Day 1: Portland

I feel a little unoriginal writing about Portland so often but with the number of breweries within its city limits, it should hardly be surprising. So without further ado, here are the places I visited this time around:

Breakside Brewery (Dekum location) is an old favorite that I haven’t been to in awhile (I used to live within blocks of it). They have had a solid and award-winning line-up of beers since they first opened in 2010, and the beer quality remains top-notch. Their restaurant is also excellent, and I cannot recommend their blue-cheese fries highly enough.

This time around I went with their classic Pilsner (one of the better ones produced in the northwest) and one of their experimentals, called Basic Witch. This saison, while slightly high in ABV for that style (6.4%), was very light overall with flavors of honey, rose water, and pepper. The pepper almost turned me away from ordering it as I have sampled pepper saisons where that’s all you can taste and it has made me a little leery of the style. However, the pepper in this beer is very subtle and you really only taste it on the back end.