BreweryMap Your Next Road Trip

This is a map of all the breweries from Colorado Springs to Portland.

I'd like to direct your attention to a pretty amazing tool that I wish I knew about during my drive from Colorado Springs to Portland. BreweryMap is a pretty intuitive website where you can find all the breweries between you and your destination point on a road trip. It's super simple: enter a start destination, an end destination, and a radius mileage for departure from your route, and watch the breweries appear on the route!

The online map pulls breweries up via Google Maps, and you can easily visit a brewery's website from the list they provide in a left column, or from the dropped pins. You can zoom in and out very easily as well. You only get one option for a map, it looks like the fastest route, so if you're taking a scenic route, you would need to get a little creative in your search options.

BreweryMap is also available as an app for iPhone and Android. It's as easy as the website, and I like it even more as an app because I can have options for selecting a production brewery, brewpub, nano-brewery and more. Finding info about the brewery is slightly harder than the website, but you can zoom in on the map and then click on a brewery's website easily. You can also search a list, but it's ordered by alphabetical city. I bought the app for $0.99 because the ratings were really high and the reviews looked good with words like "simple," "very handy," and "works great." It's not a social media tool, so no checking in or keeping tracks of where you've been, it just does one thing and does it well - helps you find breweries along a route, or near your current location. It's easily worth the one buck.

Speaking of maps, Wired also pointed me to this really cool interactive map that has some really, super interesting information about the beer industry, including which states are seeing the most new breweries, breweries per capita and much more. Check it out. Cheers!

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Oregon Beer Scene meets Colorado Beer

I spent the past month in Portland, Oregon because, in addition to visiting friends and family, I had organized a number of events that brought some of what Focus on the Beer is all about to the Pacific NW. As you know, our wonderful state of Colorado is home to well over 150 breweries, so I worked with about ten to bring their beer to a special event during Portland Beer Week. In addition to that I also organized a couple Beers Made By Walking walks and a BMBW tapping. I'd like to share some of the photos from these experiences. Many of our Pikes Peak Region readers have been a part of our BMBW walks, or you have attended some of our events, so you know what fun they can be. It felt really special to be able to do some of these things in a city that has such a huge influence in the beer industry.

Portland Beer Week is not really a beer week, it's an entire ten days of impressive beer programming. From the Portland Fruit Beer Fest, which challenges people to think very differently about fruit beer, to the Wine and Cheese Fest, to the barrel age beer seminar, the entire thing is one of the more serious educational beer programs I've ever seen.

Ale Apothecary's Breath of Fresh Air

Last weekend I was able to make the trip from Portland to Bend, Oregon, and spend some time visiting Isaac and some other friends. Isaac, who moved out there a couple months ago, has been quick to visit all the breweries in Bend and has established some friends in the industry. It was fun to visit places like Crux Fermentation Project, which I've watched intently since I first heard that Larry Sidor was leaving Deschutes to start the brewery. The beers were fantastic and absolutely worth talking about.

There are all sorts of other great breweries popping up around the state, including the Logsdon Farmhouse, near Hood River, but I haven't been able to visit that one yet. There was one brewery that I just can't not mention. Ale Apothecary is a rustic little brewery on a patch of four-ish acres, west of Bend, as you begin to head into the mountains. The property has a river that runs through it, and it sits on a hill in a forested area, very close to, possibly even located in, a national forest. The brewery is a small space attached to a house, where brewer Paul Arney allows the landscape to affect, and infect, his beers in a most exciting way.

P(OR)tland Photo Recap Part 1

I'm spending most of the month of July visiting family in Oregon, and I've got a little bit of work that I'm doing out here too. I've already spent a good amount of time at my favorite bars and breweries. It turns out that my pals in the Springs wanted to come along for part of the trip as well. Grant, Leah, Isaac, and Daniel all came out and spent four days. I showed them some good bars and good spots and wanted to send you all our photo recap. I'll continue posting my adventures as well. But we'll start with Horse Brass Pub...

Working in a Gallery in Kansas City

The other day I promised I would tell you what I'm so busy doing in Kansas City that I can't be in Colorado Springs doing my daily duty of scouring the interwebs, keeping you filled in on all that is interesting about beer around Pikes Peak. Well, I've been planning a little beer event in Kansas City at a gallery in called la Esquina, which sits no more than 2 blocks away from Boulevard Brewing Company. The exhibition is all about the neighborhood around the gallery and I've been collaborating with two other artists, Zach Springer and Elysia Contreras. When we create work for a gallery, it's usually in the form of events or activities, rather than making paintings, drawings, or sculpture. So each of us have planned an event or two that somehow links to the neighborhood and that is highlighting something that is already there that people don't know about. Now, we did indeed make drawings, but nothing that is meant to last longer than the exhibition itself, for each event we decided to create a wall drawing.

Drawing of Pancho Luna, a local homebrewer, and Boulevard Brewing.

For my portion of the event I invited Boulevard to create an exclusive beer about the neighborhood and I worked with a local homebrewer to create 'beer portraits' for a couple people who live in the neighborhood. Here's the more official text:

Focus on the Beer Visits Oregon

For the last two weeks I have been in Oregon, visiting family and enjoying the holiday season. I did everything I could to check my email as little as possible and to not carry my phone everywhere. I did, however, visit a number of great beer destinations and so I used my phone (when I had it) and other people's phones to snap a couple photos.

Over Christmas I visited Bend, Oregon where I went snowboarding and hung out in a cabin most of the time. One day we headed to town and I headed over to Deschutes Brewery to see what was happening there. Deschutes makes the beer that originally converted me to being a craft-beer drinker - the Mirror Pond Pale Ale. It was the first beer that I was able to drink a whole pint of. They estimate that this year they will be making 200,000 barrels of beer. Apparently these brewing vessels came in one piece and they had to shut down the highways and have a police escort to bring them into town. They were set in place and the room was built around them. Then we got to see the giant room full of fermenters and their bottling line.