Wednesday, December 31, 2014

It's the End of the Year As We Know It........

Well the end of 2014 is just a few hours away and we're feeling pretty good following a nice meal with the kids, (and a couple of beers)....so we decided its time to take a look back at freshpints.com and 2014. 
Us on the New Belgium Tour. Up in the brewhouse in front of the private bar

2014 has been a great year for us and freshpints.com. It seems like this year we really caught on with the beer community and we thank all the beer folks out in the world that have taken a look at freshpints.com.

The year of 2014 for freshpints.com was the year of travel both local and afar. First up, this year we traveled to Sonoma County in California to check out the great breweries....and yes some wineries as well! Sonoma County is literally flowing with great beer and wine, so our high expectations were met. The highlight of the trip  was stopping in at the famous Russian River brewing and enjoying one of the best sample trays we have ever seem.....and yes we went home with a bunch of sours and Blind Pig & Pliny the Elder, which we shared with some fortunate friends back home.

Russian River Tray

Next up on our travel schedule was San Diego for Beer Bloggers Conference 2014.

We love the San Diego palm trees!

 It's hard to summarize just how awesome the trip was but just imagine a huge room full of people (and at times a very cheerful busload of  people!) just like you.....beer nerds! We met so many awesome people from all over the U.S. who love beer enough to spend their own money to come together and meet up and learn all sorts of great beer stuff. Highlights from the BBC #14 were the pre-conference tour in Los Angeles, where we toured Golden Road Brewing, Angel City Brewing, Smog City Brewing, Monkish Brewing and The Bruery. One of the high points of 2014 for freshpints.com was going to The Bruery's barrel warehouse and just seeing tables full of beer and food to sample.....oh and getting a sample of a barrel-aged beer, poured straight from the barrel...awesome! Along with the great conference that Zephers Adventures put on, the best part was meeting so many great folks.
We met the famous Brew Dad from "Brewdad.com"...aka Mike Besser,

Blurry picture of Brewdad....yeah we got a little blurry after sampling so many beers
 we meet the awesome duo from Colorado, Jeff and Chris Estes, who have the great site "Bottle Makes Three", and David Bardallis who has the great site "All the Brews Fit to Pint"...and so many more awesome folks.


Chris, Jeff, Us, Dave
Sure we got to be beer VIPS at Karl Stauss, Yard House-San Diego, Stone Brewing (Big Thanks!), and Beer PR & Brewery folks came to us and put on beer parties and other events, but in the end just meeting folks like us was amazing.

Foudre at Monkish Brewing
Fresh Beer we pulled from Golden Road Brewing Canning line

Ken Grossman giving the Keynote speech at BBC#14



The last big trip for us this year happened the week after GABF...yes we flew out to Colorado the following week for our first trip seeing the beautiful state of Colorado.


We saw so many amazing breweries from the small Funkwerks to the big New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, to Avery Brewing and West Flanders Brewing Co in Boulder, and Left Hand Brewing in Longmont. 





 
And our new friends Jeff and Chris from the BBC #14 showed us around Denver, where we visited Crooked Stave, River North, Epic and a few other places...and they let us crash with them and watch a COPS marathon while we sobered up (wait, nope, we drank a bottle of Tart of Darkness out of pint glasses!)....Beer people are the best!






There were so many other great events that we attended in 2014: Hood River Fresh Hop Festival, Oregon Garden Brewers Dinner & Brewfest, Oregon Brewers Festival, Little Woody Barrel Aged Brewfest, Holiday Ale Festival, and quite a few PDX Bottleshares. And we really enjoyed just getting out and meeting so many great people at these various events, bars, taphouses, homes, and media events.


Big thanks to all the breweries and media folks who sent us beer samples, had us attend media events and beer festivals or sent us media releases. Thanks to Chris Crabb, Lompoc Brewing, Oregon Gardens, Breakside Brewing, Sierra Nevada, Stone Brewing, Oregon Brewers Festival, Little Woody Barrel Aged Brew Fest, Ninkasi Brewing, Bridgeport Brewing, Old Town Brewing, Burnside Brewing, The New School, Fremont Brewing, McMenamins, Cascade Brewing, Kells Brewery, Lagunitas Brewing, Top Rung Brewing, and I'm sure we are missing a few others.

As far as resolutions go, we're going to try to post more of our adventures closer to when they happen.  We've got a couple of October adventures yet to tell you all about, so maybe we'll get started on that tomorrow-ish.

Cheers all, 2014 was awesome but may 2015 be the best year yet!







Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Breakside Brewing kicking off 2015 With Five New Beers







Press Release:
December 30, 2014 Portland & Milwaukie, OR -
Breakside Brewery is kicking off 2015 with five new beers, four of them in bottles, two of them available year round and one of them launching a brand new Farmhouse Fruit and Funk series. Beginning January 1st welcome brand new year round beers Lunch Break ISA and Amuse Saison both available on draft and in 22oz bottles. January 8th will mark the return of the beloved seasonal Salted Caramel Stout to draft and bottles. Early January will see the release of Tropicalia an American Farmhouse ale brewed with Lychee fruit and Peruvian peppers, it is the first in a new Farmhouse Fruit and Funk series of six, Belgian inspired releases that will rotate every two months. Finally we can all look forward to a collaboration with Portland's newest brewers at Fat Head's Brewing and a quickly budding friendship between both breweries culminating in the release of Juggling Plums Gose on January 14th at Saraveza.

Lunch Break ISA
Lunch Break is our hop forward session beer, built for enjoying any time of day. Whether you call this beer a Session IPA, American Pale Ale, India Session Ale, Mini IPA, or something totally different, we know that you'll find this beer to be full of juicy, classic hop flavor with just enough malt backbone to keep things in balance. We reserve some of our favorite hops--Simcoe, Amarillo, Cascade and Centennial--to use in this beer, which gives the aroma a heady mix of lemongrass, orange marmalade, grapefruit, pine and resin. Hop heads who seek a big punch of hops in the nose need look no further!

4.7% ABV 28 IBU.
Amuse
This characterful session Saison is a true delight for the palate! Notes of white pepper, coriander, orange, freshly cut flowers, and ginger come together beautifully in this easy-drinking Belgian-style Farmhouse beer. The delicate balance of herbal hop aromatics and spicy yeast flavors make this beer light, spritzy and refreshing.
"Amuse" is a Chameleon-like word with many meanings, and here, it means to have fun, to enjoy oneself. Amuse is a beer to enjoy with friends: to kick off a meal, to enjoy on a sunny afternoon outdoors, to share as a gift. We hope you'll find drinking this beer as fun and amusing as it is for us to make. Cheers!
5% ABV 16 IBU.
Salted Caramel Stout
A collaboration with Salt & Straw ice cream, this has been one of our most popular beers over the past few years. The base beer is a full-bodied stout, and we add both sea salt and a specially made caramel to the wort before fermentation. The finished beer is rich and balanced with a luscious caramel flavor in the aroma and mid-palate, a hint of salt in the finish, and a smooth, rich roast character.
7.9% ABV 33 IBU.

Tropicalia
Our brewers draw inspiration for beers from all corners of the world of food and drink, and this beer is a perfect example. Influenced by a dish at Johanna Ware's restaurant Smallwares in Portland, OR, two of our brewers designed a beer using lychee and Peruvian Yellow Chilies. The playful intermingling of moderate spice and unctuous, tropical fruit keeps this beer in balance. Early aromas of pepper give way to a rich and fruity mid palate that is followed by a pleasant, lingering heat. The use of several "Hot" hops with distinctive tropical aromas add additional depth of flavor to this unique beer.
This is the first release in our new Farmhouse, Fruit and Funk series. This set of six beers--each available for two months of the year--showcases the deft and playful ways in which our brewers use non-traditional ingredients to make complex, flavorful beers. From Lychees and Yellow Chilies to Oregon-grown Peaches and California Kumquats, this line of beers stakes a claim for the "culinary beer" as an emergent, delicious and elegant new beer style.
6% ABV 23 IBU.
Juggling Plums Gose
To kick off 2015, we have a draft-only collaboration brewed with our good friends at Fat Heads Brewery. The beer, a Gose, is a slightly sour wheat beer made with salt and coriander. In a non-traditional twist, we derived all of the salt in this beer from an unlikely source; the Japanese Salt Plum or Umeboshi. Salt plums are small Japanese plums that have been cured with red Shiso and salt and spend a year "fermenting" in wooden barrels. The fruit is intensely briny, with a light sweetness and herbaceousness. Seriously though, these things pack a punch: we need fewer than 5 lbs of salt plums to impart a recognizable (yet balanced!) flavor to 1,000 gallons of beer!
In the spirit of collaboration, we brewed components of this beer at each of our breweries; Fat Head's grew up the sour wort we used to give the beer it's tartness, while Breakside supplied the base wort and salt plums. We think that you'll find the finished beer to be incredibly refreshing and complex. It's a "gateway sour" with a moderate body and slightly spicy finish. Cheers!
5% ABV 6 IBU.

Release Parties:

Salted Caramel Stout - Seattle Release Party
Friday January 9th 6 - 9pm
Ballard Beer Co.
2050 NW Market St
Seattle, Washington
Beers: La Tormenta, Eurotrash IPL, New World Bruin, Apollo & Dionysus, Salted Caramel Stout

Salted Caramel Stout - PDX Release Party
Thursday January 8th 6 - 9pm
N.W.I.P.A.
6350 SE Foster Rd
Portland, OR
Beers: IPA, Woodlawn Pale, La Tormenta, New World Bruin, Amuse, Salted Caramel Stout.
Plus Salt & Straw Ice Cream will be in the house!
Salted Caramel Stout - Beaverton, OR Release Party
January 16th
Uptown Market
6620 SW Scholls Ferry Road
Beaverton, OR

Draft Beers: Wanderlust IPA, Lunch Breaks ISA, La Tormenta, Amuse, Salted Caramel Stout, Apollo & Dionysus.
Bottles: Salted Caramel Stout, Amuse and Tropicalia.

Juggling Plums Release Party
Wednesday January 14th 6-9pm
Saraveza
1004 N Killingsworth St
Portland, Oregon 97217
A special tapping of our new collaboration beer with Fat Head's Brewing as well as an additional beer from each brewery.

About Breakside Brewery:
Opened in 2010 in the quiet Woodlawn neighborhood of Northeast Portland as a restaurant and nano-sized brewery, Breakside expanded to a 3.5 BBL brewhouse while winning their first medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011 where they have earned medals each year since. In late 2013 the brewery expanded operations to Milwaukie, Oregon with a 30BBL production brewery filled with 60 and 120BBL tanks, barrel rooms for wild and non-wild/sour fermentation's and a 20 tap tasting room. In 2014 Breakside was awarded with the highly coveted Gold Medal for American-style IPA at the Great American Beer Festival for their flagship IPA that was also named to Men's Journals 100 Best Beers In The World and Sip Northwest's Best IPA in the Northwest. Breakside is also known for their experimental, barrel-aged and sour beers like Bourbon Barrel-Aged Aztec a strong amber ale with chocolate and chilies that won Bronze at both Chicago's Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers and Best of Craft Beer Awards and Passionfruit Sour a berliner-weisse style beer that earned a Bronze at the 2013 GABF.
Breakside Beers are available on draft and in 22oz bottles in Oregon, Seattle-Washington area, Denver, Hawaii and British Columbia. 2015 expansion plans include introducing 6-packs of 12oz bottles and more specialty bottles and sour beers.

Breakside Brewing