Photos by Maya McOmie
By Maya McOmie /// Features Editor
Last Saturday, my friends and I got an inside look into craft beer producers in Portland, thanks to Zwickelmania. This annual, statewide beer festival is organized by the Oregon Brewers Guild. It is essentially a large-scale open house of brewers all around Oregon, where visitors can take advantage of free samples of beer, and if you are lucky, ones which are rare or are yet to be released, as well as many beer-complementing snacks.
Many of the breweries are far apart, but if you start early enough and do some research, it is possible to go to multiple breweries in one day. There are even several shuttle lines that can take you to many of the locations—a great option for those without cars or who don’t want to worry about staying sober enough to drive.
Our day started around 1 p.m., two hours after the festival’s 11 a.m. start, at Widmer Brothers Brewing. Although parking spots were scarce, there was enough coming and going that new arrivals could get started without much delay. After being greeted by Widmers, we waited for the 30-minute tour of the factory, while tasting some of their most popular beers. The two-story building with red brick exteriors had an industrial feel, with lots of wide-open space and tall ceilings.
Our tour guide was one of the 18 brewers who work there. He led us through various steps of the process of making and packaging beer. There were numerous stops along the way where beer and food were served. Our guide memorably described one of the steps in brewing as “kind of a big tea pot.” The process indeed reminded me a lot of coffee brewing, except beer has more ingredients. Beer, like coffee, requires a lot of precision in the quantity of the ingredients and the timing for combining things, which changes the flavor and aroma substantially.
The four ingredients of beer are water, yeast, hops and starch, and it is important to know how they work in order to control what happens to the beer. Although the entire process is computer-generated, professionals are still needed to oversee the process as it happens, and the job requires a lot of knowledge and organization.
I had never seen hops before or smelled it, and it was quite nice to see what it was that makes beer special. I also had the opportunity to taste different kinds of beer—everything from their famous Hefeweizen to a seasonal raspberry flavored brew—and see what kinds I preferred more than others.
Only a few blocks away from Widmer is Amnesia Brewing, which was much, much, smaller. The difference in scale between Widmer and Amnesia is apparent in the way their distribution is set up. Widmer creates 500 kegs worth of beer in one batch, while Amnesia’s production is less than 100 kegs.
It was pleasant to see a very different type of Portland brewery. Set up as a small restaurant and bar, it had a homier feel. The brewing was to a much smaller scale, and their equipment was in the back of the shop.
Another nice thing about the place were duct-tape labels marked with production dates and the type of beer from when they were first starting up covering the wall of the freezer. They are dog-friendly and have tables inside and outside at which families and friends can drink and dine, and their exterior decor reminded me a little of a Ghibli movie.
Their beer on tap comes directly from the keg in the freezer room in the back, in a tubing system. They also do not bottle any of their beer but only sell it by the keg—the most popular by far is the Desolation IPA, which our tour guide said is “sold everywhere.” They have a fermentation tank from the late 80s, which is the oldest one in the US.
Here, I was also able to smell hops and taste different kinds of beer, such as beer which had been fermented, i.e., had alcohol, but hadn’t had gas added to it yet. It was strange. Another one I tried was one infused with coffee, which was served cold and tasted a little bit sweet, almost like coffee cake.
Zwickelmania offered a crash-course in beer, which will definitely make me appreciate what’s in the bottle a lot more, the next time I open one up.