PORTLAND BEER HUNT

Portland Beer Of The Year Starts Here.

Do you see a beer sign? A brewery sign? Anything that says beer is near?

It’s not an accident. Once you park your car it’s still a mystery.

To help out, this place in across the street, maybe two streets, from the Rose Garden, Modo Center, Memorial Coliseum.

Get there from I-5 by taking the off ramp like you would do going to a Portland Trail Blazer game.

This is the little triangle property where you turn back to get on I-5 south.

Park and walk through the front door. You think you’ve found the beer of the year?

You just got started.

Nothing says special like a chalk board sign.

High tech? No. Low tech? How about no tech.

My fellow researcher and I saw the sign and headed upstairs. We wandered around marveling at the space with no one around.

Portland might be a small city, but it’s big enough to find people in public places.

And we weren’t early.

A second look at the sign cleared things up enough to get us headed the right direction.

Down a hallway to where?

Another hallway. A long one.

All alone in what felt like an underground rabbit warren didn’t feel threatening. Didn’t find any rabbits, either.

In other cities you might be wise to pause after a few turns in deserted hallways.

Not Portland. What could go wrong? One last turn and like magic you arrive.

There it is, Beer Of The Year: Upright Brewing’s Engelberg Pilsner.

From Willamette Week:

“It starts with our 2015 Beer of the Year, which has been around for five years but is only now showing itself to be a forerunner to our favorite development over the past year, the rise of the craft lager. That beer is Upright Brewing’s Engelberg Pilsner. Sorry to those dedicated fans in the Bay Area, but it’s nearly impossible to find outside Portland city limits.”

If beer of the year lives here, other beers must be pretty damn good too.

Sampler? Of course.

You know how brew pubs are set up.

There’s the pub part with a window into the brew part.

Even with no brewery in a pub, some places dummy up the brew part for ambiance.

This is Portland beer with just the beer. It’s ambient enough.

You’ll get Upright Brewing’s beer right in the brewery.

Go ahead and ask your beer, “Do you want to go home?”

When your beer answers with, “This is my home” you know you’re in the right place.

How is beer made?

Commercial products or homemade, it’s the same.

Do it right and make new friends.

The whole process is right in front of you.

My expert researcher is also an accomplished brew master who goes above and beyond normal brewing.

So does Upright Brewing, and it shows.

If you like beer worth talking about from a unique spot in the beer universe, plan a visit.

After the sampler, then what?

Get a glass of the best of the batch.

When it’s beer of the year for Portland beer you can’t go wrong.

Portland food fans use eating as an excuse to find new places.

New places need new fans or they go away.

Upright’s been around a few years, traveling under the BoomerPdx radar.

Not anymore. More than a novelty, more than a trend, this is where beer belongs.

And so do you. Make a date and hit the road, baby boomer. Take a few whippersnapper millennials along to show them what they’ve been missing.

If you don’t tell them where you’re going ahead of time, don’t be surprised if people at Upright already know their name.