July is Oregon’s craft beer month, for a list of events go here.

I’m going to highly recommend attending the Belmont-Station Puckerfest, which runs July 14-20 here in Portland.

Today I made my way down to the Puckerfest, a celebration of sour beers. I had never been to Belmont-Station before and it really blew me away. The larger portion of the place is a beer store with a thousand beers from around the world, rotating regularly, that you can sample by the bottle. The lighting in the store protects the freshness of the beer. The other portion is a little pub with about 16 harder-to-find beers on tap that also rotate regularly.

I misread the website for the Puckerfest and thought that it started today at noon but I was off by three hours. Luckily the owner was in store and the person behind the counter were extremely nice and didn’t want to send me away empty-handed after walking 30 minutes for this event. They had put a New Belgium La Folie (aged in oak barrells) on tap as a teaser the night before so they offered me a pint of this. It poured an elegant dark and thick red with a thin head. It smelled like beautiful apples. The flavor? Well, if this beer represents any of the other beers at Puckerfest, it is going to be one amazing event! There’s an immediate sugary sourness that turns into all sorts of clean and crisp fruit flavors that I can still taste hours later. This was one of the best beer experiences I’ve had as far as flavors go.

While drinking outside I got to meet Amy and Carl Singmaster. Carl is one of the owners of Belmont-Station, the other owner is Don Younger who also owns my favorite Portland pub a few blocks away, The Horse Brass. The Singmaster’s were beer fanatics and it was really great to talk while they ate lunch.

As far as Puckerfest goes, I’m going to try to make it back during the actual hours of the event. It runs July 14-20 from 3-11, except it runs noon to midnight on the 18th-19th. The beer I had was perfectly balanced and amazingly sour. It was a blast. I think it would be really fun to have the most over the top sour beer possible, which is what I will do if I can make it back there. A list of some of the breweries they will have on tap during this Puckerfest include: Cantillon, Dogfishead, BJ’s Portland, New Belgium, Six Rivers, Double Mountain, Roots, Cascade, Verhaeghe, Liefmans, Full Sail, and Walking Man among others. You can see Belmont-Station news, including new beers, here.