Caleb O'Connell's blog

Blogs have been slow coming recently, and I'll admit they feel more like sales pitches trying to get you all to come out to our Third Thursday event series. I hope you understand we have your best interest in mind when we try to get you out to take advantage of great beer prices! Before I get too far off topic, this is another pitch to you, the beer drinking public of Portland, to come check out our 7th Third Thursday event. The Portland taps guys will be down at Dock Fore on Fore Street where both Otter Creek and Long Trail breweries will be featuring one of their brews. From Otter Creek we have their flagship Copper Ale, which was once available more commonly around town but has gone missing for years. According to their website it's a medium bodied amber ale like many found in northern Germany. It's a very good, easy to drink beer, which is exactly the type of featured summer beer you'll need- it's going to be hot tonight! The second beer is Long Trail's Unfiltered IPA, my most-consumed brew of choice for 2010. If you're a West Coast IPA fan, you'll find it's not that kind of IPA; light in color, cloudy and mildly bitter, it's an awesome summer time beer, despite being a year-round offering.
Now more about the bar, Dock Fore. When we started this journey to create a website about Portland's beer scene, Dock Fore was unknown to me, but has quickly become one of my favorites. After having some larger events, we chose Dock Fore in hopes of having a more fun and laid back Third Thursday. Dock Fore has been home to the $1.95 20oz daily special for years. To continue the tradition, Shaun the owner has agreed to offer both the Copper Ale and the Unfiltered IPA for $1.95! Our best prices yet!

I cannot lie, one of the best parts of the Portlandtaps lifestyle is choosing what beers to feature in our Third Thursday events. We have to taste the beers, learn about the brewery, scope out the bar, and be sure the night will be fun for all. For this Third Thursday, we are getting Portland's most recognizable brewery to feature three of their beers. Shipyard Brewing will be pouring their Summer, Export and the new Wheat Ale from 8pm until midnight on Thursday for $3! We will at Brian Boru for the third time in our series! We kicked off our series with the Longest Night back on December 21, followed in January with our first titled Third Thursday.

Now about the new beer, which I'm guessing most haven't tried yet. The new Shipyard Wheat Ale is the newest beer in Shipyards line up and what's best is, this will be served year-round. It's an American Wheat style ale, which differs from what most might be familiar with. It's color is more golden brown and it's a filtered beer, so you don't have that cloudiness that is in many hefeweizen and Belgian white labeled beers. It has a lower alcohol content than many of the new beers that are getting rolled out and I like that fact. I do love the new high hopped and high gravity brews that are pushing the brew limits but I also like a two or three glasses beer that won't give me a headache the next morning. The Wheat Ale has a more sweet taste than you can expect from the export and is not as light as their summer brew. It's a good beer with food. I decided to have a simple roast beef sandwich as accompaniment for my first tasting, which was perfectly suited. I'm not an expert with beer and food pairings but I like beer that is easy to drink with simple food. I know, I know, we're doing an event to promote Shipyard beers, so how could I say anything bad about one of their beers? Fact is, this is actually a really good beer and I would highly recommend this brew to anyone. I was leery at first, but Shipyard's foray into wheat ales has been done right. To make a great beer you have to first love the beer you make but you also have to make beer you know others will love too. Shipyard has been doing this for quite some time, so it's no surprise that the Wheat Ale fits the bill.

So far we put together two very successful events for our Third Thursday series, tonight we'll be hosting our third Third Thursday thanks to Three Dollar Dewey's willingness to have us. I know, it's technically the fourth Thursday, but with St. Patrick's day being the Wednesday before the official third Thursday of March, we had to make an executive decision and move our event to a week later. We're going to be featuring Sierra Nevada Brewing, which as you know is a California brew company. We love regional brewers and especially Maine brewers, but this event was based on the green energy initiatives that Sierra Nevada has been pursuing for almost it's entire existence. I learned about the large solar array they installed to power virtually their entire brewing process shortly after they brought it online in 2008. I really did not think much of it until I started realizing that not a lot of brewers take the same route. We met with some representatives from Sierra Nevada to talk about the event and about beers. What we mostly talked about were the programs they have for sustainability with their beers and their brewing process. Third Thursday is about beer but also breweries. If a brewer has something more unique to offer, the more we want to feature them. We found that Sierra Nevada would fit for our March event since I'm sure a lot of folks do not know just how involved they are with alternative energy and promoting the use of clean and renewable energy sources. I encourage you to do some research yourselves on their use of renewables and look for other brewers who do the same.
http://www.sierranevada.com/environment.html

Seasonal beers being released in January are few and far between, especially while winter brews are in full swing. The Boston Beer Co. has decided that at the end of this month winter is old news and it's time to starting thinking spring. Samuel Adams Noble Pils is a new brew to bridge that winter-summer gap, which in some cases is a dead-zone in the beer calendar. In all honesty, we here at Portlandtaps.com are helping Sam Adams launch this beer at our new monthly event, Third Thursdays held tonight(Jan 21st) at Brian Boru's. Before you all head out and spend your hard earned dollars on a new beer, we probably ought to have some info for you all before you come out tonight.

Portlandtaps.com had our fist beer event on Monday, and it was a success to say the least. We wanted to start an annual celebration of the least amount of sunlight of the year. Our Longest Night was also a good way to fully say goodbye to autumn beers and say hello to the winter style ales that typically hang around Portland the longest. From here on out, the rest of the year is to suffer through the Christmas holiday, and then make it through New Years. Once 2010 has fully come into existence, Portlandtaps will start to roll out some new events for around Portland and we'll be starting to get some more features to the website. For now, I'll be posting all that I can find about who's open on Christmas and Christmas eve, and then putting up all the New Year's party events in town. If you know of any, and don't see them here, please, let us know!