I'm slacking, flashback/link post.

(Found these today! The spuds was only released in 1987 for the openings of new bars, and it's a light!)

I've been slacking on keeping this blog updated, but I've drank a lot of beer since my last post none-the-less.

For posterity's sake, I'll make note of the recent highlights.

We'll start w/ the hood river fresh hop festival. Anyone who remembers reading about the big (and somewhat comedic, in retrospect) ordeal that occurred at my last hood river hopfest, will find this report incredibly boring in comparison. I went, the weather was nice, I enjoyed some of the beer, and then I went camping on Mt. Hood again; at the scene of the disaster. This time I felt good, got a great night's sleep, and felt awesome the next day; when I watched the Eagles on TV with a few more beers. Unfortunately, I think the part I enjoyed about going to this festival the most wasn't that I had a great time or particularly enjoyed the beers. It was just good to not have to worry about what I missed. I might be confident enough to just not go next year, we'll see. To be fair, the fest was well run, the selection was great, and the value was good, so there aren't any complaints there. I just don't really like pales and IPA's much anymore, so fresh-hop fests just don't do it for me like they used to. I think my favorite beers of the event were extras that weren't even fresh hopped. I liked the bourbon barrel aged oatmeal stout from big horse, and the redwood smoked lager from upright the most.

After the fresh hop fest, I had a new friend in town that I had previously only known from beeradvocate.com. He was visiting from Germany with his lovely new wife, on their honeymoon. He had previously provided me with a copies of the FANTASTIC beer show, Tournee Generale, and then later, sent me a surprise package from Europe, containing a bottle of westvelteren 12; a beer that I had only ever consumed in Belgium, and hadn't seen again since. We both had busy schedules while they were in town, but we managed to get in a couple of bars while they were around, and they saw many more on their own. First, we had dinner at produce row, then we cruised over to the cascade barrel house, where we enjoyed such wonderful beers as bourbonic plague, vlad the imp aler, beck berry, funk II, sang noir, and noyeaux.

I've been back to cascade twice since that night. A few beers have changed, the crowd has become more varied (this is a good thing, I can only stare at other beer geeks for so long), and they've announced the much anticipated bottle release of vlad and bourbonic, which will take place this saturday from 9 am to 6 pm; coinciding with a performance by Ron's band at the barrel house.

Other than that, I've been buying and collecting beers, trying to put away a little cash for the release of Mother of all Storms at Pelican next month, and getting some sweet breweriana for the cave.

Oh, and a movie filmed a scene at my store today.

I promise to be more proactive on this blog in the near future.

hood river fresh hop festival

This past Saturday, I went to Hood River for the Hood River Fresh Hop Festival. Turn-out was fantastic, the rain was short lived, and the beers were great. I wish I had taken a couple of notes so I could produce a more detailed account of the day, but I was too busy drinking. What I can say is the the Vernon the Rabbit Slayer, that I had wanted to try last weekend, only to find a tapped out keg, was worth the additional weeks wait. Delicious fresh hop imperial IPA. Probably one of the most "traditional" tasting fresh hop beers of the fest (but not boring!), and an excellent and memorable example. I also really enjoyed the Ft. George Cohoporative Ale. This was a hoppy belgian inspired IPA. Yes, the belgian yeast did detract or even overpower the delicate notes I would have expected to pick up in a fresh hop beer, and maybe the style wasn't appropriate for showcasing them, but forgetting all that, it was GOOD. Spicy, sweet (but not overly so), hoppy, and with a nice head. It reminded me briefly of Urthel Hop-It, although it suffered by being force carbonated and not bottle conditioned like most of the finer examples of the style. Along with the Vernon the Rabbit Slayer, I had the Big Horse brewing "the strange", a fresh hop hemp ale using whole husked hemp seeds in the grain bill. I tried this one for the novelty of the ingredients, and while I probably would have enjoyed it any other day, I felt that compared to all the other brews I tried, this one was the lightest, and most bland. Good hot weather thirst quencher, but not the bold beer I could have used on that afternoon. The mutt from Lucky Lab was another classic example of a fresh hop brew. I think it turned out great, especially given that the hop profile was so loosely controlled. Double Mountain Killer Green was another fantastic beer. I got around to it a bit too late in the day to properly talk about it's flavor profile, but I look forward to maybe getting another shot at it this weekend, if I can work the Portland festival into my schedule. On top of these beers, I tried two stouts. One was an espresso stout, that was a bit too light bodied and light colored to meet my expectations of the style. The other was a "belgian espresso stout", and as my friend predicted, the belgian overpowered everything else about the beer, and made for a poor example of what this hybrid style could have been.

After the beer festival, we drove out onto Mt. Hood to find a place to camp. After finding a suitable area to set up, we made camp and got a fire going as I suffered the effects of drinking too many acidic beers and not drinking any water or eating enough food. Think pounding headache, loss of appetite, and queasiness. I retired early, but my friend stayed up another couple of hours, drinking cheap beer and tending to the fire. I remember briefly waking up as he entered the tent for the night. It had begun to drizzle, and we had a zipper failure on the front entrance to the tent. Still, we were also covered and sitting on a tarp, so I had faith we'd stay dry. Fast forward another couple of hours into the night. I woke up, and couldn't tell where I was in the tent. I dug out my cell phone to produce a little light, and when I illuminated the inside of the tent, I was even more confused. Turns out that somehow the tent had collapsed in the night. There was no visible exit to the tent, and I had to guide myself to find it by remembering how I had oriented myself before bed. Around this time, the tent collapsed further, and some ice water that had pooled on top of the tent entered through the failed zipper and dumped onto me and bag. Sitting is wet sleeping bag, which was sitting in a puddle in a collapsed tent, I decided to make a run for the truck, where I could take shelter under the cab cover, and change into dry clothes, which luckily I left in the truck and not with me in the tent. I loaded up my things into my sleeping bag, wiggled through the part of the opening in the front of the tent that I could find, and ran in my socks through a mixture of accumulated snow and rain to the truck. When I got there, I found that all the door were locked, which forced me to run back to the tent, and rouse my friend, who was too drunk to notice our predicament. When I finally got him to give me the keys, I ran back, hopped in, changed, and tried to sleep. It began to get REALLY cold, despite all my layers and my winter rated sleeping back. I had to close myself inside completely to keep warm. I remember thinking to myself, that I hoped I had dozed off and missed my friend hopping into the front of the truck, because if he had stayed in the tent, he surely would have been suffering the effects of hypothermia by now. Not long after a pounding came on the cab cover. It was my friend, who shouted between shivers "time to get, we have to get out of here, now!". I wasn't excited about leaving the relative warmth of my bag, but I had to get out and help break down what was left of our camp, so we could get out of there. At this point, the precipitation had fully solidified, and a blanket of white covered the wet slush that remained beneath. Running through this winter mix in shoes made for summer trail running was unpleasant to say the least. We had to break up packing into several short segments to allow our hands to thaw enough for the next task. Once we were fully loaded, we drove through the snow back to portland in the early evening, to crawl into warm beds and sleep well into the day. The last part of the disaster we didn't discover until the following afternoon. When we pulled the giant tarp that we had used the night before out of the back of the truck, it was covered in flat pieces of stone, averaging the size of a half dollar. The stone were sunken into the tarp to lay flush with the material, and they rather firmly affixed the surrounding material. With some pressure, they could be popped out of either side of the tarp. Sometime in the middle of the night, one of the stones which surely grew very hot as one of our fire pit boundaries, must have been doused with freezing rain and snow, causing it to explode, and send hot shrapnel everywhere. The little hot pieces of stone showered the tent and tarp, and melted partway through before cooling enough to lock in place. Luckily we were sheltered within, and the rain and snow stopped the risk of fire.

The tent went directly into the trash. I'm going to patch up the tarp with duct tape, and let it live to see another day.

It was the most adventurous (but not by much!) beer festival fallout we'd ever encountered.