Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you are able to relax this week, enjoy time with friends and family, eat too much turkey and pie, and drink a beer from your favorite Oregon breweries. In your free time, have a look at this week's newsletter and plan your next beery adventure.

If you are looking for more news and conversation between these emails, check out our feeds at Instagram, Facebook, or Bluesky.

News

Initiative in Madras Redmond's Initiative Brewing just opened a new 125-seat restaurant in Madras. The Madras Pioneer has all the details. Read the article

Deschutes' Costco Stout Deschutes Brewery partnered with Costco's Kirkland Signature brand on a ten-dollar barrel-aged stout. Fans--beer nerds and regular folks--seem to love it. Read why

Manufacturer of the Year The Portland Business Journal named Crosby Hops one of its manufacturers of the year, thanks to the development of their CGX Cryogenic Lupulin Pellets. Read the story

Oakshire in Springfield Oakshire's plans to open in Springfield have shifted ... four doors down. The new location for Oakshire Commons will have event space, Detroit-style pizza and beer! Read all about it

2nd Annual Holiday Brew Fest

Celebrate Oregon Beer is co-sponsoring the 2nd annual Holiday Brew Fest! Held in Pioneer Courthouse Square, this is the successor to the Holiday Ale Fest, which sadly did not survive Covid. But now in it's second year, the HBF will warm you this winter!

All the Details
​Fri 12/6 5:30 - 9pm.
Sat 12/7 Noon - 9pm
Sun 12/8 Noon - 5pm

Tickets available now: Buy here​
Volunteers needed: Sign up here​
More information about the event, breweries, and beer: website​

Proceeds from this event will help support Celebrate Oregon Beer.

Other Upcoming Events

Our regular roundup of coming events, listed by date. Contact us with your events at: events@celebrateoregonbeer.com

Holidays at McMenamins Looking for someone else to roast the turkey? The McMenamins are open for Thanksgiving and most holidays--including, of course, New Year's. Find a location near you

12 Beers of Gristmas Twelve PDX breweries, one passport, 17 days. Visiting each is its own reward, but collect stamps for a chance to win big prizes. Dates: 11/29 to 12/15. Event Details

Festival of Dark Arts Sales for tickets to Astoria's annual festival of art, performance, and dark ales begin at 7:36 am sharp on Black Friday (11/29) and go fast. Get 'em here

Humbug Lagerfest Occidental is hosting 20+ breweries Fri-Sat Dec 13-14 for its annual fest, including delicious food, special beers, holiday movies, and Santa! Details and a link to tickets

Spotlight

Oregon-Bred Hops Fifteen years ago, two far-sighted entrepreneurs thought aroma hops were the future of beer. They partnered with Oregon State University to breed varieties especially suited to the state's climate and have five new varieties on the market.

It may be hard to remember where beer was fifteen years ago, when Roger Worthington and Jim Solberg founded Indie Hops. IPAs were not yet the most popular craft style nationally (though they were in Oregon) and Citra had just been been released the year prior. Craft breweries, who would one day dominate the hops market, were still bit players in an ecosystem built around domestic lager. Nevertheless, the two founders thought they saw an opportunity.

Background​
Solberg and Worthington, Corvallis natives, were excited about beer and thought they glimpsed a different future—one that lay in the emerald cones rising high on trellises across the Willamette Valley. Most American hops are grown in the the Yakima Valley’s hot, dry climate. Solberg and Worthington felt that Oregon needed a robust breeding program that would produce cultivars like Cascade and Willamette, which flourish in the cooler, wetter Willamette Valley.

For decades, hop breeders had been focused on finding high-alpha varieties that produced clean bitterness, but Indie Hops understood that the market was headed toward aroma hops—and they wanted to develop varieties that grew well in Oregon and offered brewers a modern, updated taste. In 2009, a little over 50% of the harvest hops were high-alpha varieties. Indie Hops was right--the future was aroma, and today only 26% of the American crop are high-alpha varieties.

Instead of building a breeding program from the ground up, Indie Hops turned to Oregon State University, which already had a robust hop research program. They brought in Dr. Shaun Townsend to lead the breeding, and he worked closely with Dr. Tom Shellhammer, an internationally-recognized expert on hop chemistry. Indie Hops fully funds the breeding program, and works closely with Townsend on selection.

Strata is Born
​Shortly after Townsend came on the project, he got to work. The process of breeding a hop takes roughly a decade, during which time the breeders identify plants with good "agronomics"--that is, they grow well, are disease-resistant, and have good hop yields. Once the breeders have a population of these hops, they begin a slow process of winnowing and selection, looking for varieties that will perform well in the brewhouse.

In 2009, Townsend was impressed with a particular group of seedlings that he sent forward. He worked with Indie Hops' Solberg and longtime brewer Matt Sage to select choices that might become commercially viable. In 2011 Townsend took the most promising of the cultivars, which he designated X-331, and put it through a seven-year process of evaluation and testing. They released the hop in 2018, naming it Strata. (The company made a great video about this project that you can watch here.)

Very few hops will ever receive a name, and of those that do, most don't enjoy the success of a Cascade or Citra. But Townsend and Indie Hops managed to score a winner on their first hop. Strata features a sweet strawberry note as well as a more savory cannabis flavor, making it a favorite among IPA brewers. After just five years on the market, Strata has become the third most-grown hop in Oregon by weight.

In the years since Strata was released, Indie Hops has released three new varieties from the breeding program: the modern noble Lorien (2021), tropical Luminosa (2022), and fruity-floral Audacia (2023). They join lemony Meridian (2016), a variety Indie Hops discovered rather than bred, to round out the success of this new breeding program.

Breeding hops is a time-intensive, expensive process, and the results are never guaranteed. By focusing on Oregon's special climate, Indie hops and OSU have been working to create the hops that will sustain the industry for decades to come. So far, the results have been very tasty!

“Tucked away in each pouch of mysterious humulus lupulus, there are as many potential flavors and aromas as there are human moods, temperaments, and personalities. This is the start of a brilliant new beer world in which brewers will be free to cook up a diverse roster of beers showcasing endless combinations of new and dazzling aromas and flavors, limited only by the imagination.”

--An optimistic Roger Worthington, writing about Indie Hops near its inception

Keeping Up

For everything Oregon, please visit the Celebrate Oregon website. On it you’ll find information about the state’s brewing heritage, breweries (including region by region travel guides), the state’s unique hop regionand characteristic varieties, and info about our amazing fresh hop beer and season. We have a searchable, sortable database of all Oregon’s breweries and taprooms (though the full information for each brewery is not fully completed) as well as a map so you’re never far away from a tasty pint. In the coming year, new features will appear at least as often as this newsletter, where you can stay informed. Next time, we'll have a look at Oregon's ten most unusual breweries.

Celebrate Oregon Beer is supported by the Oregon Brewers Guild and Oregon Hop Commission.

Excellent journalism is of the many ways Oregon is so special. In between newsletters, be sure to check out these sites for the latest happenings:

• ​The New School​
• ​The Oregonian​
• ​Brewpublic​
• ​Beervana Blog​

See you again in two weeks!