Among the more recent beer releases from Public Coast Brewing of Cannon Beach is this one I received: Raspberry Tart Ale. It’s a springtime seasonal brewed with raspberry purée and is 5.7% alcohol by volume. The description in the press release says: Raspberry Tart Ale offers the vibrant essence of freshly-picked raspberries, with each sip harmoniously layering tangy sweetness balanced by a delicate tartness. Its effervescent body and subtle malt undertones provide a refreshing canvas for the bright, fruity notes and a citrus finish. Brewed with malted wheat, lemondrop hops and raspberry pur ..read more

My recent article with The Bulletin is a roundup of what I’m calling springtime IPAs—no particular style, just IPA newly released in the past several months. It’s a way to showcase a few of the new beers that hit the market this season. I highlighted five beers, with a bit of background and brief tasting notes on each: GoodLife Brewing Wave Park Hazy IPA (received from the brewery) Bevel Craft Brewing InspirationALE Kveik IPA Wild Ride Brewing Kiefer Magic IPA 10 Barrel Brewing Juicy Drama Imperial IPA (early review here) Monkless Belgian Ales Benefaction Belgian-style Imperial IPA Get the d ..read more

There’s a new Farm to Market collaboration beer from Portland’s Zupan’s Markets on the horizon, but the current one that released earlier this spring was brewed with Laurelwood Brewing as a hazy double IPA. It marks the 28th beer in this collaboration series, in which Zupan’s partners with various breweries, covering a wide variety of styles, and I received cans to review. Here’s the press release: For their second collaboration, Zupan’s Markets and Laurelwood Brewing Company release a Farm-to-Market Hazy Imperial IPA, available exclusively at Zupan’s Zupan’s Markets, the family-owned gourmet ..read more

Bier Wulf is Double Mountain Brewery’s early spring seasonal ale, an interpretation of a Bavarian IPA, a generally agreed-upon subset of the IPA style brewed with German malts and hops. I like to think of it also as, how an American IPA might evolve among German brewers bringing lager sensibilities to the table. Here’s a bit more about the beer directly from the brewery: Bier Wulf is a testament to the Bavarian IPA style- but with a twist. It unifies the earthy tones of German hops with the vibrant citrus notes of American counterparts. The German malts provide a complementary foundation, all ..read more

The Guinness Open Gate breweries here in the U.S. (in Baltimore and Chicago) are known for having license to brew interesting, limited, non-Irish stout beers, and for the Lunar New Year this year they brewed up a fruited ale, Luck of the Dragon. Proceeds generated by the beer sales benefitted several organizations (which I posted about here). Brewed with dragon fruit powder and orange (or tangerine) purée, it’s 5% ABV with no note on IBUs or other details. If I had to guess, I’d say the recipe started as a blonde or perhaps a wheat ale with low hopping rates, as a vehicle for showcasing the fr ..read more

I’ve been receiving a number of non-alcoholic beer alternatives lately, and even some non-beer ones—such as these two: Jøyus Rosé and NON5 Lemon Marmalade & Hibiscus, non-alcoholic wine alternatives that sound interesting. Jøyus is a non-alcoholic brand of wine made in the Pacific Northwest with a lineup of several wines, both sparkling and non. The Rosé has won “multiple Double Gold and Best in Class medals in the world’s most prestigious wine competitions” and even better, it only has 75 calories per bottle, according to the website. The Jøyus NA wines are all alcohol-removed products, w ..read more

When I received and first blogged about cans of Thorntail Hard Agave, I called them canned cocktails, taking a cue from the company’s press release. After drinking them and taking notes, I realize that these are in fact hard seltzers crafted from an agave wine base. Granted, they are bit more artisanal than mass-market hard seltzers, incorporating real fruit concentrates and such, but seltzers they are. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The company’s goal is to create an “alternative to the canned seltzers and overly carbonated vodka drinks that were on the market” (CEO’s comments in ..read more

Deschutes Brewery recently released Fresh Squeezed Non-Alcoholic IPA, the latest in its NA lineup as well as the first of them to be created entirely in-house in Bend. Deschutes partnered with Sustainable Beverage Technologies to install its BrewVo technology that enables the production of NA beer from full-strength regular beer. As part of the announcement and rollout, the company sent me samples of Fresh Squeezed NA as well as Black Butte NA in its new throwback branding. It’s particularly timely as Deschutes just won a gold medal at the World Beer Cup this past week in the Non-Alcohol ..read more

My latest article for The Bulletin, out last week, rounds up the Central Oregon winners of this year’s Oregon Beer Awards, and in particular focuses on 2024’s biggest winner—Sunriver Brewing Company. Sunriver won 13 medals this year and topped it off with Large Brewery of the Year. Sunriver Brewing Co. typically performs well at competitions, and in past years has won awards primarily in hoppy categories. This year’s OBA wins span a wide cross-section of the categories, including highly contested ones such as lagers and barrel-aged beers along with hop-forward ones. “I couldn’t be happier wit ..read more

Recently, Elysian Brewing hosted a virtual tasting of its new Juice Dust IPA, the “juicy” variant in the Space Dust IPA family. Ahead of the tasting, the company sent out tasting kits which included the beer (a six pack plus an extra can each of Juice Dust and Space Dust) and a shirt, all packed in a Yeti Loadout Gobox 15 gear case, branded with Elysian’s Juice Dust logo. You might remember that I’d received cans of Juice Dust after it had just come out; this media kit supplemented these cans and more. Frankly, it reminded me of some of the Shock Top media kits I’d received a decade ago, as fa ..read more