West Coast Good Beer Guide

Anytime you're traveling on the West Coast, you'll want to bring along the CAMRA Good Beer Guide for our fair region. The British authors of the Guide, both in their early 30's, do an amazingly thorough job of covering the breweries and pubs of the area. They even have an entry for a bar 10 blocks from my house -- Roadside Attraction -- that I was dimly aware of, but had never ventured into. Cheeky devils -- if I was younger I'd go write a book about drinking beer in their neighborhood. The writing is witty but concise: they cram a lot of beery information into 300 pages.

In addition to covering Washington, Oregon, and California, the Guide has chapters on Alaska, Hawaii, and Las Vegas. Within each geographic area are separate sections for breweries, brewpubs, beer bars, and "other beer destinations". The entries within each section are numbered, with a map at the end of each chapter for handy reference. Driving through Washington on Highway 97 last week, if it weren't for the map in the Guide, I would never have been aware we were passing so close to the Hop Museum in Toppenish, although we got there too late in the evening to visit it. It also saved me by providing the phone numbers for Boundary Bay and Iron Horse -- even though we intended to visit both breweries, I had left home without directions or phone numbers for either.

Just before buying this book, I had blogged about Tugboat Brewing. Thumbing through the Portland section, I became embarrassed about the uncomfortable number of similarities between what I wrote about Tugboat and the Guide's take on it. Both descriptions noted that it was a cozy pub with a 4-barrel operation that had been there since the early 90's. We both recommended the Chernobyl Stout, and dutifully pointed out that it is only served in half-pints. Finally, I regretted my pretentious use of the British phrase "opening hours", since it made it seem like I took every bit of my information from the Guide. I was certain someone was going to accuse me of plagiarism; fortunately my readership is small enough that no one made the connection.

As good as the GBG is, I wouldn't be a beer nerd if I couldn't find a few things to nitpick about it. For starters, the Washington map is a little confused: the things I noticed are that some of the brewpub numbers between 33 and 40 are incorrect, and the map shows Dick's Brewing to be in Long Beach instead of Centralia. I also wish they had included a chapter on British Columbia -- that would have been more useful to Northwesterners than Alaska and Hawaii. Another quibble is that most Portlanders will be ticked off that the only Portland brewpubs that rate a "Highly Recommended" are Edgefield and the Rogue pub -- and Rogue doesn't even brew at the Portland pub.

Still, you don't buy a travel guide for your hometown, you buy it for the places you're visiting. The Good Beer Guide is thorough, up-to-date, well-organized and fun to read. Don't leave home without it.

Washington Vacation Beers

On our way back from Canada, we stopped for lunch at Boundary Bay in Bellingham. The Pale Ale they brought to the OBF was one of my favorites this year, and we were hungry after a frustrating wait at the border, so the pub was a welcome sight. The service was especially friendly there; for example, they quickly found us a new table inside when it started to rain on our original porch seats.

Carla was the big winner, since she ordered their delicious IPA. It's their most popular ale, and it's easy to see why -- it's flowery and rich, even better than the single-hop pale that I tried. The Oatmeal Stout was also tasty -- better than the Dry Irish Stout -- but that IPA topped them all. Good food, too.

I saw a guy at another table get his gallon-sized apple-juice jug filled with beer, twice the size of regular growlers. The price for that was $15, close to bottled beer pricing, corresponding to about $8.50 per 6-pack. Regular half-gallon growler fills were less of a deal at $8.75, but that's less than most Portland pubs charge.

Then we drove across the Cascades on Highway 2, to spend nearly a week off the grid in Stehekin, a town without telephone or cellular service, that can only be reached by taking a boat up Lake Chelan. There is no brewpub action to report for that part of the vacation, though I was impressed by the selection of beer available at the one little grocery there: Alaskan Amber, Rogue Dead Guy, and even Shiner Bock were available for not-too-ridiculous prices. If I had known about that, I might not have bothered to haul in my own supply of Unibroue acquired in Vancouver.

On the way back to Portland Saturday afternoon, we went through the interesting little Central Washington town of Ellensburg. It's basically in the middle of nowhere [oops, only 100 miles from Seattle, see the comments], but it caught my attention because it's the home of the Iron Horse Brewery. Iron Horse's Quilter's Irish Death Stout was one of the buzz beers at the 2008 OBF, but I failed to try it before the lines went crazy.

Now, Iron Horse is not a pub. They do have a tasting room, but we were a tired, hungry family of four, so that wasn't good enough for us. Fortunately, a call to the brewery led to a fantastic restaurant recommendation: the Palace Cafe and Saloon, which serves four of Iron Horse's beers. The Palace -- open since 1892, in the current location since 1949 -- serves very good Western diner food in a quaint setting that would seem cheesy in almost any other place, but which succeeds in being totally charming. The bar in the back is less quaint, but they've got your sports viewing covered with several TVs mounted all over.

I got my taste of Irish Death at the Palace. It was a smooth, decent stout, but I have a feeling that its name gave it a little extra appeal. The IPA seemed better to me, another classic Northwest hop-slam. Very surprising to find something that good brewed in such an out-of-the way -- from my perspective -- place.

The tasting room sounds fun. When I called Iron Horse Saturday about 5 PM, I could hear a hubbub of happy conversation in the background. The woman who answered the phone told me about the Palace, but she couldn't direct me to it from Highway 97, because she wasn't from Ellensburg and didn't know where the highway was! Pretty informal there, I guess. If you're driving through Ellensburg on 97 or I-90, try to make a visit to the Iron Horse tasting room, and definitely hit the Palace for dinner.

Growler Math

How ridiculous is it that there are no longer returnable beer bottles? (Or pop bottles, for that matter.) In this day and age where we're worried about energy and the environment, every bottle of beer you drink is manufactured for a single use, then -- best case -- crushed into dust; worst case, tossed in a landfill.

Two-quart growlers provide you, the eco-friendly Portlander, a way to reuse a bottle, instead of sending it off to be melted and made into a different bottle. Plus you get some good, fresh local beer.

But there's a catch: in general, you get to pay more for the privilege of not using a bottle. For example, the new Deschutes pub in Portland charges $15 for a 64-ounce growler fill, about 23 cents an ounce, quite a premium over the price of a 72-ounce six-pack. Given that good Oregon beers are selling for something like $7-$9 a six-pack -- even good beers from out-of-state are in the same range -- the bottle price is somewhere between 10 and 13 cents an ounce.

Granted, $15 is on the high end of growler prices. But even the more usual price of $11 is about 17 cents an ounce. Why does it cost less to buy a six-pack, with a cut going to middlemen in the form of distributors and retailers, than to buy unpackaged beer directly from the producer?

[Update 2008/08/17]: Lindsey points out that it's confusing to talk about the price per ounce. Instead, consider that a growler holds eight-ninths the volume of a six-pack. So if you would pay $9 a six-pack, you should get a growler filled for no more than $8. An $8 six-pack equates with a $7.10 growler; $7 with $6.20. And that gives the brewer all the extra margin that used to go to packaging, distribution, and retailing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems to show that growler prices could be even lower and still be a winner for the brewery.

According to the excellent growler index on the Champagne of Blogs, there are some deals to be had: $6.95 at Rock Bottom, or $4.95 at Portland Brewing -- oops, now it's $5.95 according to a comment below. If more places had growler fills that were in that six-pack price range, it would be a big boost to environmentally sound beer-drinking. Maybe it could even be a way to boost pub business: sit down for a pint and get a discount on your growler fill.

By the way, that growler index would be a great thing to put on the Portland Beer Wiki. Pubs open and prices change all the time, so it's just the thing that you want feet on the street to update. I would also be interested in growler prices at non-brewpubs: I think that any bar with a beer license could fill growlers if they wanted to.