At Singapore’s Changi airport, locals drop by to see a movie or swim in the rooftop pool, grandparents bring their grandkids to ride the giant slide and students prep for exams in the sprawling food court. People go on dates, attend weddings or meet family for dinner. What they don’t do? Board a plane. Could something similar happen in Portland?
The Oregon Beer Awards (OBAs) convened their annual seasonal judging of fresh hop beers over the weekend and announced the winners today. I was fortunate enough to participate, which gave me a great snapshot of this moment in time. Combined with about six weeks of sampling, I have a fairly good sense of where the state of the craft has landed.
Only two breweries that entered the OBA’s Fresh Hop category over the past two years appeared on the 2025 winners’ list. Von Ebert Brewing took home the top Gold prize for Fresh Hop Hazy Pale Ales and India Pale Ales this year after placing Bronze in the 2024 ceremony, which it won in 2023. Baerlic Brewing Company, which won the Other Fresh Hop Beers category in 2023, took silver for fresh hop PAs/IPAs. The rest of this year’s winners either appear in these categories for the first time or return to what they’d humbly call their rightful spots.
You can really taste the difference in a craft-brewed beer– ice cold, refreshing bubbles, and dynamic flavors. Mass-produced beers just don’t quite hit the spot in the same way. Portland is one of the first few cities that was an early pioneer in the microbrewing scene, so this Pacific Northwest metropolis is a beer connoisseur’s paradise.
The 9th annual Portland Fresh Hop Pop-Up Beer Festival is now the longest-running and largest selection of fresh hop beers in Portland. Presented by Portland Beer Week and Prost!, the pop-up functions as an all fresh hopped beer garden with no cover charge or tickets, running all day from 8am - 10pm at night from the Bloodbuzz bar at Prost! Marketplace, the food truck court and deck with a full bar on N. Mississippi Ave.
If you found a new organization to promote Oregon beer, you gotta throw a party, am I right? Celebrate Oregon Beer—which is getting very close to launching a kickass website—is delighted to partner with TrueWest on the Rose City Fresh Hops Fest. This festival has normally been hosted by the Oregon Brewers Guild. After a rocky outing in 2023, they decided to pass this year, so I asked the OBG Board if they minded if we hosted. They were happy to have someone jump in, so we reached out to TrueWest, who hosts the Hood River Fresh Hop Festival and made a plan.
September is a unique month in the beer world. We turn more than the calendar between August and September, we end the month in a new season as well. This means that while summer is ending, the fall beer season is just beginning. While we’re still enjoying IPAs, pilsners, and lighter beers, the maltier and darker beers like Oktoberfest-style, pumpkin ales, amber ales, and even stouts are beginning to hit shelves.
More people are interested in who makes the world’s best pilsner than ever before. As I’ve written previously, pilsners have long been the style that brewers order when visiting another brewery. This is because pilsners are clean and simple and there is nowhere for a brewer to hide “off” flavors.
But these days it’s not just brewers ordering these beers. Brewery patrons are buying more pilsners, and major beer competitions across the U.S. have seen an increased number of pilsners entered for consideration in 2024.
During hop harvest season there is a lot to look forward to, but Portland, Oregon-based Von Ebert Brewing’s fresh Hop releases are always something extra special worth seeking out. This year some of them are hitting 16oz cans for the first time, while others will remain elusive on draft unless you make it to one of their taprooms or a special event such as the Portland Fresh Hop Pop-Up Beer Fest.
Von Ebert Brewing will release its seasonal Festbier, a style of German lager commonly consumed around Oktoberfest.
“For a brewery honoring the German roots of Grandma Von Ebert, this beer embodies our motto ‘where tradition meets evolution.’ The festival beers of Bavaria evolved from darker colored Märzens to the lighter colored Festbiers you see today. In this beer, we highlight that modern presentation,” said Sam Pecoraro, brewmaster of Von Ebert Brewing. “Festbier’s smooth, subtle use of hops and slightly more malty notes makes it a perfect beer to transition from summer to fall.”
Oregon hop growers will harvest around 5,500 acres this season, compared to 7,000 acres just two years ago.
"It’s a significant amount of hop trellises that don’t have hops on them right now," said Sam Pecoraro with Von Ebert Brewing. He added the reduction in acreage is due to a correction in the market. Craft beer demand is down two-percent this year, leaving growers with an oversupply, and it’s impacting all aspects of the beer industry.
You might call Red Gillen the Oregon ambassador for Japan’s craft beer movement.
After spending years living in Japan, he moved back to the U.S. and in 2008 started a website, oshuushu.com, as a way to keep his Japanese language skills fresh and write about one of his interests, craft beer. In a few years, that morphed into Gillen offering Japanese-language tours of Portland-area craft breweries.
After scattered closures and openings, Oregon's saturation of breweries has been pretty flat over the past several years. A return to strong growth looks doubtful.
The national Brewers Association counted 318 craft breweries across Oregon in 2023, same as 2022 and essentially unchanged since 2019, when it counted 311.
