Tugboat Brewing Company of Portland is a quaint and affable public house with an interesting assortment of house brewed American real ales.  Made in the tradition of the classic English styles, Tugboat’s specialties and guest taps often play second fiddle to the cozy, relaxed atmosphere of the pub.  In the alley of SW Ankeny just off Broadway in downtown Portland, Tugboat is stumbling distance from an array of true-to-Portland establishments such as Mary’s Club, a famed strip club just around the corner, Sauce Box, a swanky cocktail lounge with down tempo DJs and perusing hipster-chic regulars, and the neighboring Bailey’s Taproom with its twenty microbrews on tap served in a clean, open coffeehouse environment.  Tugboat, with it’s charm, comes grit and a lived-in living room space where hunkering down in a candle-lit booth with one of their many books is as normative as boisterous laughter shared over a cloud of cigarette smoke.  The staff are friendly with a tight knit charismatic fervor that illuminates even the most shrouded, musky corners of what is a real public house.  For the beer geek, the Tugboat is a worthy stop, featuring a fair assortment of unpasteurized, unfiltered Anglican grog brewed in their on-site brewery.  This consists of Rubbermaid horse trough mashtun visible from inside the pub.  Italian pickle buckets are used as fermenters.  This “open barreled” set-up, may be a clue to some of the inconsistencies and off-flavors of the Tugboat beer line-up, but beer snobbery is not what they are about, and if you are, they offer a nice selection of guest taps ranging from Caldera Red to Fishtale WInterfish, Anchor Porter to Klamath Basin Pale.  For the Beer Advocate or Rate Beer critic, the Tugboat will likely not score high, but still shines as a diamond in the rough of sorts.  Most of the beer geeks will be in the cleaner, tidier Bailey’s Taproom across the way lost in their laptops, taking notes of the latest greatest seasonal release.  Both places have their charm, mind you, but Tugboat is it’s own entity.  Like a time warp to a fictional pulp novel or a scene from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Tugboat seems like the kind of pub where lost dreams are reminisced about and old friends catch up until the wee hours.

As for beers, here’s a look at some of the beers you might find at Tugboat:

Tugboat Amber Ale: Poured a murky to light amber with no body.  Caramel malt notes, thin and watery.  Slightly acidic and dull as sin.  Difficult to fully palate over the plume of smoke in my general vacinity.