Happy Monday! I hope you had a great weekend and are ready for another week of Oregon beer news; I’ll be periodically updating this post throughout the day with the latest news, as usual, so check back often. If you have news to share, please contact me and I will get that posted as well.

The Great American Beer Festival concluded this weekend, and Oregon as usual brought home a nice assortment of medals. Winning breweries were: 10 Barrel, Barley Brown’s, Bend Brewing, Blitz-Weinhard, Breakside, Burnside, Columbia River, Deschutes, Full Sail, Harvester, Hopworks, Laurelwood, Logsdon, Pelican Pub & Brewery, Rogue, Silver Moon, and The Commons—17 in all! That’s a nice haul and congrats to everyone on that list!

Double Mountain Brewery (Hood River) is now bottling their beers in special returnable bottles and they are rolling them out in Portland with a number of releases. Tonight is the first stop where they are teaming up with Belmont Station from 5 to 8pm for the release, tasting, and meet the brewers: “In the five years since Double Mountain began brewing, one of the most requested items here at the Station has been bottles of Double Mountain. At last they will be here tonight and so will Brewer/owners Charlie Devereux and Matt Swihart to pour tastes for you. Hop Lava, IRA, Kolsch, and Vaporizer! We’ll have plenty for sale at this kickoff party but Double Mountain still won’t have enough beer to send the bottles everywhere so you may want to score a couple weeks worth.”

GoodLife Brewing (Bend) is holding a release party for their popular Pass Stout today at 4pm at the Brewery—specifically their Biergarten, based on the flyer advertising “fire pit party.” Pass Stout is a big American-style stout with 8% abv and they’ll be pouring samples for the release. Make sure to come get some!

Laurelwood Brewing (Portland) is sponsoring an Autumn Ale Festival with weekend, from the 19th through the 21st, at northwest Portland’s Plew’s Brews: featuring three days of harvest beers that you can sample for $1 per taster (the glass will cost $5). Look for pumpkin beers and fresh hop beers as well as other treats.

Speaking of fresh hops, the final Fresh Hop Festival in Oregon is taking place this Saturday the 20th: the Willamette Valley Fresh Hop Festival, in Eugene! It’s located at the Lane Events Center from noon to 9pm; “Admission includes two options, either $15 at the door, which includes a logo glass and five taste tickets, or $20 at the door, which includes a logo glass and ten taste tickets.” Additional tickets will be available of course for $1 each. If you missed the earlier fresh hop festivals (or even if you didn’t), this is your last chance to try a large number of the beers in one place—don’t miss out!