When in Portland at the beginning of August, we stopped by Whole Foods in the Pearl District and I picked up a few specialty beers, Fraoch Heather Ale among them. Fraoch comes from the Craigmill Brewery in Scotland, and is one of the oldest styles of beer in the world; the ale is brewed with the flowers of the heather plant rather than hops. Their website says:

Brewed in Scotland since 2000 B.C. heather ale is probably the oldest style of ale still produced in the world. From an ancient Gaelic recipe for "leann fraoich" (heather ale) it has been revived and reintroduced to the Scottish culture.

Into the boiling bree of malted barley, sweet gale and flowering heather are added, then after cooling slightly the hot ale is poured into a vat of fresh heather flowers where it infuses for an hour before being fermented.

I've known of heather ale for years and have wanted to try some for just as long. I'm glad I did! It's a pretty good beer; different, but good.

Appearance: A bit murky... the color of raw apple cider. Nice white head formed on top, not too big.

Smell: Surprisingly fruity. Apple, some green(?) berry (chokecherry), hints of wheat.

Taste: Very good, though a little different. Like a pale ale, but instead of any hop bitterness, the heather has a different character. It's tangy and floral and malty. Herbal.

BeerAdvocate scores it 84 out of 100, with 93% approval. Over on RateBeer it scores 3.25 out of 5, slightly better than average and in their 65th percentile. I think it deserves a higher score than that, myself.

If you can find it near you, try it out.

Beervana points to this old Rainier Beer commercial on YouTube. The motorcycle one. That's a classic! Although I can't find what year it came out... some site said something about the late 80s, but it seems to me that it was much earlier. Anyone know?

And for that matter, what about the "running R" commercials? The ones where the giant Rainier bottle had legs and ran around the woods... like a weird National Geographic spoof.

RedEnvelope is selling thermos-y double-walled beer glasses for a whopping $75 per six glasses. They're clever and all—made from "borosilicate glass, used to make scientific lab gear, the heat-resistant glass weighs less than traditional glassware, but is actually stronger"—but myself, I think I'll just stick to my regular pint glasses and mugs and such.

Which brings to mind that mugs keep hot drinks from burning your hands, too... via a clever device called a "handle."

Via BeerAdvocate.

Delirium Nocturnum is a Belgian ale weighing in at 8.5% alcohol by volume, and packaged in a funky faux-ceramic painted bottle. The particular bottle I had was a big one—one pint, 9.4 fluid ounces—and sealed with a cork and cage setup, like a champagne bottle. There's also a pink elephant on the label, as you can see; I guess they're advertising it's strength in a Looney Tunes kind of way. It's brewed by Brouwerij Huyghe in Belgium.

It's one of those forays into Belgian beers where it's never quite what you expect, and you're not even sure what you were expecting in the first place. For all that, I thought it was pretty good. A little different, but pretty good nonetheless. Let's hit my notes.

Appearance: Pours a rich brown, with a thick tan head. Mostly clear. I expected more of a yellow color.

Smell: Fruity—apple, berry... Jolly Rancher? Sweet sugar. Mostly sweet apple and a little funky sourness.

Taste: Sour, musty—à la a Belgian farmhouse ale—perhaps green apple. Malty. Leather? A hint of it's alcoholic strength. Candy-ish.

Mouthfeel: Full, rich; not chewy-thick though. Lots of carbonation, effervescence... light.

Overall, it's a musty-sour-sweet-funky Belgian ale, full of complexity and pretty good. I won't say it's the best Belgian beer I've had, but it stands up.

On BeerAdvocate, they mostly agree with me; it scores 86 out of 100 and has 96% thumbs-up. On RateBeer, it's a similar story: 3.51 out of 5, in the 84th percentile.

Details magazine has an article on "The World's Best Beers." Yawn. :)

Actually, it's an amusing read... they have some serious "categories" like Best Beer in a Can (Dick's Pale Ale) and Best Beer Web Site (BeerAdvocate.com), and then some goofy ones: Best Beer to Drink Quickly (Miller Lite, if it's ice cold), Best Mexican Beer That Could Probably Use a Lime (Pacifico), and Best Beer That Tastes Like Whiskey (sort of) (Allagash Curieux), among others. Odd.

Anyway, it's probably time I start working on my own "best of" list, if for no other reason than that people like "Top X" lists.

Just a reminder/notice to the locals (and anyone else coming to Bend) that tomorrow is the start of the Bend Brew Fest. It's the third annual one, and it's looking good this year: over 60 beers from over 30 brewers, entry is free though the mug is $5 (the first year entry was $15), taster tokens are $1, and there will be food and live music.

Sadly, I won't be able to make it this year; this weekend is also our annual family reunion camping trip. I'm sure there'll be plenty of PBR and other canned beer where we'll be at, but I'll be thinking about the Brew Fest. I'll be sure to point to any and all reviews of it (living vicariously) once we get back.

From Slashfood comes this pointer to this piece of art/design concept: the Beertable. Weird. The main problem that I see is that there's no cooling unit for the beer bottle holders. But for those beer geeks (like me) who prefer to drink beer from a glass rather than the bottle (or can), I don't think this would be very practical...

I keep running across the name of the Great Divide Brewing Company in reading about beer, and it's always something good; they seem to be producing very good beers and making a buzz. Recently I had their Wild Raspberry Ale (my wife found it downtown), and while I'm often skeptical of fruit beers, this one was definitely an exception to my doubt. Great Divide's own page says:

Our mantra is that real fruit makes real beer, so we ferment Wild Raspberry Ale with hundreds of pounds of real red and black raspberries. We steadfastly refuse to fall prey to extracts and cheap syrups. Sure, squirting syrup into a keg of beer and rolling it around on the floor is easy, but the taste is... fake! Over the past nine years, we have stayed true to our commitment to real fruit, no matter what the time, expense, or late season frosts have thrown our way.

Makes me wonder if the quality of the fruit from year to year is noticeable in each year's batch of beer... similar to wine? At any rate, I enjoyed this beer fairly well. My notes:

Appearance: Red... the color of dark red berry juice. No real head. Clear. The red is a bit brownish—a brick red. Adobe?

Smell: Raspberries—dark and sweet. Almost like a raspberry syrup. Nice.

Taste: Pale maltiness... very light. Berry character is likewise light. Fruity, not extraordinarily sweet. No bitterness though. Not as infused with berry as I would've thought from the aroma.

Mouthfeel: Very light and thin... very effervescent but not bubbly (does that make sense?). This makes it seem lighter than it is.

Over on BeerAdvocate, the beer earns a decent enough score of 83 out of 100, with 89% of reviewers approving. On RateBeer, though, it falls into the only-average score of 2.91 out of 5; reviewers are ho-hum about it. I score it higher. It's a good fruit beer and a decent session beer, though perhaps it might be more appropriate as a dessert.

I got so tied up attending and writing about the Oregon Brewers Festival that I'm behind on posting my beer reviews. No matter. Tonight it's Deschutes Brewery's 18th Anniversary Pilsner. This is one of their 22-ounce seasonals (the Bond Street Series), and weighs in at 5% alcohol by volume.

Appearance: Very pale yellow/gold/straw color. Super clear. One-quarter inch smooth white head.

Smell: Mild, grainy (bread). A little grassy. Very clean.

Taste: Bitter and mild, clean and steely. Good. Bitterness is very straightforward and crisp, but not too overpowering. Well-done on the hops.

Mouthfeel: Stronger body than expected. Good clean mouthfeel... cleansing.

I can't help but notice as I write this up I used "clean" a lot. I'm not sure what that's about... what I do know is that I rather liked this, and with it's (relatively) low alcohol content, it makes for a good light drinkable lager, perhaps a session beer.

On BeerAdvocate, 9 reviewers have scored it 85 (out of 100), with 100% approval. On RateBeer, 13 reviews have it at 3.05 out of 5, only solidly average.

Just a quick note on a couple of beers we picked up from Trader Joe's while in the Portland area last week: Mission Street Pale Ale and Black Toad Dark Ale.

Both were the cheap beers: $4.99 for a six-pack, and they're good enough to make that a good deal. The Mission Street is pale gold, very clear, and hoppier than I would expect (in a good way) for a commercial-y beer. The Black Toad is mild (not astringently dark, like I was expecting), kind of sweet and maybe a little bit chocolatey.

So: better than expected. The Mission Street, at least, is probably worth buying again; I haven't had enough of the Black Toad yet to make that determination.

Ran across a few more blog writeups of the Brewfest. Good ones, too.

• Brüfested (cyclotram): Good writeup, funny too ("OMG HOPPY"). Nice selection of tasted beers.
• Oregon Brewers Festval 2006 - Saturday Report (Gone Ronin): Holy crap he tried a lot of beers... good notes here, too.
• Beer and then some. (Chattering Magpie): Someone else who drank a lot—nearly 30 beers. Though to be fair, they were spaced out over the three days... Notes cover beer, brewer, alcohol and IBUs. Nice.

All good stuff. Though I find it somewhat ironic that most of the reviews of the Ned Flanders Red were favorable when I thought that beer was just vile... And I haven't seen too many reviews of the Rogue Brewer. I'd say that was way hoppier than Pliny the Elder...

You know how a lot of beer commercials like to tout their "mountain spring water" or somesuch in their brewing process? They've really got nothing on these guys:

A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island.

The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants.

That's potentially some good marketing, right there. The article also notes that the brewery is the "first ever Inuit microbrewery," but I don't know if they mean "first" in Greenland, or the world.

So even though I was off most of this past week, I've been following some writeups of the Oregon Brewers Festival from other blogs. Beervana has some really good writeups, as does the Brookston Beer Bulletin, both blogs wrote quite a bit.

Bad Ben's Brewing Blog had a post with a few pictures (I wonder if the $100 bill is for show?). Andy at Rooftop Brew has a couple of posts.

I have yet to see any blogging from SudsPundit, especially considering they were going to be at the blogger meetup that I missed... I'm hoping they'll have a bunch to write when they're able.

And then, of course, there's a bunch of hits on Technorati you can check out. I haven't read all of those, but I'll be perusing to see what's there.