beernesday

love beer and cider, will travel! i'm off to corvallis this weekend to pick up a case of my all-time favourite cider: 2 towns hop and stalk dry-hopped rhubarb cider and of course drink beer in and around corvallis and portland with a stop at the mcmenamins olympic club in centralia then, i'll be heading back to portland next weekend to pick up the rest of my breakside brewing bottle club 2015 beers, watch the whitecaps at providence park - where you can actually drink yummy craft beer and cider, and quality assure the fine beers being brewed and served in that wonderful city it's a tough life, but someone's gotta live it

i have been meaning to do a post about craft cider for a couple of weeks now (ever since camra's ciderwise event, in fact) and now the georgia straight has beaten me to it! i was fortunate enough to be sent a sample of the bc tree fruits cider, broken ladder, at the beginning of the month - in a lovely wooden box, with accompanying branded glassware i have nothing but good things to say about the cider it's crisp, it's tart, it's incredibly drinkable and it's a local product so much win! i am also a big fan of cider riot's offerings and not just because i find the cidermaker himself very attractive! abe makes the ciders in the cidery he built at his house in portland and imports them to vancouver (via copper & theory) if you can find any of the "never give an inch" blackberry cider, buy it! the "everybody pogo" is a dry, hoppy cider and is available year round so it should be relatively easy to find in vancouver then ...

i got to attend a backyard bbq and bottle share over the long weekend wanna see what we drank??     the two stand-outs for me were the breakside india golden ale and the double mountain devil's kriek tree's serendipity no. 8 was also stellar of the beers i regularly enjoy the gigantic ipa and driftwood 20 pounder continue to please me greatly! and i just can't say enough good things about the 2 towns hop and stalk cider i have one bottle of this baby left i want to save it for a special occasion, but i need to drink it soon! my life is really very difficult

You hear a lot about the breweries in Portland, but there are many other Oregon towns that offer an impressive number of breweries per capita. I had the opportunity to spend a weekend in Corvallis, about an hour and a half South of Portland. I thought there would be one or two good places for beer in a town of 50,000. Was I ever surprised when I started my research and came out with a long list of breweries and bottle shops. Not so surprising, I guess, when you take into account that Corvallis is home to Oregon State University, an international leader in the breeding and researching of hops. I couldn't make it to all the good beer on offer, but I gave it my best shot to hit as many as I could in a day and a night.   Any time I am travelling, I do beer research first, and usually take along a beer book or two (as well as my beer notebook).  For this trip I took Lisa Morrison's "Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest" as she had several entries for Albany and C...