Dan Markham

The Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon is one of my favorites. The beers they produce are marked by their clean flavors and balanced malt and hop profile. Hop Trip is now one of my favorite brews from one of my favorite breweries.

Another in The Deschutes Brewery’s Bond Street Series, Hop Trip uses fresh – and I mean fresh – Crystal hops in the kettle. The hops are from a single farm outside of Salem, Oregon in the Willamette Valley (”estate grown” hops?). Picked in the fall – hop season – they are trucked directly from the field to the brewery in a matter of a few hours. There is even a movie chronicling the trip to the hop fields.

Oh lord, what a fresh hop can do! Hints of apricot in the nose are incredibly robust but in no way overpowering. It’s like a sweet, thick perfume, not cloying at all, though, but pleasing and crisp (a common trait amongst many Deschutes brews). It’s like an IPA done right.

I bought mine from BevMo. Like all of the Bond Street ales it is a limited edition so get it while you can.

First the screw top, now this.

What’s a gourmand to do when all the familiar signals are crossed? What’s next, high quality canned coffee?

I will willingly drink any goddamned concoction the Deschutes Brewery puts into bottles

Amen to that!

via The Morning News‘ “Cracking open the fridge on a sweltering August day“, inspired by Daring Fireball

Michael Jackson, author of Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion: 1942-2007.

Rest in peace. You have freed many an interested beer drinker from the tyranny of industrio-beer and in the process opened the eyes of the same people to a wider world of gastronomic pleasure. As John Gruber says: “Beers in his honor tonight”. Cheers to that. I’d like to think he would want it exactly that way.

The book that introduced me to wider world of beer is the bible of the beer world and you owe it to yourself to own a copy.