A while back, I wrote a post about a contest to create the name and logo for Hop Valley’s first bottled beer; a Cream Ale celebrating Springfield’s 125th anniversary. If anyone is still interested in entering, the contest is open through 5:00pm tonight. You can enter, or view current entries on

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I have a minute to write up the results of our Winter Ale Taste-Off. For the Taste-Off, my wife and I sampled 9 seasonal ales. Due to the limitations of our local bottle shop, we had to stray from our initial plan of trying all the Oregon winter ales that [...]

I am heading up to Portland next Wednesday to attend a blogger’s preview of the 14th Annual Holiday Ale Festival. The trip will mark a couple of new “firsts” for me. It will be my first time attending the Holiday Ale Festival and the first time I have been invited to an event because of this blog.

For those of you unfamiliar with Portland’s Holiday [...]

It’s official. I am now a card carrying member of the Rogue Nation. My membership package arrived Monday. Inside I found a welcome letter, a copy of the Declaration of Interdependence, an issue of the Rogue newspaper, a bumper sticker, a postcard depicting the Newport brewery and my Citizen card.

I you are not already a member of the Rogue Nation I [...]

Well, nothing ever goes quite as planned. My wife and I stopped by Beer Nuts Friday evening, intent on purchasing the winter beers for our taste-off.

We had planned on purchasing:
• Alaskan – Winter Ale
• BridgePort – Ebenezer
• Cascade Lakes – Santa’s Little Helper
• Deschutes – Jubelale
• Full Sail – Wassail
• McTarnahan’s – HumBug’r
• New Belgium [...]