Brew Pubs--If you're a beer connoisseur, you'll probably find yourself with little time-out from your brew tasting to see any of Portland's other attractions. They're brewing beers in Portland the likes of which you won't taste anywhere else this side of the Atlantic. This is the heart of the Northwest craft-brewing explosion and has more brew pubs and microbreweries than any other city in the United States. Although many of Portland's craft beers are available in restaurants, you owe it to yourself to go directly to the source.
Brew pubs have become big business in Portland, and there are now glitzy upscale pubs as well as funky warehouse-district locals. What this means is that no matter what vision you have of the ideal brew pub, you're likely to find your dream come true here in Portland. Whether you're wearing bike shorts or a three-piece suit, there's a pub in Portland where you can get a handcrafted beer, a light meal, and a vantage for enjoying the convivial atmosphere that only a pub can provide.
With almost three dozen brew pubs in the Portland metropolitan area, the McMenamins chain is Portland's biggest brew pub empire, and the owners of this empire think of themselves as its court jesters. McMenamins pubs tend to mix brewing fanaticism with a Deadhead aesthetic. Throw in a bit of historic preservation and a strong belief in family-friendly neighborhood pubs and you'll understand why these pubs are so popular.
Though espresso is the drink that drives Portland, relaxing over a flavorful pint of ale is what draws educated beer drinkers to the city's dozens of brewpubs. No other city in America has such a great concentration of brewpubs, and it was here that the craft brewing business got its start in the mid-1980s. Today, brewpubs continue to proliferate, with cozy neighborhood pubs vying for business with big, polished establishments.
To fully appreciate what the city's craft brewers are concocting, it helps to have a little beer background. There are four basic ingredients in beer: malt, hops, yeast, and water. The first of these, malt, is made from grains, primarily barley and wheat, which are roasted to convert their carbohydrates into the sugar needed to grow yeast. The amount of roasting the grains receive during the malting process will determine the color and flavor of the final product. The darker the malt, the darker and more flavorful the beer or ale. There is a wide variety of malts, each providing its own characteristic flavor. Yeast in turn converts the malt's sugar into alcohol; there are many different strains of yeast that all lend different characters to beers. The hops are added to give beer its characteristic bitterness. The more "hoppy" the beer or ale, the more bitter it becomes. The Northwest is the nation's only commercial hop-growing region, with 75% grown in Washington and 25% grown in Oregon and Idaho.
Lagers, which are cold-fermented, are the most common beers in America and are made from pale malt with a lot of hops added to give them their characteristic bitter flavor. Pilsner, a style of beer that originated in the mid-19th century in Czechoslovakia, is a type of lager. Ales, which are the most common brews served at microbreweries, are made using a warm fermentation process and usually with more and darker malt than is used in lagers and pilsners. Porters and stouts get their characteristic dark coloring and flavor from the use of dark, even charred, malt.
To these basics, you can then add a few variables. Fruit-flavored beers, which some disparage as soda pop beer, are actually an old European tradition and, when considering the abundance of fresh fruits in the Northwest, are a natural here. If you see a sign for nitro beer in a pub, it isn't referring to their explosive brews--it means they've got a keg charged with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide. The nitrogen gives the beer an extra creamy head. (A nitro charge is what makes Guinness Stout so distinctive.) Cask-conditioned ales, served almost room temperature and with only their own carbon dioxide to create the head, are also gaining in popularity. While some people find these brews flat, others appreciate them for their unadulterated character.
It all adds up to is a lot of variety in Portland pubs. Cheers!
