Eugene's been blessed with a lot of very good breweries, and more seem to appear every year. But there's something I've been thinking about a lot, recently. What sort of beer is Eugene missing?
At first glance, not much. We've got our resident West-coast super-hoppy brewery in Ninkasi. There's Viking, our braggot producer. McKenzie's our 90s throwback. Falling Sky, Hop Valley, and Oakshire experiment endlessly. Plank Town's got British-style beers dialed in. Agrarian makes good farmhouse ales, Rogue/Tracktown and McMenamins are the elder statesmen. Brewers Union, out in Oakridge, makes great British real ale. And the up-and-comers - Claim 52, Sam Bond's, Mancave, Elk Horn, and Hughes Brothers are all trying to get off the ground and differentiate themselves.
Even with this wealth of beer, there's still some things I wish Eugene had. In no particular order:
- A brewery that focuses on Belgian-style beers, hopefully including sours, lambics, and barrel-aged ales. No brewery I'm aware of in town produces any beers like this, except as occasional one-offs.
- A brewery with a strong focus on German-style beer. Ninkasi's Prismatic Lager series is the closest thing we've got at the moment. Not to knock Ninkasi - the lagers are pretty good - but it would be lovely to see a brewery really step up and focus on German beer, as Occidental does in Portland, for instance.
- A great brewpub. Eugene's got Falling Sky, McMenamins, and Steelhead, but their beer has been pretty lackluster, and the food's hit-or-miss. Brewers Union does a good job on both counts, but they're an hour away from town. It would be lovely to go somewhere local not just for the beer or the food, but both.
- A boldly experimental brewery, eager to try making beer with extreme adjuncts. Some breweries here make single beers like this, but infrequently at best. I kind of have a weakness for crazy beer, so I'm not sure how many others this'd appeal to.
I'm predicting that most of these niches will be filled in the coming year or two. It's easily conceivable that Eugene/Springfield could have 20+ breweries in the near future. But these are the recommendations I'd make to brewers thinking of starting a new brewery right now.
I couldn't agree more! Nice commentary.
ReplyDeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteWhat you've largely described is a niche'ing of beer styles by market. It's becoming more common in various locations, and even saturated in places like Portland where being different is critical and challenging. I think given time, we'll see this develop here in Eugene. Comparitivley, Bend has nearly triple the breweries and less than half the population, so a saturation is still a long way off. Cheers, and please forgive the spelling errors.....