New Portland Beer Blogs

This beer blogging thing is a pretty competitive business. I leave the country for 10 days, and four new Portland beer blogs start up:

• New School: Pub Night bud Ezra's excellent new blog
• 999 Beers: daily beer-tasting project from Champagne of Blogs' Dave Selden
• Daily Pull: slick-looking blog by recent Portland arrival Brady Walen
• Portland Beer and Music: new blog reported by Jeff at Beervana
  

Ezra is so plugged in to the Portland beer scene, that the New School is going to be a must-read blog for getting the latest information. I'll go ahead and take credit for the birth of that blog: I've been encouraging Ezra to start a blog for about the last year and a half. At first I think he worried that it would conflict with his job at Belmont Station; now that he's moved on from there I guess he feels more free to express himself. So far he's been cranking out close to one post a day -- I hope he doesn't burn out, because he turns up lots of good material.

Speaking of burning out, Dave Selden is going to write about one beer a day until September 26, 2012. Haven't you heard of the kid in the candy shop, Dave? I hope he can pull it off, although it would have made much more sense to wrap up the project at the end of the Mayan calendar on the 2012 winter solstice. I'm usually skeptical about beer-a-day projects like this, but I like it that it highlights Dave's low-tech beer app 33 Beers.

I was beginning to wonder if Facebook and Twitter had killed blogging, but it looks like it's alive and well. There must be about a dozen good Portland beer blogs that I follow now.

Double Blue Moon

At last year's OBF, I was having a friendly conversation with a stranger who sat near me to eat his lunch. As I do with everyone, I asked him what he liked so far. He said, "I loved that Red Hook Tripel. It was like Double Blue Moon!"

Pretty funny thing for a beer geek to hear, but hopefully it means one guy will step up from Coors to Red Hook, and maybe keep going up the ladder. Ironically, Coors has now brewed a stronger version of Blue Moon, the -- let me compose my straight face -- Blue Moon Grand Cru.

I was trying to work up the courage to buy a bottle of this from Belmont Station, but at $11 for 750 ml -- SPE $31.23 -- all I could do was take a picture of the bottle on the shelf. I'm proud to say that, despite growing up in Oklahoma, my lifetime expenditure on Coors beer is less than $11. There's no way I'm going to triple or quadruple it in one shot. The Beer Advocate consensus is B-. Have any of you tried BMGC?

From the Cellar

I'm on vacation right now, far from the gray skies of Portland. To fill the space, here are some reruns -- posts that have aged for over a year. In other words, they were written when only a handful of people read It's Pub Night. Now that readership has risen to two handsful, I'd like to reintroduce some of the early posts that I'm happiest with. I hope you like them.

• February 2008: Incidental Contents Are Not Intended for Consumption: I auctioned my empty Abyss bottle on Ebay.
 
• June 2008: Portland Sample Tray Marathon: Dave and I sample 78 beers brewed on premises in 6 hours.
 
• December 2007: Jubel Vertical Tasting, 2007: The first year that I had five years of Deschutes Jubelale in the basement.
 
• October 2008: Beer Martini: Put your stale growler remnants to good use.