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!
