The Best Things We Drank: November 20 - 26

This week's list is all over the style spectrum but solidly in the land of Get Your Hands on These Beers If You Can.

Montavilla Hunter of Shadows CDA - Getting your hands on this one might be beyond the realm of possibility as only one keg of this beer that was dry-hopped with Cryo Citra hops, Idaho 7, Magnum and a 'mystery hop' was produced and was tapped last Thursday. That being said even limited beers have a way of popping up unexpectedly and if was as well received by the rest of the people that drank it as it was by us then Michael and the crew need to make more. Roasty and dark without being bitter and clocking in at a moderate 6.5% this would be one we'd like to enjoy throughout the dark months ahead.

The next two beers, both from The Commons, graced our lips thanks to generous beer friends who not only invited us to join their Thanksgiving feasting but broke out multiple beers from their cellar.

Photo credit: Untappd user Rico S.

Good Problems - When this bottle was pulled out we couldn't help but think about foreshadowing as it is a collaboration with Modern Times that was produced at the end of 2015. A Saison with brettanomyces strains from both breweries and nebbilo grapes (an Italian red wine variety) from the Columbia River Gorge, all of the components of the beer were present and as would be expected from both of these breweries, perfectly balanced.

Bourbon Little Brother (2014) - On paper a Belgian Strong Dark Ale wouldn't catch our eye however when it's been produced by The Commons it's a different story. We first enjoyed this Heaven Hill bourbon barrel-aged beer nearly six years ago, the first year it was produced and it was good then. This three year old vintage has held up well and is tasting wonderful, amazingly easy drinking for 10%.

New Holland Incorrigible Reserve White Sour Ale with Mango & Pineapple - The lightest of the list at 4.5% it is packed to the max with tropical aromas and flavor, balanced by just the right amount of sour bite. We enjoyed it at Imperial Bottle Shop on SE Division and as of this posting, it's still on tap. As good as it is, however, it probably won't be around for long so find an excuse* to pop in for some of this sunshine get away in a glass. 

Cheers to not just surviving, but hopefully enjoying, this holiday season we find ourselves smack in the middle of.

*We're good at excuses, for example:
- some holiday shopping that needs to be done at one of the many nearby shops
- a hungry belly that needs to be filled at one of our favorite places, Bollywood Theater
- you just need to sit down to escape the crush of the holidays.

The Best Things We Drank: July 24 - 30

Last week was The Big Show aka the 30th Annual Oregon Brewers Festival and some of the best beers we drank were consumed on our two visits to it. The other portion were had at our Cheers aka The BeerMongers.

At OBF
Boundary Bay Raspberry Radler - One of the first beers consumed at this year's OBF, it was as delicious as it was gorgeous. A radler in name, this beer is a combination of raspberry puree and kettle soured beer fermented with an ale strain and house bacteria and dry hopped with Citra. It was bursting with fruit flavor and just the right amount of fruit tartness.

Baerlic Dropping Acid Psychedelic Sour IPA - The kettle souring with lactobacillus provides a sour-in-a-good-way aroma with a pleasant hop stank flavor from the El Dorado, Comet and Amarillo hops used. At 5% one could drink many of these.

Upright Heirloom Saison - Complex beers are Upright's thing and this blended beer starts with delicious wood on the nose (from the Saison part that spent 18+ months in barrels) and offers a bright, slightly sharp but refreshing flavor contributed by the black lime wheat component.

New Holland Dragon's Milk Reserve: Thai Curry - The biggest beer at the festival, an 11.7% imperial stout, was arguably the best beer of the festival as well. It's a meal (or at least dessert) in a glass with a coconut, mild spice and cocoa-y flavor. The elements combine to create a dangerously drinkable combo.

At TheBeerMongers
Bellwoods Farmageddon  - A true treat and a reason why generous beer people are so cool - they are happy to share great stuff with those that will appreciate it. Our buddy Chris recently visited Vancouver, B.C. and brought this back. Perfectly tart and delicious, this is a special edition of their classic Farmhouse Saison which is a blend of young and old barrels ranging from 6 months to 1.5 years. If you should see a bottle DO NOT hesitate to buy it. We guarantee it will be worth the price.

Off Color Hell Broth - Listed as a "Danish style American Wild Ale" and is a collaboration with Amager Bryghus, it possesses the aroma of cider with a light, drinkable beer flavor.

Schilling Cider Road Trip Peach Citra - It's coincidental but appropriate that the next beer on our list is in fact a cider. Whereas Schilling's grapefruit cider is just a fruity cider, here they've bridged the beer gap by finding the sweet spot between the fruitiness of peaches and the bitterness of hops.

If you attended OBF we'd love to hear what you thought topped the taps. If you didn't what has recently filled your glass with delight?

The Best Things We Drank: July 17 - 23

The Oregon Brewers Festival may be in full swing but we know festivals aren't for everyone, especially those that live here. So if you're looking for beers beyond OBF, perhaps one of our favorites from last week will be up your alley. As a bonus, three of the four came out of bottles/cans, a more convenient option for enjoying anywhere.

The first two come from Avery Brewing Co. and their selection was prompted by our buddy, Chris. He grabbed the Raspberry Sour off the shelf first and we happily followed suit picking up the Apricot Sour. Before checking into Raspberry Sour we figured it was a new-to-us beer. However according to Untappd we'd actually enjoyed this two years ago and as a testament to how good it actually is, we enjoyed every drop of it just as much as we did last time. Thanks to Dan for the first go-around sharing of this lactic, red raspberry gem.

The Apricot Sour was indeed new to us and equally enjoyable. Starting off with a  fantastic, smooth apricot aroma from the "bushels" of apricots used, the barrel-aged tartness is more assertive on the aroma than the flavor, making for an all around delicious experience.

The last of the packaged beer on the list comes from the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp Across the World box we picked up and have been slowly making our way through. The West Coast-Style DIPA, a collaboration with Boneyard, is our favorite we'd had from the box so far. Not surprising considering our love of hops and Boneyard's skill with them, in this case a combination of Citra, Centennial, Simcoe and Mosaic. Hop heads like us will enjoy all 16oz of this 8.3% DIPA.

The one draft beer making this week's list begs to be enjoyed in the sun, which can happen on the Montavilla Brew Works patio or any outdoor venue when you get a growler filled with it. Summer Wheat is an American-style Hefeweizen with a 50/50 blend of Pilsner and Wheat malts with what we feel is just the right amount of blood orange puree (42lbs if you were wondering). At 5% one could drink this all day!

Switching over for a bit of insight from "the big show" in town this week (aka OBF), we visited for a couple hours yesterday and focused on fruit/sour beers. Of the 12 beers that crossed our lips Boundary Bay Raspberry Radler was easily our favorite. Our tasting notes are here and for those curious as to which G & T we preferred during our back-to-back sampling, the winner in our book goes to Coin Toss Toss Tonic (sorry, Gigantic, yours was a bit too Gin-powerful for our delicate beer taste buds).

FRIDAY UPDATE
Returning to OBF on Thursday we found three more beers that we'd recommend you give a go:
- Upright Heirloom Saison - Delicious wood on the nose, complex flavor and still refreshing.
- Baerlic Dropping Acid sour IPA - Starting with a sour aroma that brought a smile to our face, that smile was continued when the hoppy-stanky flavor hit our lips.
- New Holland Thai Curry Dragon's Milk - This is a meal/dessert in a glass and you'll get bang for your buck (11% for a single tasting ticket). It gets our nod for those attending when lines get long and a full pour is in order.

Cheers, friends!

The Best Things We Drank: May 22 - 28

Coalition Sour Patch

The six beers that made this week's list are particularly stellar and we have to give big thanks to Chris and Chris (just two of the Chris/Kris crew regularly found at The BeerMongers) for sharing. For something a little different this week, we'll list these in ascending rank starting with four that tied with 4 out of 5 stars.

Coalition Brewing Sour Patch - Love Sour Patch Kids candy? Then you'll love this beer. A version of Two Flowers, their CBD beer, it truly is the love child of beer and candy.

Baerlic Watch the Bridie - A true to style gose, it is salty, tart and utterly fantastic. Also true to style is its ABV - a sessionable 4.5% - which makes it easy for summer drinking.

Matchless POG - Familiar with POG? In case not, it stands for pineapple-orange-guava and that's exactly what this IPA offers to compliment the medium body and low bitterness. Juicy and infinitely drinkable, or nearly so at just a touch higher ABV of 6.2%.

Beachwood Brewing Mocha Machine - The biggest of the bunch, clocking in at 9.2% ABV, it definitely is a "well-engineered endeavor" combining British and German malts and Portola Coffee Lab roasted coffee which was then aged on cacao nibs from Ecuador. The fudginess was reminiscent of Sunriver Cocoa Cow but taken to another level with the coffee. Thanks to Chris T. for sharing!

Now for the runner up, with an impressive 4.25 out of 5 stars, New Holland Incorrigible Reserve (2017). This white sour ale with mango and pineapple was surprisingly affordable with the bang for the buck coming in the flavor as opposed to the ABV (a mere 4.5%). With the aroma of a bright, tropical fruit salad and an addition of just the right amount of tartness to the flavor this is a sour beer lovers of the style should definitely pick up.

Finally, for the best of the best this week (and probably almost any other week of the year)...Modern Times Asteroid Cowboy. First off, huge thanks to Chris (a different Chris) for sharing this! A Brett IPA dry hopped with Mosaic, Citra and Horizon, all of the components in balance, resulting in a tart and hoppy delight that is the total package of delish.

It really was one hellava week for beer. We hope even a small percentage of similar wonderfulness made it into your glass. Cheers!

The Best Things We Drank: May 8 - 14

This week's beers are all over the board in terms of style, size of brewery that made them and geographical location. Where they come together is that they all garnered a rating of 4 out of 5. With that, let's look at what made each of them stand out.

Montavilla Brew Works Warren's Big Barrel Porter - The only Portland (or Oregon for that matter) beer to make this week's list comes from one of our favorite breweries to drink at. The captain's chairs at the bar invite one to stay for a good long while, which we did, and as an added bonus to the beer, Flying Pie Pizza is just across the street. (Of course we got some of that as well.) This was tops of all the beers we drank there that night, starting out with a slight aroma and a flavor [especially as it warms] of gentle maple syrup with a touch of barrel. A very drinkable 9%, upon looking back at the check in saw a note that "it would be great with flan," which is particularly interesting since we don't eat much flan. But we'll trust our past self and roll with that idea.

Firestone Walker SLOambic Batch #2 - Firestone Walker does great things when it comes to wild ales and this one, fermented with blackberries, is no exception. Tart, sour and mildly fruity, it has held up well (brewed 1 1/2 years ago) and it was a treat for our tart/sour taste buds to be sure.

New Holland Dragon's Milk Reserve: Mexican Spice Cake - We've had plenty of beers that are designed to have a similar flavor profile to Mexican cake or hot chocolate and they've been done with varying degrees of success. This Midwest-brewed one is definitely one of the best. Starting off with an aroma of coconut (which is somewhat puzzling as there is no coconut in it...perhaps it's the vanilla beans?), the flavor is nice and spicy...eventually. This is a beer you gotta let warm up, so pull it out of the fridge/cooler a beer before you want to drink it but then savor every drop of it.

Other Half Hop Showers - Found in our beer fridge, we apparently forgot to put a note on it so that we could remember who gave it to us. There are two likely subjects but whoever it was needs to be commended. East Coast IPAs (and we don't mean the hazy, NE-style ones that have become so popular recently) have generally failed to wow us, being spoiled with the abundance of and skill used in creating hoppy beers by many West Coast breweries, but this one most certainly did. Thank you, Joe, Kris or whoever is responsible for gifting this to us!

Observations from Day 1 of the Oregon Brewers Festival

One of the many beautiful & tasty
beers to be had

Wednesday dawned overcast and dreary but by the time the parade was marching across the Hawthorne bridge to open the 29th Annual Oregon Brewers Festival the skies had cleared and a stunning summer day was upon Portland.

During the couple of hours I was able to attend I sampled 16 beers, starting off with Berliner Weisses and fruit beers before moving to a couple of hoppier beers and settling into the area of the International Beer Garden to try as many of the beers on tap at the time that were on my list, knowing there would be a good chance they wouldn't be available tomorrow.

Of the Berliner Weisses I tried (about half of the ones I hope to), Uber Osten from Terminal Gravity was my favorite. The 4.8% beer is balanced and just right for the style. Along a similar style vein, Nancy Cherrygan from Sasquatch offered up a bit of tartness, plenty of cherry flavor and was a beauty to look at. At 6.9% I might get myself into trouble if I were allowed to drink as much as I want of it (which would be plenty).

While I didn't have much in the way of hoppy beers I was impressed with Organized Love IPA from Riverbend, one of the newer breweries on the Oregon beer scene. In the International Beer Garden both the IPA from North Island Beer and No. 10, a 7.5% imperial IPA from Shiga Kogen Beer, are worth trying (if they're available when you're there).

Finally, two big, dark beers that were on my list were definite winners: New Holland Dragon's Milk: Mexican Spice Cake and Lost Abbey Serpent's Stout. The former is just what it sounds like, a liquid version of a spiced cake, and it is stunning. Serpent's Stout is a blended beer, with a portion being aged in bourbon barrels, which comes across without being overpowering and finishes with a coffee/dark chocolate aftertaste. Both are 11% beers so drink with caution but if I was looking for something to slowly sip while wandering the grounds I'd splurge on a full glass (4 tokens) and enjoy every last drop.

TIPS:
- Bring water (it's allowed), use the rinse stations or buy a bottle from one of the food vendors.
- Drink water. My rule is "drink your swill" and by that I mean that I carry a water bottle so that I can dump some in my tasting mug between each sample. It not only rinses it but drinking that beer-ish flavored water helps keep me hydrated.
 - Visit the International Beer Garden early on and continue to check back periodically as the beers will rotate.
- If there is a line for New Holland or Lost Abbey (both in trailer #2) the wait is worth it.
- It's going to be a warm one so take advantage of the shaded areas and/or the "free rain."