Beer at PGE Park

PGE Park is a cute little ballpark. It's handy to have the home of Beavers baseball and Timbers soccer right downtown, in a place you could bike to, or possibly walk to, with a MAX line running right past it. It's completely ludicrous that anyone would think of 1. Moving the town's baseball team out of downtown, or 2. Spending millions of dollars to "renovate" a stadium whose last renovation isn't paid off, and which is actually pretty nice the way it is right now. By the way, some of those millions are tax dollars.

Speaking of high prices, let's talk about having a beer at the ballgame. Your best bet is Thirsty Thursdays, when a 12-ounce cup of Widmer or the like is half-price: $3.75. Here at It's Pub Night, our unit of currency is the six-pack equivalent (SPE), so your Thirsty Thursday SPE is $22.50. On non-thirsty days of the week, let them supersize your beer to 20 ounces for $8.25 -- SPE $29.70 -- instead of submitting to the 12-ounce SPE of $45.

The concession stands in the park are stocked mostly with Miller Lite, with taps of Widmer Hef or Drop Top interspersed. Beer snobs need to be aware of the two locations in the ballpark with better beer selections: the beer garden, and the Beer Here stand between Sections G and H.

Widmer's beer garden, located at playing field level along the right-field line, serves Broken Halo and Drifter in addition to the aforementioned Hef and Drop Top. They also serve some wine and cocktails. The beer garden is a great trick for cheapskates: buy a general admission ticket, show up early, and get a front-row seat in the beer garden. For the price of the bleacher seats with no back, you get cast-iron lawnchairs and a table to set your drinks and nachos on. It's not the ideal location for watching baseball, but for soccer it's almost at the same spot as the premium seats, only closer. Kids are allowed there except on Thursdays.

If you simply must have a non-Widmer beer, then you'll need to check out the Beer Here stand. Wait a minute! That's the name of Mr. Foyston's blog, The Beer Here. That's a nice homage -- I might drop my resistance to the stadium boondoggle if the new ballpark in Lents were to be called It's Pub Night Field. Anyway, the little beer stand between sections G & H has six non-Widmer taps:

• Deschutes Green Lakes Organic Ale
• Diamond Knot IPA
• Mac and Jack's African Amber
• Pyramid Slim Chance
• Heineken
• Tecate

Well, it's not as good a selection as at PDX airport, but it gives you something to work with. I have a soft spot for the Mac and Jack's, a tasty, satisfying beer; Diamond Knot IPA rates a whopping 98 on Beer Advocate, and Green Lakes is quite nice as well. There's not even a slim chance that I'd have the other three, but who knows, maybe someone will like them. The Beer Here also has a few 12-ounce bottles for sale -- there were some Deschutes bottles like Black Butte, and I believe I saw a bottle of Guinness, but nothing really noteworthy. They should stock some 22's of Ninkasi, or the new bottles from Hopworks and New Old Lompoc.

The schedule of Timbers and Beavers home games is here. If you're in the mood to try out a Thirsty Thursday, there's a Beavers game tonight. Play ball!

Southeast Morrison Pub Crawl

There is a growing bar district between Grand and 9th on Southeast Morrison Street. With three interesting places -- Morrison Hotel, The Maiden, and Sway Bar -- opening within the past couple of years, it deserves a place on the list of Portland pub crawls. It's also nice because there are several options for extending the crawl beyond those three places: a beer-bar jaunt down 9th past the Green Dragon and Lucky Lab to Roots; spendy bowling at Grand Central; or you could head north on Grand into hipster heaven as the Pub Nighters did Tuesday.

Walking into the Morrison Hotel Tuesday, I was a little bit concerned that some poetry might be happening there. Turns out it was just the quizmaster administering some trivia to an attentive audience. We were happy to crowd into the bar side instead, where we were only occasionally distracted by an outburst from the restaurant-booth side. The Morrison isn't much for beer on tap -- only four taps -- but they have dozens of nice bottles available, with a good mix of Belgian and German imports and nice American micros, all priced pretty reasonably. Tuesday they were selling Russian River Damnation for $9 a bottle -- I've never seen it for less than $10 in a store.

We were very surprised to see Widmer Alt on tap at the Morrison Hotel. Not the 25th Anniversary Double Alt that is selling in 22's right now -- which is excellent, by the way -- but the honest-to-goodness original Widmer brew. Not sure I've ever seen that outside of the Gasthaus.

Then we went a few doors down to The Maiden -- originally called the Maiden in the Mist, but renamed by new management. We weren't sure if the live music that night was going to impede conversation too much, but we ended up having a blast there. Some really good swing dancers were going to town -- apparently they knew to show up when the Tracy Kim Trio was playing. The mellow Parisian jazz was a great backdrop, and it was fun for a bunch of wallflowers like us to watch the dancers. The beer selection was not incredibly inspiring, but on Tuesday they always have a $3 IPA -- usually Ninkasi, but this week it was Alameda's El Torero. Swanky atmosphere, good food, and lots of fun if there's dancing going on.

When I told my wife we were going to the Sway Bar, she eyed me suspiciously and said "That looks like a pick-up place to me." Not for our type. It was a bust for the beer-loving Pub Night crowd. The bartender was offended when we turned up our noses because there was no draft beer: "We have six taps, it's just that we're out tonight." Call me a zealot, but zero out of six seems like a smaller number than, say, zero out of two. Anyway, I'm not sure how they sold out of all six at once, there were only two customers in there Tuesday evening, and couldn't you keep a spare somewhere? Might be an interesting place, but we took our party around the corner to the cheater-pint slinging establishments on Grand Avenue.

Over on Grand, we stopped in at the Eastbank Saloon, the Slow Bar, and My Father's Place. Not very impressive for beer nerds, except Bridgeport's Hop Czar on tap at the Slow Bar, which also had the most interesting atmosphere of the bunch. I might write up a Grand Avenue pub crawl another time; meanwhile check out the Morrison Hotel and the Maiden, and maybe even the Sway Bar if they remember to stock some kegs of beer.

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.