Well, it's that time of the year. Our Disney-fied version of St. Patrick's day is in full commercial gear, leprechauns and pots of gold a'plenty. Fortunately, more serious people are delving into actual Irish culture. John Foyston reports that whisky expert (say with a brogue now, you lot) Stuart Ra...

There remains one great frontier for good beer: good food. Well over a decade ago, Higgins added the most expansive beer list in Portland to their menu (even hiring a beer steward), an act I assumed would precipitate full beer integration into the city's best restaurants. But no. Go to a nice place,...

Apparently the age of tasting competitions has arrived. Over the weekend, two such events ended or evolved, and Oregon did well in both cases. Beer Brawl First, the Concordia Ale House hosted the second Annual Beer Brawl, a taste-off of four beers from Oregon, Washington, and California. Hat tip to ...

My homebrew advice has borne positive results . Excellent. Whether or not homebrew saves you a great deal of money over the long haul, I will say it's hard to underestimate the sense of satisfaction one receives at having produced something worthy of the pro beer you admire. And look, he served it i...

To my sort of incoherent post on beer styles below (my health improves, but slowly), Ethan John poses the right questions : I guess I don't understand what the problem is. That it's harder to be a beer judge now? What negative consequence can more formally recognized styles possibly have?Or, put ano...

A hundred years ago, milk stouts were regarded as nutritional . This was no doubt the function of a clever ad campaign by Mackeson, but it worked. Much like Americans now dose themselves with echinacea, in pre-war England they prescribed a glass of stout. I have attempted to revive the practice unde...

Here's a thought experiment. Not an experiment so much as mental time travel. Or something. Anyway, imagine the year is 1981. You sport a wicked fu manchu and despise this "new wave" music and all that Kim Carnes stands for. But not all change is bad. Some hippies from out in California have introdu...

[Another beer tax post, yes, but one with interest to everyone in America. No apologies this time.] It's often useful to see a whole before you try to understand a part. Thanks to data supplied by the Tax Foundation (prost to Jacob Grier ), we have a decade of beer taxes. I have dumped these into an...

What an odd winter. Western Oregon has felt more like Bend this year than the Willamette Valley, with long periods of dry, sunny cold punctuated by flurries of snow. Today, as I sit looking out over a slate sky through the black fracture of a dormant maple tree, it feels a bit more like home. Some w...

Last night, tuning into KGW to get the wrap-up on the All Star game (Brandon acquitted himself nicely), I saw a piece on two new Deschutes beers, brewed for the sesquicentennial. I posed a question earlier this year about what kind of beer would be appropriate for the milestone; well, here's what a ...