PORTLAND, Oregonâ€"
Over the last couple of decades, the city once called Stumptown and known for its rain, retro culture and venerable Powell's Books has staked out a scintillating new claim to fame as a brew lover's Parnassus.
In fact, beer brewed on premises, live music and historical renovations of Portland landmarks are the underpinnings of a hotel, entertainment and brewpub empire developed by the local McMenamin brothers, Mike and Brian. They are about to open their latest project, the renovation of the Crystal Hotel built in 1911 and situated a short hop from Powell's City of Books. Their many pubs include 25 in the city alone. (Check mcmenamins.com for that impressive list.)
But not all of Portland's microbreweries are in their realm. One of those is Hopworks (503-232-4677,
hopworksbeer.com), where the only thing missing is Bavaria itself as a giddy lunch crowd enjoys local beer. Many brewpubs of Portland share a European taste for high-quality hometown beer as well as the passion with which brewers make it and locals and visitors consume it. And they have big crowds in common. Hopworks is packed day and night.
"It's the perfect marriage of art and science," said Hopworks owner and brewmaster Christian Ettinger, smiling as he handed me a glass of his richly amber-colored HUB Lager, which he brews in the basement of a converted 60-year-old tractor showroom. The velvety taste transported me back to Munich's Hofbrauhaus. Ettinger, 37, a native Oregonian and business school graduate who "fell in love with German beer culture" as an exchange student in Cologne, is a typical proponent.
Is Portland's reputation as "beer-vana" deserved? After sampling ales and lagers at several of the town's 37 brewpubs, I vote unequivocally yes. I'd rank HUB Lager, Mogul Madness Ale from Rogue Distillery & Public House (503-222-5910, rogue.com), superb whiskey keg-aged Bourbonic Plague sour beer from Cascade Brewing (503-265-8603, cascadebrewing.com) and Kingpin Double Red Ale from BridgePort BrewPub (503-241-3612, bridgeportbrew.com) as among the best beers I've had anywhere.
Since the passage of Oregon's brewpub law in 1985 allowing the brewing and dispensing of beer on the same premises, nearly 200 establishments have opened statewide. Other states have similar laws, but Oregonians have taken locally brewed beer to heart.
Nearly 15 percent of all beer consumed in Oregon is brewed in the state, three times the national percentage of "artisan" beer consumed when compared with sales of mass-marketed "industrial" brands such as Budweiser or Coors.
Trying to track this developing consumer niche, megabrewer Anheuser-Busch in the 1990s bought a one-third interest in Widmer Brothers Brewing Co. (503-281-2437, widmerbrothers.com), one of Portland's first microbreweries, and now markets its brands across the continental U.S.
Oregon's brewing industry added $2.4 billion to the state's economy last year, and over the last two decades has added 25,000 direct and indirect jobs to the state's economy.
And Portland's beguiling brewers revel in their variegated offerings, with a dizzying array of 1,000 locally crafted beers available on tap, in bottles or in kegs, according to the Oregon Brewers Guild, an industry association.
Those range from "hoppy, hoppier and hoppiest" concoctions, including popular ales such as IPAs to the seasonal sour beers that Cascade Brewing's "imagineer" Ron Gansburg models after Belgium's beer varieties, using lactobacillus bacteria in addition to basic ingredients malted barley, hops, yeast and water.
Why is Portland the "epicenter" of this beer subculture? As Ettinger notes, all the elements are in place for a spectacular product: pure water from the Mount Hood snowpack stored in the Bull Run reservoir, which also is Portland's drinking-water source; plentiful supplies of fresh hops (Oregon now provides 5 percent of the world's annual crop) and malted barley, and yeasts that are prepared by several labs in the area.
Most important, brewpubs fit with Portland's deeply ingrained anti-corporate culture and local pride, Ettinger said. Given a choice, locals prefer to support local products over mass-marketed ones.
The brewers guild does its best to promote "beer tourism," and at the end of July will sponsor the 24th annual Oregon Brewers Festival (oregonbrewfest.com) at Tom McCall Waterfront Park, a scenic location on the banks of the Willamette River. Last year 70,000 people attended the four-day festival, a bit short of the 6 million who went to Oktoberfest in Munich last year but a sizable crowd nonetheless.
One of the most appealing and hassle-free ways for tourists to experience "beer-vana": a pedicab tour of downtown brewpubs. For $60, PDX Pedicab (503-828-9888, pdxpedicab.com) will fetch you and a companion at any downtown hotel and take you to three breweries. The price includes free sampler trays of up to six 4-ounce glasses of beers selected from each establishment's menu.
My friend Bo and I took a pedicab to three microbreweries in the Pearl District, the former factory and warehouse barrio that has become Portland's hip restaurant and bar scene.
We stopped first at Deschutes Brewery (503-296-4906, deschutesbrewery.com), a renovated auto garage, and swooned over the barrel-aged stout called Abyss and a rich, dark porter called Black Butte.
Then it was on to Rogue, where in addition to Mogul Madness we got a taste of one of the city's most popular beers, Dead Guy Ale. Finally we went to BridgePort BrewPub, founded in 1984 and one of the most successful in distributing beers outside Oregon. Its Blue Heron Pale Ale is sold in 20 states.
As we reluctantly departed, I asked BridgePort cellar master Todd Fleming my stock question: Why had Portland become the nation's beer paradise and not Des Moines or Tampa or …?
"This is an educated market. People have traveled a lot, so you had better offer your clientele some variety," Fleming said.
Added pedicab driver Andrew Frahm: "People here are into change, variety, to not pumping out the same thing all the time."
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