Category: Front Page

Just about two years ago, Larry and Cam and the other Merry Cruxters at Bend’s titanic Crux Fermentation Project set out to make a blonde ale – that happiest, friendliest, and most approachable beer of summer – but with a very edgy, Northwesty, slightly confrontational gilding of our region’s signature beer virtue and primary aesthetic: More Hops.

They wanted to inject this lovely, bright, slightly lemony, mellow, Cocker Spaniel of a beer style with some teeth: it should, as most Northwesty ales do, bite back a bit. But, for this style, love bites, nibbles, a friendly nip, with no real pain. It would be quite a balancing act; taking the most crowd pleasin’ of ales and taking it Seriously. Not easy.

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I’ve spent countless hours in breweries across the United States and the world, and during that time I’ve discovered there are a few things every brewery should do or have. They may seem minor to some, but the devil is in the details, and these basic features never fail to make my experience significantly more enjoyable.

Remember, this is just my opinion, but if you disagree with me you’re completely wrong.

A well-designed chalkboard is a beautiful thing. Some breweries spend hours on these, and I’d consider a few I’ve seen works of art. Apart from the aesthetic enjoyment, when the right information is made available, it makes ordering beer much more efficient (and I tend to spend more). Here are the most important things to delineate on your chalkboard, apart from the basic beer information, of course:

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On this 11th go around through the game of “Stump the Chump”, we’ve got questions about everyone’s favorite topic: beer. We even questions about brewing and we’ve got a great and nearly overwhelming answer about hops from Mr. Hop, Stan Hieronymus.

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I’m way late getting to this and I sorta don’t care.

See, EVERY TIME I mention “Cold IPA” to anyone, I wind up having to explain what it is. But the fact is that I don’t fully understand what it is or where the fug one of my long-ago Facebook friends, Kevin Davey, got the idea. Kevin, who worked at America’s lager wizard, Will Kemper at Chckanut Brewing, was brewmaster at the Seattle branch of Gordon Biersch Brewpubs when we met via social media, and has now gone on to the brewmaster slot at Portland’s dynamic, lager-centric Wayfinder Beer, the brainchild of Double Mountain Brewing founder, Charlie Devereux, Matt Jacobsen of Portland’s sublime Sizzle Pie Pizza, and Rodney Muirhead, honcho at Podnah’s Pit BBQ and slick Mexi joint, La Taq. They opened Wayfinder in 2016, after doing what they all regarded as Job One. As Jacobsen put it, when asked how Wayfinder hit the ground running the brewery equivalent of a Usian Bolt 9 flat, “Hire a great brewer!“. They went after Kevin Davey not in spite of his long background in making lagers, primarily, but because of it.

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David Thomack looks up at the hop vines growing out from the plant out over strings at the Thomack home in Clarksville, Tenn., on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. Thomack uses the hops he grows in his garden in each of the beers he brews in his basement.

On the fridge he uses for his home-brews, a light stick of wood transformed into a tap signifies the lighter beer and a hockey puck from a Nashville Predators practice session accesses the dark beer at the Thomack home in Clarksville, Tenn., on Tuesday, April 27, 2021.

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“Good people drink good beer.”

If you spend long enough in craft beer circles, you will almost certainly hear this adage, cribbed from Hunter S. Thompson and repurposed as an industry motto. (As writer Dave Infante recently recounted, you might also hear that craft beer is “99% asshole-free.”) Here, both seem to suggest, is an industry full of fine folk, doing what they love and making beer—and maybe the world—better for it. What’s not to like about that?

The self-congratulatory sentiment these sayings express has pervaded craft beer for decades, alongside the industry’s understanding of itself as a morally upright underdog. Many make the parallel between David and Goliath and craft beer’s progenitors: Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, the U.S. beer market was dominated by multinational breweries, and the handful of brewers imagining an alternative to mass-produced, one-dimensional beer was an almost-literal drop in the ocean. And yet those scrappy upstarts succeeded in fighting back, in imagining a brighter future for beer, and in changing the way we drink for the better.

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If you’re like me…well, first, my sympathies

Really.

But, second, you might just be a total, hard-core, born ‘n’ bred Stout Freak. And if so, you probably have a fair number of private, mental categorizations that you use to sort out the roiling tsunami of today’s dark beers in general and American-style Stouts, in particular.

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Brits can take their watering holes very seriously. I was once scolded for asking how long a “pub crawl” would be. “This is a heritage walk!” our guide scoffed as he ushered us into our third pub for what was probably my fifth pint. He wasn’t joking: Entire groups are dedicated to documenting and maintaining the history of British pubs—the kind of thing that happens when many of these establishments predate the entire history of America. And these positions can be very serious, including one currently hiring that pays up to $40,000 for the year.

The Lincolnshire County Council has recently posted a job listing for a Heritage Project Officer. (If you’re noticing a pattern in how Brits use the term “heritage,” you’re not entirely wrong.) The ideal candidate will be “enthusiastic and creative”—which shouldn’t be too hard seeing as the one-year gig will require “researching and recording the architectural and social history of public houses along a 50 mile stretch of the Lincolnshire Coast from Grimsby to Boston.” (Lincolnshire is about three hours north of London along England’s eastern coast.)

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Crux Fermentation Project…Mouthful, right? And that’s just the name, which is why everybody just calls ’em Crux.

I call ’em “one of America’s Best breweries” and I have seen nothing to alter that judgment a millimeter since they opened, back in the summer of 2012. Led by the lone remaining original partner, former Deschutes brewmaster Larry Sidor, they have followed a measured, steady, unfailing curve to what can now only be called greatness and, during my self-imposed health/home hiatus, I abused their generosity and kindness greatly. They kept sending me beers I kept not writing.

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