Sometimes we can forget how freakin’ cool it is to have a Deschutes Brewpub in downtown Portland. Not long ago, you’d have to make the three hour trek out to Bend to get your paws on some of the exclusives that are now just a hop, skip, and a jump away. Even better, too, is that now that there are more locations, this means more tasty one-off Deschutes’ brews in general.

This week, as usual, we rolled into Deschutes Portland and were gladdened by the presence of some interesting new brews.

Today, Monday March 8, 2010 you can taste Ninkasi’s Spring Reign seasonal release and and their year-round line-up of Total Domination, Believer Imperial Red, and Tricerahops Imperial IPA. Spring Reign and a very rare small keg of Critical Hit Barleywine will also be featured on draft. If you didn’t try the The Critical Hit at Lucky Lab’s Barleywine fest this weekend this is your last chance. We tried it there and highly recommend it to any fan of big, hopped-the-hell-out brews!

California’s Bear Republic’s HopFest hits Portland, Oregon with some phenomenal hoppy brews.

What: The release of Double Mountain’s new beer “The Empire Strikes Back”

When: Tonight, Thursday, March 4, 2010,  5-9pm

Get your stunt liver primed for this coming Friday and Saturday, March 5 and 6. You’re gonna need it. Lucky Lab is hosting the thirteenth annual Barleywine and Big Beer Festival at their NW Quimby brewpub. The spacious setting is the perfect venue for such an event. In the leading city for craft beer, this brewpub isone of Portland, Oregon’s finest.

A recent tour of the cooler thanks to brewer Ben Flerchinger revealed nearly 60 beers waiting to be tapped. More are still on there way. According to the Lab technician, the average alcohol by volume of all these brews is 9.89%. Hot damn!

Check out the New School blog’s preview and picks for this year’s festival. There’s a list of the beers there, too.

The Barleywine and Big Beer Fest will occur at 1945 NW Quimby in Portland, Oregon.

Brewpublic visits Eugene, Oregon to explore the beers of the Central Willamette Valley. Here we catch up with Oakshire Brewing, the humble brewers of delicious beer. Fresh off the heals of the beloved KLCC Beer Festival, we get a glimpse into the seasonal, specialty, and one-off beers thanks to brewery founder Jeff Althouse.

Portsmouth Brewmaster Tod Mott

Recently you may have read the New School Beer Blog’s post about the hype surrounding Russian River’s Pliny the Younger Triple IPA. To some, a highly sought after brew such as this should inevitably lead folks to extreme measures. For others, the hype repels those who believe firmly there are equal if not superior brews available that can be more easily obtained. Regardless of what your stance is on such a topic, there will continue to remain a fervent desire to possess such noteworthy specimens.

Relating to this sort of buzz for the next best beer, Portsmouth Brewery of Portsmouth, New Hampshire is preparing themselves for a whirlwind of beer geeks angling for their dibs on the brewery’s most anticipated brew, Kate the Great. Kate is an imperial stout that brewmaster Tod Mott has been making since his first days with the brewery in 2003. In 2007, Beer Advocate hailed the brew, named for Catherine the Great, a Russian Empress of the 18th Century, as the #2 beer on the planet, and the #1 beer in the United States. Mott, a humble brewer with a masters degree in ceramics, has brewed professionally with Harpoon, Commonwealth, Back Bay Brewing, Quincy Ships (where he was a founding partner) and, most recently, the Tap in Haverhill, where he designed and set up the brewing system. Many of today’s modern brewers in New England can thank Mott for his guidance in brewing and name him as an inspiration to their craft.

Brewpublic will be heading south this weekend to visit the beer hot spots in Eugene and Corvallis. As expected, the weekend here in Beervana promises a slew of great tasting opportunities that you might regret missing out on. Even if you don’t happen to find a keg much hyped Russian River Pliny the Younger before it blows, you might want to seriously consider making it out for the following pours:

Upright Brewing’s Oyster Stout Release Party

In the beer world for sometime, there’s a been a healthy competitiveness between brewers that often aids in the evolution of styles, flavor preferences, and brewing techniques. This natural progression found in most facets of life keeps things interesting and can help extricate us from the doldrums of boring conventionalism. With modern craft brewing we’ve witnessed this manifestation on a variety of fronts. Perhaps most notable was the Boston Beer Company and Dogfish Head’s race for the strongest brew. Utopias or World Wide Stout? The debate of what constitutes a beer, how it should be brewed, and what ultimately discerns it as the strongest remains a hot topic of debate. Was Sam Adams’ Utopias “cheating” by using spirit soaked barrels and not being carbonated. The idea of charging in excess of $200 for a bottle of the Utopias troubled some folks. And even the $10 a bottle price tag of WWS turned off many craft beer people. And another question, was the whole thing a gimmick? Perhaps, but it made for a fun discussion at a beer store or at a Beer Advocate tasting. It bore into the minds of beer geeks around the world much the same way the macro lager breweries have tried to under-carb one another for their audiences.

Now there’s a new arms race of sorts being waged betwixt Scottish entrepreneurial brewery BrewDog and Germany’s Schorschbräu. Known for their innovation as much as for their gimmicky, snotty marketing presence as they are for their controversial envelope pushing, BrewDog captured the craft beer world’s attention three months ago by announcing their sole entitlement of having brewed the “world’s strongest beer” through a comical, cutesy, lighthearted video. The beer named Tactical Nuclear Penguin claimed to surpass Schorschbräu’s record of 31% ABV reached in 2008. According to a video disseminated on Vimeo and YouTube, TNP weighed in at 32% ABV. In this video, founders James Watt and Martin Dickie dress as penguins and speak of their accomplishment achieved through barrel aging  and iced distillation.

Golden Valley's Mark Vickery with Pinot Noir barrels filled with stout

Brewpublic took a day trip to McMinnville, Oregon, where, in the heart of Oregon Wine Country Golden Valley Brewery pours up some delicious handcrafted beers. GVB Brewmaster Mark Vickery was on hand to discuss their most recent release, a highly anticipated small batch Imperial Stout aged in Pinot Noir barrels. Barrels from neighboring Panther Creek Cellars, one of Oregon’s highest regarded producers of Pinot, are used for this pioneering brew known as Black Panther. A version of GVB’s regular stout was also aged in the barrels and available on tap exclusively at the brewery. The first commercial brewery in Oregon to use Pinot Noir barrels to age beer, Golden Valley’s big cat is an out of this world dark, rich beer with a melange of notes ranging from creamy oak and earthy tannins to robust roasty malts and piquantly cherubic hops. Each year we make certain have a couple of these laid down in our building vertical.