or vital-statistics boxes like this:

Lucky Labrador Brewing Company

Lucky Labrador Brewing Company

Information provided by Beer Mapping

So far I haven't seen a feature on BMP that would let me annotate one of their maps with my own information the same way I can with Google Maps. That's OK, it's still a great resource, especially when you're on the road.

On a related note: if you're not just a beer geek, but also a coffee geek, you should check out my buddy Eric's site: espresso map. It doesn't have the beermapping bells and whistles, but it might just save your life one day.

Fresh Hop Tastival 2008

There are a couple other eyewitness reports on Saturday's Fresh Hop festival at Hopworks, so I'm a little late getting my opinion out there. Angelo is really ticked off that most of the taps were dry by the time he arrived at the exact midpoint of the event. The scan of his program with the empty kegs marked is hilarious.

The consolation for those who arrived late is the fact that Hopworks rolled out for them the barrel-aged version of their fresh-hop Parsec Pale -- pumped through a filter of fresh hops(!), as seen in some of John Foyston's excellent photos of the festival. Those of us that arrived on time were told that the barrel-aged Parsec would not be served.

Despite the large crowd -- which actually wasn't so bad if you got there early -- there were several ways that this year's Tastival was better than the 2007 one at Edgefield:

• Alphabetical order!
• Location near my house.
  
• Nicer looking pint glasses.
• All advertised beers were served, at least for a while.

Since I had already scoured Portland for about half of the beers at the Tastival, I got almost everything covered. My favorite of the year is still the Nugget-hop variant of Full Sail's Lupulin, and there were certainly some failures at the festival, but here are some of the ones I hadn't yet tried that made a good impression:

• Deschutes Fresh Hop Mirror Pond: mmm...
• Ninkasi Mt. Hops: bitter, funky, and yum
• Hopworks Parsec Pale: nice, similar to Laurelwood Hop Bale
• Deschutes Fairweather: light and tasty, right on

Foyston reports that the Portland Deschutes pub is still serving that Fresh Hop Mirror Pond -- and two more fresh-hop ales not at the festival. It's worth checking out. You might find the Ninkasi around town also, it's far better than the fresh-hop light lager they made last year.