Blog Category: On The Outside

Session Fest Brewers Night Thursday July 26th, 7:00 PM   Session Fest 2012 Friday July 27th-29th, 'Open' to Close   Naked City Taphouse [Map] Seattle, WA In general, beers in the Northwest start out strong. In Portland, out of 542 beers surveyed, the mean ABV is 6.61%—up from last year—with a standard deviation of 1.72. In fact, it's pretty rare to find a beer under 5% ABV in town. In the UK however, when I... Read More »

Photo ©2011 Ian Lass. If you've spent enough time living here in Portland then odds are that you have made the 3 and a half hour trip southeast to our other beer mecca that is called Bend. If you haven't... well then crawl out from under your rock. Besides offering everything an outdoors enthusiast craves from kayaking, hiking, caving, horseback riding, skiing and snowboarding and many other activities, it goes without saying that Bend offers... Read More »

Black Isle Brewery's first brewing location, now supported by a new larger facility. From Inverness, we traveled north to Black Isle Brewery, an all organic brewery producing a current lineup of about ten beers, all available in bottles. As I mentioned earlier, this is where the battle lines on real ale get a bit murky. Included in Black Isle Brewing's beer range is a line of "Organic Live Bottle Conditioned Beers", which CAMRA defines as... Read More »

Becky and I decided to head out of Portland, hopped on I-205 North, and a couple of turns later ended up in: Scotland.  Alright, there was a bit more to it than that, but this isn't a blog that specialized in travel planning. Most beer drinkers in Scotland—who care about what they are drinking—are firmly planted into two camps: traditional real ales and emerging craft beer. I'm using the word emerging here as compared to... Read More »

Yesterday, my girlfriend noticed a beer bottle in a seldom seen area of the refrigerator, mixed in with the secondary condiments.  She asked me why I was hiding a bottle of Bourbon County Stout (BCS).  I yelled from my spot on the couch that I had just picked it up yesterday.  "You picked up a 2008 yesterday?" she asked.  That piqued my interest. Earlier this year, we moved to a new house without a basement. ... Read More »

Firestone Walker 13 We like to keep most of our coverage on the local Portland beer scene, hence the URL portlandbeer.org. Makes sense to us.  A lot of beer news happens outside of our little beer utopia though.  Some of it is relevant, some of it is interesting.   Though our main concentration will remain in our community, we will be bringing you some worthy news from the outside in an aptly named column called... Read More »