New Arrivals For August 31, 2007

First off the truck is Sierra Nevada's Anniversary Ale. Brewed to celebrate their 27th year of producing some of America's most consistently delicious beer. Here's the official description:

Anniversary Ale is an American-style IPA featuring Cascade hops, the signature hop used in our Pale Ale. The beer has a pronounced pine and citrus hop aroma balanced by the sweetness of two-row pale and caramel malts. The result is an unusually well-balanced IPA that proves an IPA can be both assertive and elegant. Anniversary Ale is a medium-bodied, well-hopped ale that finishes with a slight malt sweetness.

I'm envisioning a SNPA on steriods, or maybe a cross between the Pale and Celebration. Either way, I can't wait to get home and try a bottle.

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Next to arrive is Widmer's popular fall seasonal, Okto. It's smooth, it's malty, you know you want it. Widmer would like you to know the following:

The full body and malty flavor make Widmer Oktoberfest an ideal beverage for the Fall season. As the style dictates the hopping is delicate enough to allow the malty character to dominate, yet still provides a floral aroma and finish.

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And then the big one came in. The last load of the day has a couple new beers, and a few long-lost favorites that have been conspicuously absent for a long time:

New Guys:

Pyramid Imperial Hefe: (description coming soon...)

Big Sky Troutslayer: (description coming soon...)

Returning Favorites:

• Petrus Oud Bruin
• Piraat
• Gulden Drak

House of 1000 Bottles

Yesterday I discovered that we have almost 950 different beers. If you include the 40+ varieties of cider and the 30 or so different meads our current selection is now over 1000 different beverages!

Hooray Beer!

German Beer and English Cider

I got home from work last night and sat on the porch to drink a glass of Oliver's Dry Cider. Before I could pour a glass, Neil showed up with a bottle of Mahr's Weisse and asked if I felt like sharing. Probably more of a rhetorical question than anything, but I responded by getting another glass.

The cider was still, bone dry, and too cold to properly enjoy, so we set it aside to breathe and warm up while we contemplated the weisse beer. Every beer I have from Mahr's raises their score on my mental brewery list, and this was no exception. The beer poured like a Portland summer; beautiful, hazy sun shone out from beneath a fluffy white cloud while the breeze carried floral notes and a bit of spice. OK, the spice part might not have anything to do with Portland, but the rest is true. The "typical" flavors of wheat mingled with banana and clove phenols are present, but the true measure of this beer is it's restrained balance. Unlike most other German wheat beers the various components don't fight for attention until one starts to dominate, instead they all play happily together like little German school kids.

By this point the cider was calling, so we switched gears for a moment and gave it a go. Even after warming up it seemed noticeably lacking in "top flavor", the initial taste in the front and roof of your mouth. At first it was almost as though you couldn't taste it until after you'd swallowed, but when it hits you definitely notice. The bottle says, "Matured for a minimum of 8 months in oak casks", and when the juice hits the back of the tongue its an easy statement to believe. As a lover of lambics and barrel-aged beer I don't know if I've ever said this before, but the stuff was almost too dry. Wonderfully apple flavored and fairly potent at 7.5%, but the astringency kept jumping out and distracting me.

At some point Neil went back to the Mahr's and immediately commented on how well the flavors and residual sugar in the beer cut right through the cider and seemed to open up both of them a little more. He was right. A little coating of beer on the tongue was enough to soften the puckering sensation and draw out more of the rustic, spicy apple character. We went back and forth like this until both were gone, and then it was time for dinner.

I was pondering how globalization had played a part in what would have been an unthinkable combination of beverages 60 years ago, but that's a post best left to some poly-sci wonk.

(Not So) New Arrivals

This is generally one of, if not the slowest times of year in terms of new beers coming out. The summer seasonals have been here for months, and most of the fall/holiday seasonals won't start rolling in for a couple weeks at least. In spite of this, we've managed to maintain a steady trickle of fresh treats pretty much all summer long, most of which aren't seasonals. Over the next few days, I'm going to slowly chip away at the backlog of new things that have come in since mid-July. If you're a regular at the Station you may have already seen a few of them on the shelf, but now that I have my writing mojo back I'll catch up soon enough.


Lakefront - Fuel Cafe Coffee Stout: I've been pestering the distributors for months to find us a reasonably priced coffee beer, and my persistence finally paid off. A couple months ago somebody started bringing Lakefront into Oregon, mainly for their Organic ESB and New Grist, a gluten-free beer made with sorghum. That triggered a long lost memory of Fuel Cafe, a beer I used to enjoy when I lived in Madison, WI. It took almost three months of pleading, and promising to buy it all if no one else did, but they finally brought in a small load of this tasty "session" stout. It does have a fair amount of caffeine in it, and it's less than 5% abv, so the coffee buzz might take hold before the booze sets in, but if you're drinking a coffee beer you're probably looking for the jolt anyway. I'll be honest and admit that it doesn't have near the complexity of Alesmith Speedway Stout or Mikkeller Beer Geek Breakfast, but you can buy a six pack for less than the price of one bottle of either of those. The coffee flavor predominates, but they've done a good job of subduing the acrid bitterness that tends to appear in coffee that's been brewed and chilled. Combined with a silky mouthfeel and a slightly roasty (yet smooth) finish, it makes for a tasty beer that'll keep you going late.


Schmaltz Brewing - Coney Island Lager: From the fine folks who bring you the HeBrew line comes this tasty "premium lager", a fund raising effort for the famous theme park. The label alone is worth the price of admission; a borderline psychotic clown stares out at you and beckons you to see whats going on inside the tent. Seemingly every square inch, and all the required info, is covered in slogans, miniature posters, and other carnival style advertising.

Inside the bottle you'll find a refreshing, perfectly balanced lager. Despite the "premium lager" moniker, its really more akin to an Americanized version of a Dortmunder Export, a golden, slightly hoppier lager. A clean, grainy/bready malt base gives way to a gentle tickle of herbal and citrus hop flavors on it's way to a wonderfully crisp finish.

Tune in tomorrow for info on some new beers from Mahrs Brau (one of personal favorites), some top shelf British ciders, and possibly more.

The Silence of the Blog

Wow. I just noticed my last (admittedly pathetic) post was a full two weeks old. I realize the whole concept of a blog is fresh, dynamic content delivered on a daily basis and I apologize to everyone who expects us to stay on top of the new beer announcements and other news. In my own defense we've been ridiculously busy for the last 2 months, and it doesn't show any signs of letting up until after the holidays. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that we're being discovered by more and more people every day, but I don't have nearly as much time to spend ruminating on things, describing new beers, or finding humorous beer-related stories on the web.

On the topic of new beer notes and reviews; I expect to be receiving a few new things tomorrow, and I'll supplement that post with a round up of other recent arrivals that may have slipped under the radar, but I have something else in mind for today.


Public Tastings


We're having some difficulty finding distributors and brewery reps to lead tastings here at the BierCafe, so we're going to start hosting more of our own. I was hoping that the following questions and discussion points would generate some input from you, our loyal customers and blog readers.

Discussion Point #1: Free Tastings

Honestly, we'd love to give beer away, but the fact of the matter is that beer is a very low-margin product, and on our small scale we simply can't afford to do that on a regular basis. If we were a giant grocery store selling a huge volume of beer things might be different, but (thankfully) we're not.

One option we had considered is charging a nominal fee (say $3-5) and then offering people a voucher or coupon good for $3-5 off a purchase of $25 or more on beers featured in the tasting. This would allow people to basically have "free samples" as long as they turned around and purchased a few that they liked, and if it turns out that you don't like any of them at least you've only spent a couple bucks to educate yourself on things to avoid in the future.

The other option would be "beer fest style", pricing the samples individually based on cost and allowing people to buy as few or as many as they were interested in.

Any comments or other thoughts on how we can keep the tastings free or reasonably priced without losing our shirts in the process?


Discussion Point # 2: Themes

How would you like to see the tastings laid out: by brewery, style, region, or some other method we haven't thought of?

There's value in each scenario: Sampling a range of things from the same brewery can teach you a thing or two about "house character." Secondarily, sampling a wide range of styles as interpreted by a single brewery and mentally comparing them to others in that style that you had in the past can be enlightening.

Similarly, sampling by style or region can be an eye-opening experience when you realize just how much variation there is between ten different Belgian Dubbels or India Pale Ales.


Discussion Point #3: Time and Day

We've been running most of our tasting on weeknights from 5 to 7 on the assumption that people would enjoy getting off from work and stopping by to sample a couple things and grab a beer or two for the evening. Several people have commented that they'd prefer the tastings to be later so they can eat first, and other people have said that they'd like for tastings to be held on Saturday or Sunday afternoon when there's not much else going on. What would you prefer?


Thanks in advance for any comments or suggestions you feel like offering up! Since the blog format isn't very conducive to forum-style conversation and rebuttal I've posted this on PortlandBeer.org as well. If you haven't been there yet I highly recommend it. There's a large contingent of beer geeks in PDX, and a plethora of events, so by all rights this site should be hopping, but at this point it's still pretty quiet. It's everything you want to know about our local beer scene in one handy spot.

Let the flood of comments begin...

The Ultimate Camping Beer?

You be the judge.