Notes from the Portland Craft Beer Festival

As with almost everything else connected to beer, we continue to see an evolution in beer festival format. Organizers are working to satisfy shifts in preferences that have as much to do with event amenities as with beer. Craft beer's growing mainstream status is part of that.

The Portland Craft Beer Festival is a good example, I think, of what's happening. I'd heard good things about it, but had no personal point of reference because I'd never attended. That changed last week.

This is the fifth year of the festival, which is held at comfy Fields Park in Northwest Portland. The Park is a significant selling point. It's of modest size, but located in a populated area that has great transit access. Getting there is easy and The Fields actually feels like a park, with thick green grass, great views.

Organizers are creative with the layout and it works well. The taps are positioned in the middle of the park under a tent. There are taps along the length of the tent on each side, allowing patrons to approach from both sides. It's an efficient use of the space consumed.

With the beer in the middle, there's ample room for tables with and without umbrellas a short distance from the beer tent. A variety of vendors and marketing demos are set up around the fringes of the park. Perhaps best of all, the layout allows for a large gaming area, which was set up for multiple lanes of corn hole. The venue didn't feel packed, despite a pretty good crowd.

This isn't an overly expensive event. For $30 (a little less online), you got a glass and 10 tickets. Each ticket yielded a 4 oz taste, unless you splurged on a full glass for tour tickets. Those first 10 beers might not be a great deal; but the next ones are because additional tickets are a buck, which translates to a $4 pint (four tastes). That's virtually unheard of at contemporary beer festivals.

They were pouring more than 100 beers, ciders and wines during this event. The beers were a mix of standards and one-offs. I was sharing tastes and sampled around 25 of them. There were far more misses than hits and most of the best beers were standards from known breweries. Several beers I tasted had obvious and significant defects. Not good.

I'm not sure beer quality is all that big a deal at an event like this. In some ways, it reminded me of what festivals were like 15-20 years ago, when patrons were more interested in drinking interesting beers in a unique setting than they were in obsessing over those beers. At some point, we crossed a bridge into bizarro geekdom. This, to me, seemed like a step back in the direction of sanity.

One thing I never thought I'd see at a beer festival is a gaming area. But the young crowd wants that and festivals are responding. This wasn't the first time I'd seen a corn hole being played at a beer event, but this was certainly the largest use of space. I was tempted to regard this as a generational shift in preferences, but it isn't that. When I was younger, we always played games in bars and taverns. Gaming at beer fests simply means craft beer is attracting the mainstream audience that wants that experience while drinking a few beers.

There was no live music. Instead, they provided some sort of piped in music playing on not huge speakers near the gaming area. I'm a fan of live music at these events, but the reason fests are moving away from it is that patrons don't pay attention. A little buzz in the background is all they want. You'll see a similar approach at the Oregon Brewers Festival in a few weeks.

What organizers have done is put together an event with wide appeal. They chose a relatively intimate venue in an easily accessible location. They designed a layout that provides easy access to beer and space for seating and gaming. And by not catering to the geek crowd that chases rare and expensive beers, they've made the festival attractive to a mainstream audience that just wants to have a few beers while enjoying the scene.

There are some things that need to be fixed. The lack of readily available drinking water is at the top of my list. Beer consistency could definitely be better. But all-in-all, the Portland Craft Beer Festival is a nice example of what a modern beer festival should be.