After a two year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Oregon Brewers Festival returned to Waterfront Park this past weekend. This is undoubtedly the most important festival in the history of Oregon craft beer. It's always on my calendar, despite the fact that many of my compadres no longer consider it relevant. Declining attendance in recent years has helped reinforce the notion that the event is, in fact, irrelevant. But OBF remains the largest beer festival in Oregon, one of the largest in the country. Even with declining attendance, an event like that isn't really irrelevant...until numbers dr ..read more

Reliving the quaint past of craft beer can be interesting...and instructive. Cash laden investors and hedge funds hadn’t yet entered the scene. Early craft brewers were stuck cobbling together makeshift breweries with their personal savings and borrowed money. Craft beer hadn’t yet arrived.  On a recent trip to Spokane, I entered a worm hole that took me back to yesteryear. The area is home to a robust craft beer movement that’s probably a decade or so behind Portland in its evolution. There are a lot of small breweries catering to a growing audience of fans.  My travels took me to ..read more

One thing you know or should know when you own a dog is that, sooner or later, they're going to break your heart. They aren't built to last as long as humans, so they leave this life before we do. We suffer that reality because of the loyalty and comradery we get in between.  Blitz joined us in March 2007, nicknamed Chewy (after the Star Wars character) due to his occasional verbalizations. He was our third Lab, replacing Bert, who passed away at the end of 2006. I'd been around Labs my entire life and never had one live past the age of 12. I had no idea Blitz would wind up being the gen ..read more

The first time we poured beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival in the mid-1990s, my wife and I hoped to pour Hair of the Dog. We didn't get the gig and I don't recall why we wanted to pour Hair of the Dog beer. We surely had it somewhere, but I don't remember the details. Fred Eckhardt shares a moment with Sprints. (Matt Wiater photo) Hair of the Dog beers were always different. Even in the early days when Alan Sprints wasn't yet making the barrel-aged monsters he would become internationally famous for, the beers were unique. I suspect that was largely because they were made by hand on ..read more

When Miller closed the old Blitz-Weinhard brewery in 1999, many of the brands that had been brewed in Portland moved to the Miller-owned plant in Olympia. That included Henry's Private Reserve, which was launched in 1976 and was arguably Oregon's first craft or near-craft beer. Private Reserve had become legendary long before production moved out of state. As I've said before, I don't think the quality of the beer suffered when it was brewed in Olympia starting in 1999 or when it moved to Hood River in 2003. Quality did go to hell when production moved to Colorado in 2013. It's a common theme ..read more

Last week's announcement that Molson Coors (MillerCoors in the US) will discontinue production of Blitz-Weinhard brands effectively closes the book on Portland's most iconic brewing entity. The brands being discontinued are Old English 1200 (originally 800) Malt Liquor and Henry's Private Reserve.  The Blitz-Weinhard story dates to 1856, when Henry Weinhard arrived in the Portland area and began to build a brewing empire. His first stop was Vancouver, but he soon crossed over into Portland and his brewery became a regional power within a decade or so. In fact, the existence of a notable ..read more

In the olden days of craft beer, one of the first beers that interested me was Bert Grant's Scottish Ale. It was available in Pullman, where I was in graduate school and also one of the few craft beers you could get in a bottle at the time. There weren't that many around and most were draft only. Of course, that Scottish Ale was one of the beers Portland Brewing began producing for the Portland market when it opened in March 1986. Contract brewing the Bert Grant beers helped get Portland Brewing off the ground. It gave them a reliable cash flow and, just as important, allowed them to tap into ..read more

All things considered, the pandemic hasn't been a bad time to raise an intense Labrador puppy. I hate to think what we would have done without all the readily available time, time required to deal with Bunk's incessant need for exercise, attention and supervision.  Of the Labs I've had in my life, Bunk is by far the craziest and most difficult to manage. And the competition isn't close. Most Labs calm down and become relatively normal around the age of two. I fear Bunk won't calm down until she's five or six or seven. Wild times ahead. If the pandemic has been a decent time to raise a pu ..read more

Because I am not prone to follow Twitter, I missed a notification (in May!) from Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives relating to the materials I assembled as part of my work on Portland Beer. I donated those materials to the OHBA in 2014 and they finally have the materials catalogued for use. The work was finished up by a graduate student intern and took some time. Why I wasn't notified directly about this I don't know. But never mind. The archived materials include transcribed interviews with founding craft brewers and other industry-connected veterans, as well as pertinent newspaper arti ..read more

Given the players involved and the result, a lawsuit was probably inevitable. The suit filed last week in Multnomah County court alleges that Anheuser-Busch conspired to drive down the value of the Craft Brew Alliance, allowing it to acquire the company for less than fair value. Further, the suit charges that AB was aided and abetted by CBA leadership that sherked its fiduciary duties. The lawsuit was filed by shareholder Tim Malloy, represented by Portland law firm, Motschenbacher and Blattner. Malloy seeks class action status and a jury trial. He seeks damages of $107 million on behalf of ..read more