This past final weekend of June we headed up to Portland for a family trip, and while it wasn’t ostensibly about beer, there were still a few beery opportunities to be found (it is Portland, after all!).

We had lunch with a friend at Hopworks Urban Brewery (just as good as before—see my review here from a couple years ago) and in addition to getting to try the “Fight for your Rye’t” (brewed for Portland Beer Week’s Rye Beer Fest), I was also able to pick up bottles of the India Red Lager that HUB brewed in collaboration with Deschutes Brewery in Portland (also for Portland Beer Week).

Along with the IRL, a trip to Belmont Station scored me a few other niceties that I can’t get (or haven’t yet seen) here in Bend: a couple bottles each of Gigantic Brewing‘s new offerings, the IPA and The City Never Sleeps; a couple cans of Natian Brewery‘s Undun Blonde Ale; an Imperial Stout from Iceland (I don’t remember the name); and a bottle of the Conflux #2 from Boulevard Brewing (from their collaboration with Deschutes)—one I couldn’t pass up as that was a good beer.

I also had a glass of Gigantic’s “Rauchweizen and the Bandit” which is otherwise only on tap at Gigantic’s own tasting room. I quite enjoyed it.

The other notable stop was an impromptu visit to the relatively new Portland U-Brew & Pub: on our way to pick up pizzas for dinner, my friend Justin and I swung it to have a quick look and tasted some beer. For a five-minute visit it was worth stopping: not only is P.U.B. a homebrew shop and U-Brew facility (where you brew your beer on premise and when it’s complete you take it home with you—homebrewing on steroids), it is in fact also a brewpub where they have their own brews on tap.

They’ve been open only a year, and seem very low-key—which is why I haven’t heard of them, I think. They are planning a one-year anniversary weekend celebration on August 17th and 18th (a Friday and Saturday) so be sure to keep an eye out for the latest on that.

Incidentally, that is a rhubarb wheat beer on the menu; I got a taster of that and it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect: a cloudy wheat beer infused with the earthy and tart sourness of rhubarb. (This is relevant to my interests because I have a bunch of rhubarb and have been contemplating such a beer.)