Portland Beer Week: The Educational Seminars

One of the most amusing things I experience on my beer travels is beer fans who know little or nothing about the beers they are drinking, the breweries where the beers were made or the processes involved in making them. What these folks need is a little education.

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There are a variety of ways to get education, including brewery tours, homebrew clubs, etc. Some festivals include an element of education, often on how the brewing process works. Portland Beer Week has featured educational seminars for several years. That effort continues in 2019.

"I love making education part of Portland Beer Week," event organizer, Ezra Johnson-Greenough, told me by email. "It's always fun to learn more and hear brewers and other experts bounce thoughts and ideas off each other. I also think it helps make Beer Week more than just a drinking exercise."

Portland Beer Week is, of course, mainly a drinking exercise. Ten days worth of drinking and partying, June 7-19. Check out the calendar. Each day is packed with excursions into the bowels of the local craft beer scene. Don't drink too much!

The educational piece is represented by a series of seminars spaced more or less evenly during the first week. They are:

Future of the Craft
Sunday, June 9th, 7-9 pm
Migration Brewing, 2828 NE Glisan St.
This seminar will consider the state of the industry, which is being bounced around by changing consumer demand, increasing competition, flat or declining growth, hostile distribution systems, corporate buyouts and even cannabis. Where does the industry go from here?

Panelists will include Tony Roberts (co-director of the Oregon Brewers Guild), Sam Holloway (Crafting A Strategy), Ben Edmunds (Breakside Brewery), Ben Parsons (Baerlic Brewing) and Jason Notte Flint (beer biz writer).

"I designed this seminar to create a discussion/debate that I would personally like to hear," Johnson-Greenough said. "It should be lively."

Tickets are $12 and include a Migration beer. Get them here.

The Branding Bunch: Here's a Story
Tuesday, June 11th 5:30-8 pm
Function PDX, 919 Northwest 23rd Ave
A look at brewery branding and storytelling, as practiced by industry marketing pros. Get insight from designers and brand managers on how to develop your brand's story from social media to point-of-sale.

Panelists will include: Briana Romancier (Coates Kokes & Pelican Brewing Co.), Jeremy Backer (Level Beer & Ex Novo), Michelle Humphrey (pFriem Family Brewers), Ashley Jhaveri & Chrispy (ZZEPPELIN). Moderated by Michael Perozzo.

"This particular seminar is really about how breweries are learning to leverage their unique stories into a brand, and then how to communicate that effectively through social media and branding," Johnson-Greenough said. "Michael will do a great job guiding the discussion."

TIckets are $12 and include a drink ticket for a Baerlic Brewing beer at the bar. Buy them here.

Barrel-Aged Beer and Whiskey Seminar
Thursday, June 13th, 5:30-8 pm
House Spirits Distillery, 65 SE Washington St
House Spirits and Westward Whiskey present the annual Barrel-Aged Beer Seminar, which veers into whiskey, its similarity to beer and how integral it is in barrel-aged beer production. Attendees will get an inside look at the process from whiskey wash to barrel-aging.

Special guests/panelists: Ben Edmunds (Breakside Brewery), Matt Lincecum and Matt Lincoln (Fremont Brewing) and Andrew Tice (House Spirits/Westward Whiskey).

"This is going to be really fun," Johnson-Greenough said. "Making a barrel-aged beer isn't as simple as filling a barrel with beer. Also, many don't realize how similar whiskey is to beer or that House Spirits is really a brewery first. Anyone who geeks out about this stuff you will enjoy this class."

Tickets are $35. Attendees will sample two barrel-aged beers from each brewery and single malt whiskeys from Westward. Buy tickets here.

Sour & Wild Ale Seminar: Coolship Edition
Friday, June 14th, 5:30-8 pm
Von Ebert Brewing Glendoveer, 14021 Northeast Glisan St
This annual tasting and educational event explores the process of making sour beer with wild yeasts and bacteria. The focus this year is on brewers who use coolships...open-top vessels made to cool wort (unfermented beer) out in the open where live yeast and bacteria found in the environment can make its way into the sweet wort.

Joining Von Ebert's Sean Burke: Trevor Rogers (De Garde Brewing), Shilpi Halemane (Logsdon Farmhouse Ales) and Garrison Schmidt (Block 15 Brewing).

"I'm always interested in how brewers produce so-called "sour" beers," said Johnson-Greenough.  "There are multiple methods, theories and techniques. Why is coolship beer trendy? Why are brewers increasingly drawn to local flora and fauna? I'm not sure all consumers care how their beer got to taste sour or funky, but connoisseurs of the style do."

Tickets are $35 tickets and include rare/premium beer tastings with De Garde, Logsdon and Block 15. Get them here.

I'm not generally a fan of overpriced festivals, beer dinners and related events. There are more than enough of those kinds of events around. But these educational seminars offer worthwhile content for what seems like a reasonable cost. I hope people will support these things.

As for ticket availability, I understand they will have tickets available until the last minute, unless an event sells out...which evidently isn't likely. The exception to that rule may be the Sour & Wild Ale seminar, which has been fairly popular and may sell out. A word to the wise. 

De Garde and Oregon's Coolship Fetish

It's not much of a secret that increased competition has brewers looking for ways to produce unique beers that distinguish and differentiate their portfolios. One result of that reality is a growing interest in spontaneous fermentation and coolships.

Trevor Rogers and his coolships

Breweries currently immersed in spontaneous fermentation include
Allegory, de Garde, Logsdon. Block 15, Ale Apothecary, Flat Tail, McMenamin’s Edgefield and Wolf Tree. The list of those planning to install coolships soon include pFriem, Von Ebert East and Little Beast.

“The concept of spontaneous fermentation is exciting for brewers because it brings ‘local’ into the brewery on a whole new level,” local writer and author Jeff Alworth told me. "There's something incredibly seductive about the local-ness of spontaneous fermentation."

That's because microflora can vary widely from place to place, even in a small area. Jeff related a story in which buckets of cooling wort were left out overnight in Forest Park., all within reasonably close proximity. The buckets were then pitched into larger batches and left to ferment.

“The amazing thing is they all tasted different,” he said. “Even a couple hundred feet is enough to get a different mix of microbes. It’s crazy. I think yeast is on the frontier of experimentation, and spontaneous fermentation is basically yeast-foraging. It has a lot of appeal.”

Part of that appeal may be the risky nature of the approach. Spontaneous fermentation can be done almost anywhere, but the results can be wildly unpredictable. Some places have characters floating around in the air that aren’t conducive to producing good beer. Success is a roll of the dice.

The entire concept caused my friend and occasional co-conspirator to pitch the idea of exploring what's happening with coolships. An article to be published in the September issue of the Oregon Beer Growler details our findings.

What we found, generally, is that approaches vary. You might think breweries using coolships have done meticulous research on what's floating around in the air where they live. You might think there's some standard in terms of what a coolship looks like or the material it's made of. Not exactly so. Read the OBG story for more on all that.

My own corner of the story involves de Garde. I wrote about them for BeerAdvocate in 2015. Their operation was small, but growing rapidly at the time. They moved from their original location (on Blimp Blvd.) to a space in downtown Tillamook in late 2017. Time to revisit.

How de Garde wound up in Tillamook is a story that's been documented many times in many places. Co-founder and brewer Trevor Rogers collected and evaluated wild yeast cultures from several areas on the Oregon coast before making a decision.                          .

“I liked the yeast and bacterial combinations in several areas,” Rogers says. “One place I liked had a lower concentration of bugs in the air, which produced sluggish fermentation and occasional bad batches. I eventually decided the microflora around Tillamook was ideal.”

Anyway, I drove down there last week to take a look at the new space. It's quite impressive, with a vast tasting room and a compact brewery behind and above it. There's significantly less brewing and barrel storage space here than at the old place, but improved efficiencies mean they produce just as much beer. They have two operational coolships of more or less standard shape and depth.

Rogers had wanted a larger coolship to take full advantage of the new brewing space. But it wound up being cheaper and easier to simply build a second coolship that's essentially identical to the original one. They sit side-by-side in the brewery.

Beer nerds will recall that the original de Garde brewery had a garage door that opened to expose cooling wort to outside air. It worked fine most of the time, but Rogers felt they needed to improve the consistency of microbe flow.

"We found outside wind patterns had a big effect on what was coming in," he said. "Sometimes we got a lot of bugs, sometimes not. The new space was designed to fix that. It has a high capacity fan with air ducting that allows a regular flow of outside air into the coolship area."

The result is they don’t have days where there’s a high or low flow of bugs. It's more even now. Rogers knows a lot inoculants come from inside the brewery, the reason a lot of old wood was kept when the building was renovated. But he believes it's important to replenish the inside area.

I don't know that de Garde's approach is the best one out there. They've built a solid niche in the spontaneous fermentation space and they sell a ton of beer directly to patrons from their tasting room. Others want a piece of that action and either are or soon will be navigating that space.

"I think it’s great that people are experimenting," Rogers said. "We don’t yet know the full potential of our area. We targeted the coast, but that’s not to say that great beer can’t be made in other areas. A lot of exploration remains to be done."

The coolship fetish is a real thing. And catching.