Dave Knows Portland

Archives for September 2009

Bring on the sour beers!

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As readers of this blog know, I’m not a fan (with the rare exception) of the Northwest style of IPA. I acknowledge and accept that the IPA has its place, and the style is truly loved by some, but the trend over the last few years for virtually every big beer bar and virtually every beer festival to dedicate a quarter to a half of the available taps to IPAs has been an ongoing irritation.

Rodenbach Red - on of my favorite tart beers!So it was with great pleasure that I read a recent post on Dr. Wort’s Buzz-erk Beer Blog: Shifting Beer Trends: IPA OUT – SOUR IN!

Nate calls the LATE IPA trend, the “obscene hop content” trend. I for one will be glad to see it die down…. Nothing worse than walking into a pub or brewpub that has 85% of their beer selection IPA’s. That’s just obnoxious!

I think anyone would, rightly, balk if 85% of taps were dedicated to sour beers. But this is how it is with IPAs right now. My (perhaps naive) hope is that a few of the IPA taps be replaced, not exclusively with sour ales, but a variety of other styles! However, if all IPA taps were replaced with sour ale taps, I would enjoy that a lot more than the current situation.

In the blog post Dr. Wort reminds us of the beer style trends that came before IPAs: stouts, pale ales, weizens. And explains what, exactly, a sour beer is. For one thing, the moniker encompasses multiple styles:

It’s really way to generalized a term covering a vast expression of “Styles” from Lambics to Flemish Reds to Berliner Weisse. All three of the beers are completely different from each other. Generally, all these beer are Tart or Sour or funkified to some degree with Wild Yeasts and Bacteria.

Read the whole post:

And recently I stumbled upon a great resource for finding Lambic and wild ales in Portland:

September 19-20 (part 2): Mini Beer Fest, Sauerkraut Festival, Mt. Angel Oktoberfest

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This weekend is crazy full of activities for the Portlander, virtually all of which involve beer. Yesterday I blogged about four such events (Alberta Street Fair, Biketoberfest, Pirate Fest, and Beer with your Art), and today I have a few more for you . . .

1stminibeerfest2009The Mini Beer Fest takes place at the Green Dragon (928 SE 9th) all weekend (11am-9pm Saturday, 11 am-7 pm Sunday) Admission is $10 for admission, and includes 5 drink tickets.

60+ beers will be available from 30 small breweries, all of which produce fewer than 1000 barrels per year. Visit On Tap for more details.

Meanwhile there are at least two regional events you should bear in mind: The Mt. Angel Oktoberfest and the Sauerkraut Festival (it’s all about the kraut!) in Scappoose. Too many goddamn choices this weekend!

September 19-20: Alberta Street Fair, Biketoberfest, Pirate Fest, and Beer with your Art

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Plenty of events to choose from this weekend, and thank goodness all of them have beer!

piratefest09First up, the fourth annual Portland Pirate Festival takes place at Cathedral Park.

I have not made it to any previous Pirate Festivals (I have no swashbuckling outfit for one thing), so all I can tell you is check out the website. There’s music, dance and performance, historical reenactments (with cannons!), stuff for kids, and of course there will be beer!

The aaarrrs and blimeys begin at 10am both Saturday and Sunday, September 19 and 20th. And continue irritating until 10pm Saturday and 6pm Sunday.

biketoberfest2009Hopworks Urban Brewery (2944 SE Powell) his sponsoring and hosting their first Biketoberfest, this Saturday, September 19. What, exactly, is a Biketoberfest? It’s a FREE Bike in Oktoberfest – Bikes, Fresh Hop Beers, March Fourth, Bike Builders, More! Heather and are planning on bicycling over there ourselves early in the afternoon (the fest runs from noon until 10pm) before heading to NE Portland for perhaps the last street fair of the season . . .

Alberta Street FairYup, the Alberta Street Fair takes place this Saturday, September 19th, from 11am to 6pm. Like in previous years, the website provides virtually no useful information about the festival – nothing about the vendors, musicians, or a map of the activities – just the date and time. I can surmise, however, that it will be like previous Alberta Street Fairs, Last Thursdays, and the Art Hops, which means the street will be closed to cars from about 11th to about 30th, with all the usual Portland street fair accoutrements, and because it is Alberta there may unfortunately be clowns.

artandbeer200And last, but definitely not least, local artist Eric Steen’s Art and Beer at the Museum takes place Saturday, September 19th from 6pm to midnight at the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park). Here’s the artist’s statement for the intriguing event:

Portland-based artist, Eric Steen, presents an event that combines drinking beer and experiencing art. For one night only, you can sample three new beers from Laurelwood, Lompoc, and Lucky Lab at the Portland Art Museum. A brewer from each of the three Portland microbreweries received a tour of the museum’s collection, selected an artwork, and made a beer that will complement that artwork. This beer sampling is part of a one night event called “Shine A Light: A Night at the Museum”, an event that will host a number of performances, time-based art actions, music, and more. The entry fee for the event is $12 and will give you access to all the art and performances, the museums galleries, and unlimited sampling of the three new beers.

I also wrote about this event a couple weeks ago: Art and Beer at the Portland Art Museum.

Chapman Vaux’s Swift Watch 2009

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Last year I witnessed the Chapman Vaux’s Swifts for the first time, and was duly impressed. I dragged Mile73‘s Heather along, and she too, thought it was amazing:

There were probably about 500 people there watching. Families, couples, dogs, kids and babies. As the flock of birds undulated and regrouped, a peregrine falcon sliced through them. They alternately chased it away and swirled to avoid it. The crowd cheered like a sporting event.

The swifts spiraled and circled the drain until it was nearly dark. The last few disappeared into the stack and the crowd burst into applause.

It was a spectacle. Totally worthwhile if you live in Portland. Go see it. I mean, all those birds fit in the chimney! Come ON!

Here’s Heather’s video from last year:

Chapman Swifts 9.18.08 from Mile73 on Vimeo.

Check out these sources for more information about the phenomenon:

The spectacle continues, approximately, another couple weeks, but go now if you don’t want to miss it. Heather and I are going soon!

Gourmet Magazine visits Portland again, tries the pastrami at Kenny and Zuke’s

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GourmetGourmet Magazine, like the New York Times, has lately become obsessed with Portland (perhaps due to the nefarious marketing of Travel Portland?).*

It started last November, when a stunning claim was made in the pages of the magazine in a fawning article about the local restaurant scene: Portland today is to the culinary arts what Paris was to the visual arts a hundred years ago. More recently, in somewhat of an anti-climax, Portland’s waffles were lauded.

So it should not come as a surprise that Gourmet visited again.

In an article in the October issue, Meet the New Deli, author David Sax notes that for the last 50 years the Jewish delicatessen has been on the decline.

In New York City alone, where this vigorous symbol of Ashkenazic cooking once flourished among immigrants, thousands have been reduced to a scattered few dozen. Cultural assimilation, dietary trends, and economics are largely to blame, but there’s also a culinary factor at work.

Untitled-1But he argues there has been a renaissance lately, and Portland’s Kenny and Zuke’s is one of the shining examples.

The people who work there are young, idealistic, and enthusiastic. Each morning, a trio of hippies roll tomorrow’s bagels by hand (the dough rests overnight), then dip the previous batch in malted water and bake them for breakfast. At night, Mathew Scaletta, a shaggy-haired 24-year-old who grew up canning fish in Alaska, preps and smokes the pastrami until it is dark red, with an intense, brackish tang and hints of peppery spice that meld perfectly with the rich marbling. The meat is steamed for close to three hours before being hand-cut to order and placed on Gordon and Zukin’s rye bread. Studded with kimmel (caraway) seeds and baked to a malty brown, the sourdough is dense and fragrant—a far cry from the homogenized loaves that most delicatessens pass off as rye. “I can buy other rye cheaper,” says Gordon. “But, damn, it’s good! Are we going to put our pastrami on a lesser rye? I don’t think so.”

And I agree with the assessment of Kenny and Zuke’s – the rye bread is fantastic, and the pastrami is amazing (though not as good as my friend Brent’s homemade, backyard smoked, version!).

Read the rest at Gourmet‘s website (if you can stomach all the pop up and slide across ads – gah!): Meet the New Deli.

* Per commenter extramsg: “Gourmet has an editor from Portland, which helps. It’s on their radar, not just a long-distance suburb of Seattle or San Francisco. Also, David Sax wrote the article independently and sold it/the idea to Gourmet. It’s really a follow-up to his book “Save the Deli” which comes out soon and highlights the best delis across the country and laments their disappearance. Caplansky’s and K & Z’s opened after the book was pretty much written so they didn’t make the book, yet they’re both exactly what he’s been wishing for.”