Our next stop was and the Cascade Brewery Barrel House. Aside from the pretty normal beers most everyone has on tap, IPS's, Pales, Reds etc. Cascade Brewery also specialize in sour fruit beers, so that's kind of what we focused on. These are beers purposely infected with lactobacillus bacteria giving them all a tart fruit flavor. Most were fairly dry, but a few crossed into the semi dry category. The standouts were the Nightfall which had a favor similar to the blueberry with a light carmel flavor. It hovered around the semi sweet mark. The Vine was a close second. It had a sweet wine and honey aroma. The flavor was citrusy, with white wine qualities and a crisp finish.
Next was Coalition Brewery. These guys do something kind of cool. They kind of have a small, neighborhood bar feel and that is further accentuated by the fact that they have a program where local home brewers can get a chance to help design a beer, brew it on a small pilot system and possibly, if the beer gets enough cheers from the fans, brew an additional batch on the big 10 barrel system.
The result of this coalition during my visit was the Apollo Creed CDA. It had some charcoal, coffee and herbal notes. Nothing earth shattering, but nice.
Also worthy of note was the King Kitty red, with had a nice sweet malt favor off the top with a carmelly, citrusy finish. The Bumps Bitter came in a close second with a citrus, light malt aroma. It's flavor brought a decent profile of citrus hops backed up by a good malt bill that was a nicely balanced, drinkable beer.
It had been a long day. Out travels had taken us from the middle of Old Town out into the suburbs on the east side of town. We had staggered into six breweries tasting a grand total of 52 different types of beers and we even took a little side trip down distillery lane and we weren't quite done yet.
But before we continue, I would like to send a message to the great brewers of the Portland area. For the last fifteen or so years, you fine men and women have forged the trail the rest of the country meekly follows in. Everywhere I go, beer snobs across the country look to the west with this far-away look in their eye when the name of the city is mentioned. When it came to the combination of good food and good beer this city led the way. And a big part of this innovation was because of a citrusy, spicy little cone known as the cascade hop, it's big brother the amarillo hop and the rest of it's pacific northwest brethren. The unique charactaristics of these flowers allowed brewers to push IBU's to new and exiting limits. Now here we are, and I find myself writing the adjective 'citrusy' after every damn beer I taste.
Dear Portland brewers, do something else. There are literally hundreds of different hops in the world, or better yet, there are wonderful things being done with malts these days. People are coaxing a multitude of different flavors using strange strains of yeasts and archaic herbs. There are some wonderful things being done in Portland, as I have talked about, but damn people, you can back off the hops just a tad.
I'm glad I got that off of my chest. I'm also glad that there is a very small audience for this little blog, I think these would be considered fighting words in most Portlandian neighborhoods. But lest you think I am alone in this, here is a drunken rant from Gary. This has not been edited, we just gave him an IPA and recorded him. I wouldn't watch the entire thing, it gets a bit weird toward the end, but I think I've made my point.
The last stop was Migration Brewery. Admittedly this stop is a little fuzzy around the edges for me. I know it had a really nice outdoor seating area. I know that their taster portions are very generous. I know that the Rye Whit was good, it had a nice sweet, citrusy smooth drinkable summer beer flavor. I know that the Nitro IPA was a nice, well-balanced Northwest citrus IPA with the smooth creamy mouthfeel of a nitrous beer. And.... that's about it.
With our palates completely shot by relentless IBU assault we slinked back into Old Town for a couple of drinks in some of my favorite downtown watering holes and passed out. There was one more city left to conquer. It lie just up the I-5 to the North. Seattle, Washington was to be our final stop on the trip.
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