Beer and Breweries

Breakside Brewery opens new Slabtown “Hop Lab” Brewpub

By: Ezra | March 6, 2017

Multi-award winning Breakside Brewery is pleased to announce the opening today, Monday, March 6th, 2017 of their new Slabtown brewpub at 1570 NW 22nd Ave

Portland, OR 97210. The three level, restaurant, and bar also has a custom JVNW 10 barrel brewhouse designed for optimizing hop flavor and aroma. Breakside has named the new Slabtown brewery (their 3rd brewhouse) the “Hop Lab” and it will produce hop forward beers designed to be served fresh at the pub and not kegged or distributed except for the occasional special event.

Seeking New Frontiers in Hoppy Beers

General Info

The Slabtown brewpub features a custom-designed 10 barrel system from JV Northwest (Canby, OR). The brewery includes a 3 vessel brewhouse, 2 10-barrel fermenters, 3 20-barrel fermenters, and six serving tanks (3 x 10 barrel and 3 x 20 barrel).

Brewers

Will Jaquiss will lead the brewery at Slabtown. A graduate of Williams College and the Siebel Institute, Will has been the R&D Brewer at Breakside since 2015, and he is responsible for designing award- winning beers such as Will’s Alt and Hop Delivery Mechanism Double IPA. During Will’s tenure as

our R&D brewer, he turned our “3 barrel basement brewery” at the Dekum pub into one of the most award-winning breweries in the world, including multiple medals at the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival.

Joining Will as co-brewer will be Tom Fischer . Tom has worn many hats and is one of our longest tenured employees at Breakside, originally starting as a server and bartender. Tom has been a production brewer since early 2014 and has been involved in all aspects of brewing and cellaring.

Brewmaster Ben Edmunds and Director of Brewing Operations Jacob Leonard will work closely with Will and Tom on recipe design, process refinement, and overall brewery management.

Focus & Style

The Slabtown Brewpub will serve as our “hop lab,” and the majority of beers brewed here will be hop-forward.

“Hoppy Beers” Beyond IPAs

Brewers today have the greatest pantry of ingredients available to them in the history of brewing, especially hops. In the quest to discover the next Citra, Mosaic, or Simcoe, hop breeders have grown and developed numerous other varietals, many of which are wonderful hops but not great for American IPAs. We want to focus on these “non IPA” varietals and try to expand the vocabulary that we use to talk about hops and hop forward beers.

A Brewhouse Designed Around Maximizing Hop Flavor and Creating Different Ways to Use Hops

We’ve designed a brewery around the idea of optimizing hop flavor and aroma.

Brewpub Freshness and Exclusivity

Get it here, get it now, get it fresh. For the past years, we’ve focused carefully on shelf stability, on the perfect “30 day” IPA. Slabtown is our opportunity to swing the pendulum the other direction and focus on intensely fresh beer. We won’t be kegging the beers from Slabtown and sending them to our other pubs. Save for the occasional special event or two, they’ll be available on site only. We’ve crafted a lineup of entirely new beers that we think will shine with this sort of showcase.

“The Seeker Series” of IPAs: Beers That Honor The Diversity of India Pale Ale

We want to pay tribute to the great IPAs that we’ve encountered over the years. Rather than argue about which regional variant of IPA is the best, we want to brew them all. Our “Seeker” series of IPAs will be our take on what we feel are the paradigmatic regional IPAs found worldwide:

• the golden, resinous, strong IPAs of SouthernCalifornia typified by friends at Pizza Port, Bagby, Beachwood, Noble Ale Works, and Ballast Point • the soft , hazy and estery IPAs of New England in the vein of Hill Farmstead, Nightshift, and Trillium • the piney and citric IPAs of the P acific Northwest and Northern California made timeless by Firestone Walker, • Russian River, and Barley Brown’s • the over-the-top, weighty IPAs of the Midwest inspired by Fat Heads, Columbus Brewing, Brew Kettle, Three Floyds and Surly • the rich and saturating IPAs of the Mountain West a vein that runs from Melvin in Jackson WY south through Denver to Albuquerque, home of Bosque, La Cumbre, and Canteen • the fruity and oily IPAs from the Southern Hemisphere.

BREAKSIDE BRINGS AN ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT TO SLABTOWN WITH A SHOWPIECE BREWPUB

Opening Beers

SOMETHING WICKED

A New England-inspired IPA with loads of Mosaic and Citra hops. Part of our “Seeker” seriesPRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE DOUBLE IPA Intensely hoppy double IPA with notes of apricot, papaya, and juicy fruitW I L S N E R Classic Pilsner meets West Coast sensibilities: German Pilsner + Simcoe hopsO R O Easy drinking Summer Ale with a kiss of Lemondrop hops

TROPICAL GOSE Gose with lychee fruit, coriander, and umeboshi (salt cured Japanese plums with red shiso)

MEXICAN COFFEE STOUT Sweet stout with cinnamon, fennel, and Stumptown coffee

SLABTOWN SESSION ALE**

4.7% hop bomb featuring Eldorado hops

COCONUT HAZE** Famous “Vermont-style” yeast meets contemporary IPA and toasted coconut

SUN BELT IPA** Classic Southern California-inspired IPA

CHINOOK IPA** Contemporary meets classic in this Northwest IPA, heavy on Chinook and Mosaic hops

SHIFT BREAK WHEATWINE**

Collaboration beer with Night Shift Brewing

** Denotes beers will debut starting Mar 15.

We’ll eventually establish a few of the beers as our full-time house beers, but the tap list will rotate with a wide range of different new beers. At any given time, customers can expect 2-3 house IPAs, 2-3 additional hop forward beers on draft, a lager, a dark beer, a fruit/culinary/sour beer, and 1-3 additional rotating selections. Beyond that, we’ll supplement the draft list with core beers from the Breakside lineup brewed at Milwaukie, and a large selection of bottles including many limited, barrel-aged and sour beers.

Future Beer and Projects

Collaboration Beers with Nightshift, Figueroa Mountain, Reuben’s Brews, Pinthouse Pizza, Little Beast and more friends Hop School Series: “G is for Grungeist,” “C is for Cashmere” Chef Collaboration Series Redux

ABOUT BREAKSIDE BREWERY

Breakside Brewery opened in 2010 in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Northeast Portland as a restaurant and pub brewery The brewery gained attention early on for its innovative, experimental and diverse beers, while also winning a first medal at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011. In 2013, Breakside expanded operations to Milwaukie, OR with a 30 bbl production brewery filled with 30, 60 and 120 barrel tanks, barrel rooms for wild and non-wild/sour fermentations, and a 24-tap tasting room.

In 2014 Breakside was awarded with the highly coveted Gold Medal for American-Style IPA at the Great American Beer Festival for their flagship IPA, which was also named to Men’s Journal’s 100 Best Beers In The World and the best beer in Oregon by The Oregonian. Breakside is also known for their portfolio of barrel-aged and sour beers like Bourbon Barrel-Aged Aztec, a strong amber ale with chocolate and chilies, that won Bronze at both Chicago’s Festival of Barrel-Aged Beers and Best of Craft Beer Awards, and Passionfruit Sour a fruited berliner-weisse style beer that earned a Bronze at the 2013 Great American Beer festival In 2016, Breakside plans to open a new brewpub in Northwest Portland’s Slabtown neighborhood.

Breakside Beers are available on draft and in 22oz bottles in Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Northern California, Colorado, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alberta.

Read up on Breakside in the PRESS and see the full list of ACCOLADES.

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Ezra

Ezra Johnson-Greenough is a writer, brewer, artist and event planner, known online by some as Samurai Artist. When not dreaming up exotic beers like his recent BLT Gose and planning events such as Portland Beer Week, Brewing up Cocktails and the Portland Fruit Beer Festival he is keeping his beer blog The New School up to date and designing beer labels and logos for Upright Brewing and Burnside Brewing among others.