Name: Alex Bittner
Title: Blogger @ HopHellion.com & Data Analyst @ GP Analytics
Favorite Beer Style: I love them all but right now I’m really into farmhouses and saisons.
Fun Fact: I write young adult fantasy novels and I recently publishing my first, Daughter of the Mara.
Beer Snob Scale (1 to 10, I’ll drink whatever to Cicerone): I’d probably put myself at about a 7.
So here’s the thing: I didn’t always like beer. That may sound odd coming from a self-proclaimed beer aficionado but it’s true. My first real drink was a Bacardi and Pepsi while hanging out with friends one night during my senior year of high school. This drink led to several more of the same and inevitably to my first hangover. Not an altogether pleasant memory but there you have it. From there I partook in such girly nonsense such as wine coolers (Bartles & Jaymes, anyone?) and had a few not very nice encounters with a little drink called the Long Island Iced Tea.
Beer didn’t really come into my purview at all until my third year of college when I spent a semester in London. It was there, in one of my favorite cities on the planet, that I first became truly acquainted with that drink we call beer. I was already an Anglophile so the magnetic pull that the British pub had on me didn’t come as a big surprise. I’d had a Guinness or two in my time so I started there. From there I slowly expanded to Fuller’s and Young’s (I frequented Founder’s Arms in Southwark while I was living there) and drank whatever other cheap British beers I could get my hands on.
This semester in London also included a fair bit of travel to other European destinations but only two are of importance to this story: Scotland and the Czech Republic. The trip to Scotland was brief (a long weekend) but led to a sampling of Scottish beers (and whiskey because Scotland). It was also on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile where I had my first legal American drink (i.e. I turned twenty one while there which was cool but also kind of anti-climatic given the legal drinking age the in UK is eighteen). The importance of the Czech Republic should be obvious to any beer loving individual reading this entry. If not, let me enlighten you: the Czech Republic is the reigning champion in the category of most beer drunk per capita. The last count was in 2014 where they came in at 142.6 liters (two and three were the Seychelles and Austria which came in with 114.6 liters and 104.8 liters respectively). In short, the Czech Republic is all about beer and cheap beer at that which is especially important when you’re a college student on a 3 month long sojourn that you’re still paying off over ten years later (thanks student loans!). Anyways, in the Czech Republic I was introduced to the wonder that is pilsner lager and the large glasses it is served in. My boyfriend (now husband) Matt and I spent a good amount of time in Prague in hospudas familiarizing ourselves with Pilsner Urquell, Staropramen, and whatever else was put in front of us depending on how we answered the ever important question “light or dark?” In case I haven’t made it clear the Czech Republic is amazing and you should go (and I really need to go back).
Upon my return to the States I stared drinking more beer and did some minor exploration of local breweries in my area. At the time I was living on the Central Coast of California so I was quickly introduced to places such as Firestone Walker and whatever else happened to get distributed to our area.
In November of 2005 Matt and I made the decision to move to Portland, OR and this was when my beer madness really started to take hold. It took awhile but once I discovered all of the different kinds of beer readily available in my new city I was hooked. Matt and I would spend our weekends deciding which brewery to try next and drinking the many varietals of craft beer Portland had to offer. This craft beer adventure continued when we moved to Seattle, WA so we could attend grad school (he got his master’s in English, I got mine in library and information science). While Seattle isn’t quite the beer town Portland is (sorry, Seattle friends, it’s true and you know it), there was still much to explore and I discovered a few breweries that continue to be some of my favorites to this day.
After spending a couple of years in Seattle we returned to Portland before relocating to Bend, OR in October 2015. Aside from its craft beer associations (okay, yeah maybe because of them) I have loved Bend ever since moving to the Pacific Northwest. Its volcanic rock and juniper trees are my happy place. It was also after making this move that my obsession with craft beer moved into the professional sphere of my life. Prior to my current job I worked as a communications analyst at a PR firm in Portland which dealt primarily with clients in the tech field. I liked this job but hoped at some point to parlay my analytics skills into the craft beer industry. This was when kismet struck. While helping my husband look for a job after we moved to Bend (I had kept mine and was working remotely) I stumbled across a job listing for a Business Analyst at a startup that does supply chain analytics for craft breweries. I have not led a charmed life by any stretch of the imagination so when I first saw this I had two thoughts: someone was fooling me and that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I would ever get this job if it was real. Turns out it was real and I did get the job and the rest is history.
This takes us to the present and the purpose of this blog. My purpose for starting Hop Hellion is three-fold. Firstly, I need an outlet for the aforementioned craft beer addiction as it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Secondly, I am a writer (you can buy my first novel Daughter of the Mara if you’re into fantasy books about nightmares) and I love telling stories. Recently, as I’ve become more closely acquainted with the people associated with the craft beer industry I have felt the urge to tell their stories. Everyone has an origin story and as craft beer is a pretty specific industry I am fascinated by the ways different people find their way too it. Thirdly, I am interested in craft beer and its sense of place. Craft beer like any piece of art (I know this sounds corny but stick with me here for a minute) is tied to a time and place. Case in point, two of Deschutes Brewing’s most famous offerings Mirror Pond Pale Ale and Black Butte Porter are named after places in and around Bend. I love beer and I love travel and with Hop Hellion my goal is to show how each brewery’s offerings are specifically endemic to where they came from and display the importance of the connection between product and place. You feel me?
So, that’s what Hop Hellion is all about: craft beer and the people and places that create it. Hopefully this is something you’re interested in too and you’re ready to follow me on this adventure through the world of craft beer. If so, here’s to you! Prost!
