As one Portlander put it to me: “Portland has a beer fest every three weeks.” To be honest, that seems like a conservative estimate. There’s a holiday ale fest, wild ale in the spring, fruit beer in the summer, ten days of Portland Beer “Week,” a full month of fests in July, a beer-and-bike fest in the fall, plus the first-ever LGBTQ beer-wine-cocktail fest happening this weekend. To name a fraction of them.
On Saturday, Jan. 25, Portland saw the kickoff of another annual-fest-to-be: the Northwest Coffee Beer Invitational, held in its inaugural incarnation at the Goose Hollow neighborhood’s eponymous Inn. It was a crowded, convivial success. “We’ll definitely be doing this again next year,” says event coordinator Jean Heffernan to me only an hour into the half-day event.
Twelve Oregon brewers collaborated with local coffee roasters to produce 12 excellent submissions ranging from Berliner Weisse to Baltic porter. Here were three trends apparent among them.
Lighter Beers: Many coffee beers of yore, and several still today, match dark roasts (think Sumatra) with even darker beers (think oatmeal stout). And yes, they’re good. But it’s refreshing to see options like Widmer Brothers’ Scared Half to Death Mocha Pale Ale, Pints Brewing’s Cherry Bomb Berliner Weisse and Coalition Brewing Company’s Night Cap Coffee IPA, especially as coffee beer brewers look to break out of winter into the spring and summer markets.
Unconventional Flavors: Maraschino cherry. Sesame. Lemon juice. These novel flavors and more were incorporated in the submissions at the Invitational—to surprisingly satisfactory effect. To stand out in an increasingly saturated coffee beer field, brewers have realized the necessity of taking risks wherever inspiration strikes, whether that means drawing from sour cocktail recipes or “accidental desserts.”
Triple Alliances: The best thing about cross-industry beverage fests is the long-term collaboration they tend to initiate. In Portland, where coffee and beer vie for king, this invitational was both a symptom and a harbinger of increasingly close ties between professionals from both fields. And a few breweries went a step further, incorporating rum and bourbon flavors from local distilleries’ recycled barrels—and even specialty Oregonian waters like the Volcanic Mineral Refresher paired with Ristretto beans in Burnside Brewing’s Trifecta Collaboration Stout.
