#breakside

[auraeseer]

Reign boas and unique horns.

[whatchudrinkin]

Liquid Sunshine

There is nothing like a crisp Pils after a long day in the sun. Pilsner has a proud heritage, but the name was sullied by Miller Lite and its ilk. Pilsner was a buzzword, appended to boring beer to make it seem exotic. It’s taken decades, but now Pilsner is regaining its proper place. Authentic Czech Pilsner is on grocery shelves. Breweries across the country are making faithful recreations of the European originals. And a few are adding their own twists.

Breakside’s Pilsner is as crisp as any -- cereal sweetness followed by dry herby bitterness. But It’s a little hoppier than your average lager. Not too hoppy. A hint of Yakima Valley hops -- an American terroir if you will. A squeeze of lemon, maybe. A smidgen of something wild. There’s a lot going on just below the surface, which is exactly what I want when the temperatures start to climb. A refreshing beer that’s more complicated than it seems.

[craftbastards]

Breakside IPA (Breakside)

Brewery : Breakside Beer : Breakside IPA Style : IPA Variance : None

8.5 / 10

It was so hard for me not to give this a 9 because even as I type this sentence I kind of feel like it deserves it but because I am indecisive and can’t make up my mind right now I’m sticking with the 8.5. It only took me one sip of this beer to realize why they call it the “Feel Good Flagship IPA” because I feel better than Superman at a Three Doors Down concert because he knows all their Kryptonite can do is make his ears bleed because that song fucking sucks. I’ve only had one other beer from Breakside in the past thanks to the awesome people over at Tavour (www.tavour.com) but this one came from a buddy at work and it’s just as good if not better than the last. A strong initial tropical fruit flavor starts this one off with a nice bitterness before some grapefruit and grassy hop flavor mixes in before ending with a mix of pine and citrus to wrap things up. This really is one hell of an IPA to the same extent that Miasma by Black Dahlia Murder is one hell of an album and if you ever find yourself in an area where this is distributed make sure you pick a bottle up. If this is your first IPA of the Northwest variety you should be doing one of those jump in the air heel-clicky-thingies because this beer is worth celebrating due to it’s amazing flavor and drinkability. For you bastard drinking crew members and craft alcoholics of the world, grab yourself a bottle of this, set up your lawn chair, and kick back because you’re going to want to take your time with this one. Prost!

Written by: Steve B.

[itwasaverygoodbeer]

Breakside Brewery Wanderlust IPA ~ 6.7% ABV

[whatchudrinkin]

We have some minor complaints.

Hey, Amanda. You did a great job today. We got our order really fast and all that. You looked a little busy, so I didn’t want to bother you. You probably had no time to chat, and I don’t like confrontation – or conversation for that matter. But I had a few notes on our meal tonight.

It’s not our first time at Breakside’s Slabtown brewpub. We’ve been before. But between the two times, we’ve had a pretty mediocre experience.

First of all, the pint of Hop Delivery Mechanism you served Sarah had quite a bit of diacetyl in it. I know, I know. It’s not your job to make the beer, or even pour it, but I think you need to tell someone the beer you’re serving is seriously, seriously flawed. It tastes like buttered popcorn. That’s fine flavor for a jelly bean, not a double IPA. I would’ve mentioned something, but as I said, I hate confrontation.

It’s not your fault, Amanda. It’s not your fault. 

The Bazooka Face was actually really really good. It’s hard to pull off a session strength IPA that is actually satisfying. It wasn’t super watery, and the hop flavor was real orangy, which I enjoyed. I thought it was cute that the menu said it tasted like sunny-D.

The food was good, if a little bland. I can, and do, cook better vegan food at home three nights a week – the other two night sare about on par with the food served here. 

Again, that’s not really your realm Amanda, but I had to say it. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine. There are at least five great bars in Portland serving amazing vegan pub grub. Go there and figure out how they do it. Not you Amanda, but someone, please.

It took a while to get my second beer, probably due to the afterwork crowd. You guys must get a lot of them huh?

Precious Snowflake was a nice double IPA. There was no butter in it for one, but it also had nice flavors, too. Pineapple and weeds are nice. Pine and dirt can be good. Heck even all those onions were cool.

I get it. This new brewpub is supposed to be all experimental and everything. It’s a hop lab. That’s why two-thirds of the taps are some variation on IPA. But last time we were here, in March, I got two different cloudy IPAs, Something Wicked and the Night Shift collab Shift Break, and I couldn’t tell them apart. 

Okay, you got me. I could tell them apart, but they were so similar it seemed like the experiment here was to test your patrons ability to tell the difference between a lemon and a grapefruit. Kinda boring.

It’s not your fault Amanda, but maybe you can get this message to your bosses?

– Your Friends at Whatchudrinkin?

[whatchudrinkin]

Seasonal Affective Disorder

There are somethings that just don’t make sense this time of year. Colds for one and barrel aged barley wines for another. But childhood disease vectors don’t act rationally, and anniversaries fall on the same day every year. That’s why I’m sitting here surrounded by snotty tissues and writing about Breakside’s Old Lord Chubby Cheeks.

Breakside Brewery turned seven last week while my son turned three. The former celebrated with a “wheatwine” aged in rye whiskey barrels, the latter had chocolate cake with a side of microbes. The homemade chocolate cake was great, but the wheatwine was a little rough. 

Old Lord Chubby Cheeks is nearly twelve percent alcohol and it tastes like it. It’s a burly beer. Despite being brewed with heirloom wheat, it tastes more like a classic barley wine than anything – a blend of chewy malt and bitter hops. The rye barrels add a lot of character, a certain spiciness and a spirituous tang. It’s rough around the edges, abrasive. I asked Sarah was she thought. She took a sip and said to ask her again next winter. 

So I bought another bottle, for enjoying again when the weather turns cold, and the seasonal viruses are more appropriate.

[whatchudrinkin]

Controlled Demolition

Sometimes when I drink a new beer, especially an IPA, I get anxious about how long it’s been on the shelf. I’m scared I’m not getting the optimal product. Freshness has become the rallying cry of the modern brewer. “Best before yesterday” is literally printed on cans of Sticky Hands. So if I don’t like the beer, it’s my fault, right? I should’ve opened it earlier, bought it on tap, drank it in the brewery. 

Breakside Brewery takes a different approach. Head brewer Ben Edmunds knows the beer will be different in twenty days, thirty days. And instead of throwing his hands in the air, he decided to engineer his recipe to taste good whether the bottle has been on the shelf a week or three months.

He explained the evolution of flavor to Jeff at Beervana a last year.

“If you take Wanderlust as an example, the first fifteen days is all Mosaic and then it goes through this adolescence and between day 15 and 30 and what’s happening is this weird interference with Mosaic dropping out, but around day 30 the Amarillo starts to come forward and it becomes this new beer around day 30. When you have that beer from day 30 to 45, it has a little bit of tropical dankness, but essentially all that Mosaic character is gone and it becomes more bright, citrus peel, marmalade. I like to think how a hoppy beer is going to last on a shelf, and I don’t mind it going through this evolution.” 

If I had to guess, I’d say the bottle we drank last night was about thirty days in, maybe less. It still had a vibrant tropical scent, but the flavor was very dry, dominated by the more piney, dank flavors of Amarillo. I wish I’d bought a whole case, doing a daily test to see where the flavors are going could be very informative. 

[whatchudrinkin]

Golden

In the early days, a double IPA was a mixture of pungent hops, brutal bitterness, and, for balance, a syrupy malty sweetness. Over time, high alcohol malt bombs changed lanes from DIPA to barleywine and a new, more sophisticated version emerged. The new DIPA focused more on hop aroma and flavor, and malt moved into the backseat along with the yeast. These are the classic West Coast IPAs. Now there is yet another DIPA, a cloudy, fruit flavored New England IPA.

But there are other options out there. Breakside Brewery’s India Golden Ale tastes more like a Belgian tripel than anything else. It has the same heady strength in an ultra dry, extra crisp package. The hop flavor tends toward the dehydrated fruits -- lime peels, dried mango. It’s far lighter on the tongue, tasting less like fruit juice and more like fruit essence.