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.

OBF Becomes a Chameleon at 32

The 2019 Oregon Brewers Festival is three months away. Once upon a time, that reality would have generated considerable interest. Once upon a time, there weren't a gazillion beer festivals crammed onto the annual calendar.

This will be the OBF's 32nd year and they've gone chameleon in an effort to reverse the declining attendance of recent years. There was a time when this event could do whatever it pleased. A lot of harebrained ideas were tried over the years. But things are different now. They've got to sharpen their game.

One of the big changes this year is that all the beers will be from Oregon. Yup. They'll be serving 101 products from 93 breweries and eight cideries. I'm guessing you'd have to go back to the very early days to find a year in which all the beers came from Oregon. This to me is a smart move. It is, after all, the Oregon Brewers Festival.

These will mostly be one-off and experimental beers made for the event, according to a press release. That's in keeping with the current rage for small batch stuff, a strategy that's in place at most successful festivals and similar events. Of course, the quality of experimental beers can be all over the place. But it hardly matters. Festival goers demand unique beers. The list is here.

Event organizers, responding to declining attendance, cut the event to four days last year...dropping Wednesday. That seemed a little odd because stats showed Sunday was the dead day. They've adjusted appropriately for 2019. Wednesday is back; Sunday is gone, gone, gone.

The popular Brewers Brunch that kicks off the festival moves to Ecliptic Brewing this year. Brunch tickets go on sale on the OBF website Wednesday morning (May 1) and cost $49. That includes brunch, two beers, a souvenir T-shirt and an OBF tasting mug.

Brunches have historically been held reasonably close to Waterfront Park. Not this year, as Ecliptic is located a good distance from the Park. That becomes an issue for the Oregon Brewers Parade, which departs Ecliptic following the brunch at 11 a.m. and hoofs it to the Waterfront. Anyone can walk in the parade, by the way. That will be interesting. It's a long walk.

Another change related to making the event more user-friendly involves comfort. One of the best spots in the Park on hot days is under the shade trees at the south end, an area typically occupied by beer trailers. Not this year. The trailers will move to the river side, leaving the shade for mingling and drinking. (The map on the website hadn't been updated when this post went live.)

You may remember that the printed program was dropped last year. They were evidently not being picked up by patrons (who don't read, anyway) and thousands wound up being recycled. Organizers launched what seemed to me to be a pretty decent smartphone app in 2018. Surprise...the printed program is back this year. No word on the app. Bizarre.

New and old features for this year include a Meet the Brewer Tent, a Brewer Dunk Tank, games, food vendors, homebrewing demonstrations, plus the Crater Lake Soda Garden offering complimentary craft soda to designated drivers and minors. Sadly, surprisingly, live music is gone, to be replaced by DJs in different parts of the park. That sounds like a hoot.

I've always argued that the Oregon Brewers Festival is a pretty good value. You enter the venue for free. To drink beer, you buy a mug and tokens. It's four tokens for a full mug of beer or cider, one token for a taste. No big, upfront charge to enjoy a few beers. The changed beer lineup might actually make this year's event more appealing to some.

But the strategies don't all mesh. The press release says attendees must purchase a $20 tasting package this year. The package includes a mug and 10 tokens, which means you're paying $10 for a throwaway plastic mug. That's not the worst deal in a city saturated with overpriced festivals and beer dinners, but it seems vaguely at odds with the goal of boosting attendance.

Some of my older friends who haven't attended OBF recently say declining attendance might get them interested again. But the biggest changes outlined for this year suggest organizers are targeting younger patrons, which makes good sense, actually. We'll see how that works out for them.

Visit the OBF website here for a rundown of festival dates, times, etc.

Fruit Beer Fest Returns to Burnside

The Portland Fruit Beer Festival, now in its seventh year, returns to its original home at Burnside Brewing this weekend, June 9-11. Organizers expect to pour more than thirty beers and ciders made exclusively for the festival, our premier fruit-oriented beer event.

They're returning to Burnside after a one-year stint at the North Park Blocks. Why? Well, there were additional costs involved in holding the event downtown. When the weather was uncooperative, the attendance necessary to justify those costs didn't materialize. Thus, the return to Burnside.

It's a reasonable move. The Burnside campus is centrally located, with easy access from all quadrants of the city. One of the reasons for the Park Blocks experiment is limited space at Burnside. That venue was packed to the gills and overly congested during several past Fruit Beer Fests.

To address crowding concerns, organizers say they'll spread the beer stations out and provide more shade and seating than in past years at Burnside. They'll also have a smaller, satellite venue across the street. It'll be a neat trick if they're able to reduce the crowding issues, and I hope they can.

When I first realized fruit infused beers were gaining favor a few years a back, I was mesmerized. It's not something I was exposed to growing up, a time when macro lagers were king. I wondered if fruit beers weren't maybe some kind of strange fad connected to the growth of craft beer.

Of course, that isn't really the case. Fruit has been used in brewing for centuries. As local author and blogger, Jeff Alworth, told me, "Except for lager-brewers in Bavaria, basically no one in the history of civilization ever thought using just grain was somehow proper."

What's happened in modern American craft beer is that tastes have expanded to embrace practices employed for centuries and abandoned during the macro lager era. Fruit is part of that and the Fruit Beer Festival has helped build interest in fruit-centric beers, a positive thing.

The beer and brewery list for this event is extensive. I arrived late to the media preview and tasted only a few of the beers. That isn't all that big of a deal since they weren't sampling the entire festival portfolio. You can view the list of standard beers and ciders on the event site here.

In addition to the standards, there will be 3-4 rotating taps dedicated to rare beers outside the regular lineup. Those beers will rotate at various times during the weekend and most will cost additional tickets. There will be special tappings from Firestone Walker, Great Notion Brewing, Crux Fermentation Project, Cascade Brewing, pFriem Family Brewers, de Garde and others.

Festival days and hours:
Friday, June 9: 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Sat. June 10: 11:00 a.m to  9:00 p.m.
Sun. June 11: 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Advance tickets are available online here, with a small added service charge. Buying in advance may save you time getting into the event venue, though I can't guarantee that. Oh, you have two ticket options, basically a choice between a fancy and plain Jane glass. Up to you.

As always, you can get updated info via the event's social media channels: @FruitBeerFest on Twitter and Instagram, search Portland Fruit Beer Festival on Facebook. 🍻

Oregon Brewers Festival Rolls on at 29

It's a bit hard to fathom. The Oregon Brewers Festival is celebrating 29 years. Some 80,000 craft beer lovers will descend on Waterfront Park to enjoy five days of fancy suds and sun. For the unknowing, the festival runs Wednesday through Sunday, July 27-31.

The beer landscape has warped since that first OBF in 1988. Back then, there were seven craft breweries in Oregon. Today, Portland has 65 breweries and there are 30 more in the metro area. The state is home to nearly 250 breweries. The country will soon have 4,300. Shazam!

As the brewery count has climbed, so too has the festival count. Hundreds of "festivals" now dot the Portland calendar. I don't even want to consider how many events populate the state and national calendar. A calculator might be helpful, if you want to do that.

But the Oregon Brewers Festival is one of the oldest and largest in the country. It is, quite simply, the event that provided much of the form modern events have copied. Sure, there are differences in size and shape, but the basic form mostly starts and ends with the OBF.

For many years, the OBF was the only serious show in town. We didn't have umpteen beer festivals a week. We didn't have specialty beers coming out of our ears. We also didn't have social media, which has helped magnify the event crush. Craft beer was mostly a novelty in that bygone era. That's obviously changed.

The OBF has rolled with the punches to some extent. They've rearranged the grounds to allow for easier movement under the tents and (they hope) near the taps. The International Beer Garden is a recent addition, designed to showcase what's happening around the world. This year's IBG will feature 25 beers from Japan, Germany and The Netherlands.

Of course, significantly altering the culture of an event of this size is tough...like turning an aircraft carrier around. Some geek types see the OBF as less relevant these days. These are the folks who chase rare specialty beers and gum up social media with their commentaries. I prefer to see OBF as a constant, a place where you can enjoy good beer in a great venue. Also a salute to the past.

They'll pour 88 beers from independent craft breweries this year. Independent has become an increasingly important OBF theme in light of buyouts by Anheuser-Busch and others. When you look at the event program, you won't see beers from 10 Barrel or Elysian or Goose Island, all fully owned by AB. You also won't see beers from Ballast Point, fully owned by Constellation Brands, or Lagunitas, half owned by Heineken. Good philosophy, I think.

The glass/mug is changing again this year. For the first 25 years, the fest used murky, white plastic mugs. In 2013, they switched to a glass glass to avoid odors from off-gassing and to allow better views of the beer. The glass lasted just two years (although I do have a nice collection at home for tasting parties, thanks to Art Larrance).

Due to some "problems" downtown, Portland Police and Portland Parks banned glass from all parks. So the OBF switched to a clear plastic glass last year. Not bad. This year they're bringing back a mug, now in clear styrene plastic. If this mug is more substantial than last year's flimsy plastic glass, it will be a nice win for everyone.

I'm not going to comment on the beers. The list is plain enough to see on the website and what you drink will depend largely on what you like in a beer. There are plenty of styles to go around this year on a list that isn't dominated by IPAs. I expect to seek out darker, sour and barrel-aged beers, but that's subject to change.

You know the rest of the story. The festival features live music, food booths, craft vendors, a craft soda garden and homebrew demonstrations. It doesn't cost a penny to enter and roam the grounds, but you'll have to buy a mug ($7) and tokens ($1 each) if you want to sample beers. It remains one of the better festival values, I think.

In case I haven't provided enough info here. there's always the event website here, as well as the various social media feeds on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. I have not received word regarding the presence of Pokemon species in Waterfront Park, but I'm sure they're around.

Happy hunting!