Where to Drink Craft Beer in Portland, Oregon
The Commons Brewery
Mike Wright’s tiny brewery outgrew his home garage in Southeast Portland, so this year he moved it up the street to an old tile store. It’s quickly become one of the most popular breweries in town. Wright’s style is toward lower-alcohol session beers and excellent farmhouse-style ones, with 12 of them on tap in his sunny, window-lined tasting room. 630 SE Belmont St.; commonsbrewery.com.
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Ecliptic Brewing
Brewer John Harris has been a key figure in the Oregon brewing world for years. The concept for Ecliptic, his new solo project, is to release beers timed to the phases of the Earth’s orbit of the sun; this means the hop-forward beers in his brewhouse change with every solstice and equinox. Brewpub chef Michael Molitor is following suit with superseasonal dishes. 825 N. Cook St.; eclipticbrewing.com.
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Baerlic Brewing Co.
The trouble with being a prolific home brewer is that it can often be hard to find enough friends to drink all the beer. Ben Parsons and Rik Hall don’t have this problem any longer. Their new Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood brewery and taproom has 10 draft lines, all with small-batch, often one-off experimental brews, like Doug E Fresh (an IPA aged on Douglas fir wood). This means you’ll rarely find the same beers from visit to visit. 2235 SE 11th Ave.; baerlicbrewing.com.
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Cascade Brewing Barrel House
For the past five years, Cascade’s barrelhouse has been packed with the beer obsessed, all there for brewmaster Ron Gansberg’s unique sours—especially his cherry-spiked Kriek, which the brewery taps straight from the barrel. After a huge expansion, due to open in early 2016, the brewery will have space for 2,000 barrels and a new tasting room with a 40-foot bar. 939 SE Belmont St.; cascadebrewingbarrelhouse.com.
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Loyal Legion
Anyone who questions Oregon’s standing as the beer capital of America need only go to this beer bar, which has an astonishing 99 taps of exclusively Oregon-made beer (plus local beer-braised sausages on local pretzel rolls). Many of these beers are from Portland and Bend, Oregon’s other brewing mecca, but small producers across the state are represented, like Buoy Beer Co. in Astoria and Pfriem in Hood River. 706 SE Alder St.; loyallegionpdx.com.