Deschutes: Bend's Big Craft Brewery

We have been to Deschutes Portland Pub a few times, and even had the chance to go behind the scenes to see their brewing operations. The Portland Pub is a relatively small brewery that basically produces the beer consumed onsite. Our trip to Bend gave us the opportunity to visit the main Deschutes Brewery. As you are aware, we love the brewery tours. You'd think you've seen one brewery, you've seen them all. But that's false! Each brewery has different arrangements and philosophies They also vary on size and volume, and have different tour guides. Even some of our repeat tours are different because the breweries increase in size or upgrade equipment.

But back to Deschutes... the first picture shows the brewing kettles (we love stainless steel). To avoid getting particles stuck in seams, each kettle is fabricated in one giant piece. This caused a challenge to Deschutes - how to get these kettles over the Cascades and into Bend. With some careful transportation and temporary closing of highways, they made it. Here are some other interesting facts:

The Deschutes tour took us past their lab where they cultivate and test their yeast strains. Deschutes sets out to make English style ales so they do add minerals to their water to match the type of water that occurs naturally in England.



















Every bottle of Deschutes beer comes from this line.







The best part of any tour is of course the tasting. We were lucky enough to get to try several of their seasonal brews, including Hope in the Dark, but of their year round selections our favorites are Mirror Pond Pale Ale, Green Lakes Organic Ale, and Obsidian Stout.

Finding the Sun in Bend, OR

Last year we had a rather long, wet, and cool spring. By the time June rolled around we were dying for a peak of sunshine, as well as some warmth. We heard tale of a place in Oregon - just a few hours drive from Portland - where we could get out from underneath the towering Douglas firs, looming rain clouds, and finally get some sun on our abnormally pale faces. So on a rainy, cold Portland morning in June, we packed up our car and headed out to Bend, Oregon. Where we most certainly found sunshine!



















Here is a list of a few places we discovered while in Bend and highly recommend.

Sites:
Pilot Butte - This extinct cinder cone volcano offers an amazing view of Bend and the surrounding mountains such as Mt. Bachelor and Three Sisters. You can drive, bike or even hike to the top to catch a view like this:

















Downtown Bend - There are many unique stores, coffee shops, and restaurants in the downtown area.

Drake Park - A pretty park located in the downtown area. Drake also has a great trail for biking or strolling along the Deschutes River and Mirror pond

Food:
McKay Cottage Restaurant - The most amazing breakfast we have ever had! Definitely go on a sunny morning so you can sit outside.

Bend Burger Company - A great burger and super friendly staff...a win-win.

Baldy's BBQ - Ever since leaving OKC we have been on the lookout for some good Texas-style BBQ and this place does a good job of feeding our smoked meat craving.

Activities:
Deschutes Brewery tour and tasting - A more in depth post with pictures here.

Eagle Crest putting course - It's putt-putt but on real grass and a fun way to spend an hour.

For what's it worth we found most of these places plus many more things we want to do at the visit Bend website.

An added bonus was this amazing view of Mt. Hood on the way back to Portland.

















We enjoyed Bend so much that we went back again in August, and will head back as soon as the mountain passes reopen in late spring.

Remember when we used to update this blog...

Yeah, us neither. However, we are about to remedy that at least in the near future so check back very soon for posts about what we did the last half of 2011 and what we've been doing in 2012. Until then please accept this OKCtoPDX approved Portlandia clip as an apology for our absence.

Portland Gets a New Bridge!

Courtesy OregonLive.com

Many years ago, we presented our readers reader with a post about bridges in Portland. Great times, I know. Well, get ready to add one more bridge to the mix. The City of Portland and Trimet recently broke ground on a new bridge over the Willamette. This bridge, completion date of many years from now, will carry light rail, people, and bikes. No cars allowed! That's Portland for you.

For now they are calling the bridge the Portland-Milwaukie light-rail bridge. I have a feeling they will come up with a cooler name once it gets dedicated. I'm thinking something to do with beer, books, or hipsters. Read more about the bridge and see a nice graphic here. To watch the building, live, click here.

Time to Lager!

As you know, we are homebrewers (here is proof). Our first few batches of brew were made using ale yeast (a top fermenting yeast). The different strains of ale yeast allow you to make pale ales, amber ales, porters, etc. Ale yeast like warm temperatures (room temperature is fine) and work through the beer quickly. Thus, you can drink your homebrew about a month after you boil up your wort.

Lager yeasts are a different story. These fellas like cooler temperatures (under 60 degrees Fahrenheit) and work at a slower, more relaxed pace (on the bottom of the brew). Lagers often have mellow notes, but allow for some additional flavorings if you are daring (we are not that daring yet). Pilsners are an example of lagers. If you want to brew up a batch of lager, you will need to either do it in the winter (much like the Germans who created it) or have some equipment artificially chill the batch.


Back in February we decided to take a crack at brewing a lager beer. Our garage keeps a fairly constant 50 degrees over the winter, and we had enough space in our fridge for the final lagering phase (yes that is 5 gallons of lager in our fridge above!), so we went to our local brew supply store and bought the ingredients. The key to lagering is patience - expect to wait at least three months before you pour your first beer.

Boil the wort as usual (instructions), and follow the steps up through this post. Once the lager yeast is in the primary fermentation bucket, keep the batch at around room temperature for a day. This will make sure the yeast get started. After the yeast start bubbling away, move the primary into your cool (45 to 55 deg.) area. Keep the batch in this area until the batch bubbles once every 4 minutes. Don't be too eager to move onto the next step, just be patient and let the the beer mellow.

When the primary fermentation is done, move the primary into a 60 degree area for a few days. This helps the yeast finish off its work for this round. Rack the beer to the secondary (like here), and keep the beer in the 60 degree area for a week. As long as the beer is not bubbling, you can move the secondary back into a cold storage area. We used our fridge set at 37 deg. F. This is the official lagering period and should go 3 to 4 weeks.

After the lagering period, bottle just like you would the ale beers. Store the bottles in a cool area (55 to 65 deg F) for one week, allowing the yeast to carbonate the beer. Then move the bottles back into a cooler area (45 to 55 deg F) for 4 to 6 weeks. This allows the final conditioning and flavor mellowing to occur. After this time, refrigerate, crack one open, and enjoy!

For the official instructions, from the experts, please go here.

Happy Caturday!

Post In Pictures: Woodburn Tulip Festival

We had a sunny day in April (a rare treat)! We jumped at the chance to enjoy get outside and try out our new camera. We drove down to Woodburn, Oregon to take some lovely pictures of tulips at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm's annual festival. Woodburn is south of Portland off of I-5 (see the map below).

















It was nice to finally get out of the house and enjoy some non-rainy, oh I mean sunny weather. The festival has been extended due to all the rainy weather so if you are in the Portland area you might want to consider checking it out if we happen to get another sunny afternoon (HA, we crack ourselves up). Here are a few pictures (we took 100 but we really narrowed it down for y'all).








































Tulips are great and all but these miniature donkeys were a-dor-able!!

Happy Caturday!

Spring Means Raptor Cam

The raptor cam is a sure sign that spring here in Portland. This is the fourth year for the KGW Raptor Cam. The eggs started to hatch about a week ago and there are 3 chicks in the nest so far. Things are starting to get pretty exciting...check it out!!

Click, Click, Click, Click Camera

As you might have guessed you have taken our annual early spring (aka too much rain = no energy to blog) hiatus from our little blog. And we apologize to any of our readers that have been disappointed by the lack of blogging and beg for your forgiveness. Ok, now that we've gotten the groveling out of the way let's jump right in.

You might have said to yourself..."Self, is that blog title a Bishop Allen reference?" And your self would be correct. If you did not say that to your self don't feel bad just consider yourself in for a treat and enjoy the little video.



So you are probably wondering what is this all about. Well friends, we are pretty excited to announce that we purchased a new camera. A couple months ago, we decided to finally stop pining for a cool SLR camera to increase the quality of our blog pictures to go with our new look. After some internet research and trying different models at various stores. We decided on the Canon Rebel T2i (this is not a product endorsement...yet). We are still trying to figure out what all the buttons and settings do but we think our early shots still look really great.

Here is a picture with our new camera:














And just for comparison, here is the same picture with our old camera:
















We will probably still use our old point and shoot Sony digital camera some since it's easier to tote around for now (we are currently scouting camera bags). If you have any SLR or general photographic tips please feel free to pass them along.

We've got Zwickelmania!

Picture this: you enter a brewpub, maybe to eat, maybe to sample what's on tap. What's this? You can get a free tour? AND they hand you a free pint of beer?! You might think this is fantasy, but during Zwickelmania, dreams do come true!

This event was new to us, but the Oregon Brewers Guild has sponsored Zwickelmania for the past few years. We weren't quite sure what zwickel meant, but it turned out meaning a day of free beer. Our tours and samples were confined to downtown Portland, but breweries all over the state were open on this day.














We started the day at Deschutes Brewery. Their main brewery is in Bend, OR, but they can brew a few small batches of beer at their Pearl District brew pub. They were nice enough to give us a full (and free!) pint of their new hefeweizen.











Fermentation tanks at Upright Brewing. Their operation was interesting - they have about 4 10-barrel fermentation tanks in their basement brewery.











We ended the day at Widmer Brothers Brewery. In fact, we shut the place down. Okay, not really, but we did get in the door just before Zwickelmania ended. Widmer is a large scale craft brewery. Where Upright had 1o barrel fermentation tanks, Widmer had 1,500 barrel tanks (1 barrel = 2 kegs = 31 gallons = 248 pints). We're talking a pint for over 300,000 people!

This was our third time touring their operation, but each time we see more and more of the brewery. The newest part for us (see above) was the bottling area. Nothing was being bottled at the time, but you could imagine the clanking of the bottles as they are filled with delicious beer. Speaking of beer, they had sampling stations spread out all around the brewery... very nice touch! We even got to meet the original Widmer Brothers!

We enjoyed the (statewide) event. The weather was nice and we got to try breweries we had yet to visit. We will definitely participate next year and may even head to a different part of the state. Cheers!

Pardon Our Dust

Hopefully you have noticed that we are making some changes to our blog. We thought our blog was starting to look a little tired so we decided to give it a shot in the arm. Please bear with us while we redesign our blog and reformat our older posts.

Happy Caturday!

Seattle: The Other White Meat

A few weeks ago we took a trip up I-5 to Seattle; the other major metropolis in the pacific northwest. Peter was attending a conference and I decided that Max & Erma could do without me for a few days so I tagged along. Here are some of our pictures from our trip and a list of places we recommend should find yourself in Seattle.

We had a great view of the infamous Space Needle from our hotel room.














Other views from our hotel











Seattle sites











Pike Place Market (a definite must see)





















Sci-Fi & Sound Museum
























Other places we recommend

Easy Street Records
Mod Super Fast Pizza
Pike Place Chowder
Tap House Grill
Top Pot Doughnuts
Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co.

Put a Bird On It

Last night we made an interesting discovery on Google maps. Google had changed Portland to Portlandia. Nice one Google, nice one!














Unfortunately we have not had a chance to see a full episode of Portlandia due to the fact that we banished cable from our home, but we have seen a few clips. If you've seen it we would love to hear your opinions. BTW, Portlandia as been renewed for a second season!

*UPDATE*
It was brought to our attention that the Portlandia that google was referring to is probably this statue.

Happy Caturday!

Happy 2011 y'all (sorry for the belated new year's wishes)! We've been working on some new post ideas and planning some upcoming adventures. I don't want to spill too much information, but this year you can look forward to more blog posts about Portland area restaurants and attractions. Plus we have more adventures in store for OKCtoPDX (some of which involve taking our whit and charm overseas). We can't be 100% sure what this year will hold for us but we hope you are as excited about 2011 as we are.

Portlandia: Dream of the 90s

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up about a show based on life in Portland that premiers tonight on IFC. Portlandia stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein. I've seen a few clips so far and it looks hilarious.

Happy Caturday (aka Meowy Catmas)!

A Twist on How To Wrap A Cat For Christmas

How to Wrap A Cat For Christmas is a huge hit on YouTube right now but we prefer Conan's take involving Andy Richter.

Merry Christmas From OKCtoPDX!!

A Playhouse Christmas!

We are extremely lucky to have several vintage 80s Christmas specials (complete with commercials) on VHS, and a tape player to watch them with. Our favorite Christmas special is Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas and we watch it every year. The special has some really incredible guest stars like Oprah, Dinah Shore, Cher, and Charo plus many classic Pee Wee moments. If you aren't lucky enough to already own a bit of Pee Wee Christmas fun you can buy it here or watch it on YouTube, see part 1 below.

Merry Christmas and Happy New YEAR (ahhhh)!!!