Dave Knows Portland

Fort George Brewery and Public House in Astoria

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Co-piloting is hard. I was craving a beer. Also homemade sausage. Lo and behold in Astoria, Oregon there’s a brewery and attached pub that makes its own sausages!

At Fort George Brewery and Public House I ordered a pint of the excellent Cavatica Stout. Heather partook of a Dakota Fanning, a concoction containing cranberry juice and Squirt. We shared the sausage appetizer, a platter of housemade pork sausages accompanied by flat bread, cheese, and mustard. The sausage was fantastic. There were four kinds; a sweet Italian, a boudin blanc, one with caraway seeds and one containing bits of Tillamook cheddar.

Fools that we are we ordered more food. Fort George’s fish and chips is made with locally caught albacore tuna. The dense chunks of albacore were battered and deep fried as usual. I prefer lighter and moister cod in my fish and chips but this hearty version was good, though a bit dry. The portion was huge too; I tried to help Heather with her order, but after my albacore steak and melted cheddar “tuna melt” I couldn’t handle more than a few bites. I did, however, make room for the intriguingly monikered North II – Grand Crüe, a Belgiany strong ale with a host of ingredients including pilsner malt, belgian wit yeast, raw Hawaiian cane sugar, oats, and lemon grass. The combination was delicious and lighter than you’d expect. It reminded me of a sweet-tart Madeira wine. The bartender informed us that North II – Grand Crüe will be available at Portland’s Holiday Ale Fest in a couple weeks.

Tiny Astoria, Oregon (population 10,045) has three breweries (that I know of): Astoria Brewing Company, Fort George Brewery and Public House, and an outpost of the Rogue empire. So that’s a brewery for every 3348 residents.

By contrast, within Portland’s city limits 30 breweries (more than any other city in the world) produce beer for 568,380 people. That’s a brewery for every 18,946 Portlanders.

So by my calculations Astoria has nearly 6 times more breweries than Portland!

I’ll be heading back to Astoria when I can, hopefully for more than a day trip, to try the rest of Fort George’s, and Astoria’s, beers.

Heather has blogged more about our trip to Astoria here: Tank Full Of Gas, Chapter X: Astoria, Oregon

A visit to New Deal Distillery

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The highlight of our visit to New Deal Distillery open house Saturday was tasting the yet-to-be-released chocolate vodka.  From what we gathered it will be called Mud Puddle, and will be available in spring.  The warm buttery elixir was poured from a masking tape labeled bottle into clear plastic sampling thimbles. It smells of cocoa and is not sweet.  We ran into Markovitch from Tasting & Complaining, who recommends mixing it with New Deal’s searingly hot pepper-infused vodka, Hot Monkey.  A Muddy Monkey perhaps?

Loft Organic Liqueurs also took part in the open house.  New Deal partners with the Emoryville, California based company to produce the first certified organic liqueurs in the U.S.  The real fruit flavored and agave-syrup sweetened liqueurs are limoncello-inspired. My favorite flavor was the Spicy Ginger. The tangerine-cello tasted of real fruit. We also sampled the lemon grass and lavender varieties.

Meat Cheese Bread and Saint Cupcake provided the perfect snacks to accompany our booze foraging.

Related Post: A Tour of Artisan Spirits

Portland Hidden Gem: breakfast sandwich at Fehrenbacher Hof

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Behind the Goose Hollow Inn, about a quarter of the way up the steepish slope of SW 19th, one can find the best corned beef with reuben sauce breakfast sandwich in town, at the Fehrenbacher Hof Coffee House (1125 SW 19th).

Fehrenbacher Hof also makes available the typical assortment of pastries, and prepares above average espresso concoctions, but I’m talking about the breakfast sandwiches; You can also get it with veggie sausage or ham, in lieu of corned beef.

It’s cooked in some sort of salamander broiler or pizza oven; I’m not sure. But the delicious sandwiches come out toasty and hot with the cheese melted and crispy around the edges, kinda like a homemade Cheez-it. The reuben sauce (and in all likelihood the corned beef) is the same used in the planet-famous Goose Hollow Inn reubens; as I understand it the two businesses are both part of the Bud Clark empire.

Bonus apple slices!

Movie Review: Year of the Fish

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Year of the Fish is a modern adaptation of the Cinderella story set in New York City’s Chinatown. Cinderella is young émigré Ye Xian. She has come to America seeking a job so she can send money back to her sick father in China. Mrs. Su, a distant relative, takes her in with the promise of employment. The employment turns out to be indentured servitude in a massage parlor; Mrs. Su is this story’s Evil Stepmother. When Ye Xian refuses to give customers the requisite “happy ending” she is forced to be the massage parlor’s scullery maid and janitor. Prince Charming is a young man named Johnny who plays the accordion in a hipster jazz band.

The Cinderella story most of us are familiar with largely shapes the film, but there are a few twists.  Some elements come from Ye Xian, an earlier Chinese version of the story.  Others from the Slavic folktales about Baba Yaga.

The film is “animated” in that the live action video was gone over with a rotoscope-style digital painting process. The result is water-colorish. At times the effect is stunning and beautiful: in close-ups of actors’ faces, impressionistic shots of the city streets, the parks, a fountain. But mostly I found it distracting and obfuscating. I expected a transition to live action at some crucial point, a la Wizard of Oz‘s black and white to color, but that was not in the filmmakers’ plan. Like with subtitles, however, after a few minutes I almost forgot about it . . . until it became distracting again.

Some plot revelations late in the film make one wonder why there was no inkling earlier (script? editing? time constraints?). Chinatown, when it appears, is one of the most interesting characters in the film, but the depressing confines of the massage parlor get much more air time. Some of the clichés seem heavy handed, even allowing for a fairy tale’s lack of nuance.

Randall Duk Kim, who plays three characters in the film, performs each with gusto (his performance reminds me of Jeremy Irons‘ in Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. Shitty movie, but you cannot tell me he is not having a fantastic time). I also enjoyed the performance of Tsai Chin, as the acerbic Mrs. Su. An Nguyen and Ken Leung, as the Cinderella and Prince Charming, respectively, give good, if somewhat wide-eyed, performances.

But the highlight of the film for me was the accordion music (written and performed by Ted Reichman).

Year of the Fish premieres in Portland Friday at the Hollywood Theatre.