After three days of bottling, Cascade Brewing at the Raccoon Lodge have completed filling 675 cases of their Kriek. This sour cherry ale offers a rich, lush, fruity nose and lactic tart mildly creamy refreshing flavor to match. Brewmaster Ron Gansberg says of this oak barrel-aged and carefully blended brew “Much like the Apricot (Ale), the Kriek offers a lot more of the fruit essence than the previous year’s. I think we really did it with this one.” And he’s right. There isn’t anything to critique about this particular brew. Gansberg adds “It will be interesting to see how this beer develops with age.”

Have you heard the news from Cascade Brewing? They’ve been bottling a deeply complex new Kriek. Plus, we’ve sampled brewmaster Ron Gansberg’s hops shoots that were harvested recently this late winter.

There’s a lot going on at Cascade Brewing these days. Their Raccoon Lodge was recently named as one of the world’s top 50 brewpubs in the world by RateBeer.com (See other breweries’ Northwest’s RateBeer accolades on a post here by Geoff Kaiser of Seattle Beer News). Further, nationally circulated Draft Magazine named Cascade’s Vlad the Impaler as one of the best 25 beers of 2009. Cascade’s Apricot Ale made Draft’s 2008 best of list as well.  On top of all this, the Cascade crew are working vigorously to get a new spacious barrel room and pub open at SE Belmont and 9th. They hope to be open some time this spring. We can’t wait!

Cascade brewmaster Ron Gansberg peruses through Draft Magazine

Brewpublic Visits Cascade Brewing at Raccoon Lodge from Brewpublic.com

Those of you who read this site and do not frequent Jeff Alworth’s Beervana blog are likely few and far between. Alworth’s knack for words reveal a truly mindful respect for craft beer. The Satori is his year-end award allocated for a singular beer that shines above the rest in the readily available Oregon marketplace. After staging a public poll for which he takes his readers’ tastes into consideration, Alworth crowns a champion. This year, unsurprisingly, his declaration heralded the fabulous work of Alex Ganum end company at Portland’s Upright Brewing.

With any beer preference polling, you can count on campaigning and ballot-stuffing, but in the end, it was Alworth who made the final stamp. As unsurprising as a single brewery claiming multiple people’s choice awards in the pages of Northwest Brewing News, or the fact that Ashville, NC could actually challenge Portland, OR for thee “Beertown USA” (still laughing about this one), you can count on a push via social media to sway the projected public opinion relating to such superlatives. Thank goodness, our man, Jeff, had good sense to disregard such clicksmanship. He writes:

Four is a truly original beer, though its lineage is long. I suspect that a time-traveler could take this beer to Southern Belgium in the 1880s and, with its wheat and lactic zing, it would be recognizable to the locals who loved tart, rustic beers. Nothing like it is regularly available in Oregon, and it is a great addition to our slate of regular beers. I’m pleased to call it my Satori Award winner for 2009–and I hope it will continue to be brewed here for a good, long time.

You’d think the prior weekend’s Holiday Ale Fest would have slowed us down this weekend, but again, there’s just too many things to attend to in the world of beer. Our little slice of heaven we like to call Beervana was host to several noteworthy undertakings featuring some spectacular tasting opportunities. Aside from all the great bottled brews we’ve been scooping up around town, these grand get-togethers made for yet another wonderful weekend.

On Thursday and Friday, I was fortunate to hang out with our friends at the Raccoon Lodge where Imagineers Ron Gansberg, Curtis Bain, and the Cascade boys were bottling up a special blend known as Sang Rouge. Cascade Brewing has not bottled a commercial release in roughly a year, and this sour bottle conditioned red is a real treasure. After tasting some stellar barrel-aged brews from the coffers including a 2008 and 2009 Sang Noir, Bourbonic Plague, and cellared bottles of the Cuvee du Jongleur and the Five Thread, my weekend was ready to get in full swing. Thanks, Cascade!

After cleaning up and grabbing some food, we headed off to New Old Lompoc’s SideBar to celebrate the kick off of Chanukah with some fantabulous new brews including the centerpiece of the event, Sam Orlansky’s 8 Malty Nights, a chocolate rye beer with a rich full-bodied warmer. The beer along with Lompoc’s brewers was blessed by Orlansky’s childhood friend, Rabbi Bradley Greenstein. The packed little barrel room was evidence of the great things Lompoc has been involved with lately. L’chaim! We also enjoyed a spectacular Cherry Lechter ale brewed with a bit of Brettanomyces. And what would a Lompoc holiday party be without a mouthwatering pint of the hoppy C-Son’s Greetings.

In recent months you may have noticed a small Pacific Northwest resurgence in Gose brews among other obscure beer styles. The Gose is a style of beer that has a checkered past and during periods in its evolution has all but disappeared from the planet.

The Gose style dates back to the early 18th Century in the town of Goslar, Germany, in the Lower Saxony in the northwest slopes of the Harz Mountains. Brewed with at least 50% malted wheat in the grain bill, Gose beer fell outside of the Reinheitsgebot due to the use of salt and coriander spice. However, the beer was allowed special exception due to it being considered a regional specialty. Goses became so popular in Leipzig, a city now consisting of more than half a million people, that several regional breweries started brewing Goses themselves. By the end of the 19th Century, it was considered to be the local style of Leipzig and there were countless Gosenschänke in the city.

Brewpublic’s Quebecer correspondent Marc Demeule recaps a malt-filled weekend in October where he returns to Portland for more of what he loves…craft beer. This time Marc does it fest-style with Brewpublic’s 1st Brewniversary at Saraveza, The Portland Fresh Hop Tastival at Oak’s Park, and the KillerBeerFest at Bailey’s Taproom. We just wonder if he will make it back for the Holiday Ale Fest. Well, there’s always something exciting brewing in Beervana.

Tonight we were able to get our palates around a flavorsome new maltilicious Full Sail fresh hop beer. Despite the hoparazzi not having many cameras handy, we can confirm that Oregon Guildmeister Brian Butenschoen was on hand to quaff the birra delicioso. Here’s an incriminating cell phone photo taken by Brewpublic’s own Margaret Lut.

Gearing up for our Brewpublic Anniversary event at Saraveza on October 9th and our KillerBeerFest at Bailey’s on October 10th, we couldn’t help but feel the vibe of the harvest season. Though we didn’t anticipate the event to be much of a fresh hop event since the Portland fresh hop festivities will be in full effect the same day at Oaks Park, we were happy to recently discover our event will feature some fantabulous wet hop brews exclusive to the weekend. For example, our friends from Barley Browns, owner Tyler Brown and head brewer Shawn Kelso of Baker City were kind enough to share a gem of a beer from their four-barrel brewery’s library. Making the five hour trek from their Eastern Oregon hotspot, these guys brought us a one-of-a-kind Wild Fresh Hopped American Strong Ale. They will also feature some of these unique highly sought after brews at Belmont Station in the near future. During their brief stay in Portland Brown and Kelso also dropped off eight beers to MacTarnahan’s/Pyramid to submit them in this year’s GABF. Expect some medals from these chaps.

Knock, knock…Who’s there?…Monday morning, and a hard liver.

90 degree days seem comforting following last week’s string of triple digits. It helped to justify the kind of beer we subjected ourselves to, like it was the heart of winter and we needed a warming glass of strong beer.