Beer Wars seems like a movie  worth watching. It’s a documentary about quality beer and the struggle to show the United States how good beer can be. Not that I’m not already convinced about microbreweries, but this sounds right up my alley. Here is the trailer:

From the trailer I didn’t see any Oregon breweries, but I saw some the great well known larger breweries like Stone and New Belgium. We’ll see what happens, but since there wasn’t any mention of them in the trailer, I’ll tell you about a little brewery that I visited about a week ago.

Double Mountain Brewery is set in Hood River, up the beautiful Columbia Gorge, and is located about 3 blocks from the large Full Sail Brewery. Employee Owners of Full Sail started Double Mountain. Last weekend they were celebrating their 2nd anniversary and I traveled 60 miles to attend. I knew they had really great Oregon-style hoppy beer like the India Red Ale, the Hop Lava, and the winter seasonal Fa-La-La-La-La, and even their Kölsch has some hop kick, but I had no clue that they have a whole arsenal of really great brews ranging from German malt beers to crazy bourbon aged browns. They were serving thirteen of some of the best tasting beers I’ve had. Here is a picture of the beautiful drive:

It’s beautiful out here all seasons. Okay, here’s a couple pictures of the brewery, click the image to see it larger:

Do you think that hop poster inspired my recent poster? Possibly subconsciously…

And you know you’re in a good Oregon brewery when you have a folk band like Chickweed on stage under a giant tent because it’s raining.

But what it all boils down to is that Double Mountain is brewing up some of the best tasting beer I’ve had. I decided not to buy the IRA even though it would have been nice to have on tap from the source, but it is probably the beer I order the most. Here’s a list of what I drank in clockwise order from the top:
-Kölsh
-Black Irish – Dublin Style Stout
-Brett-Devil – Fermented an under-hopped IRA wort with 100 percent Brettanomyces yeast that produced some insane flavors including apple and pear. 9+%.
-Fa La La La La – Winter 2008 Reserve
-Standard Porter – Brewed with Gambrinus Organic Pilsner malt, among others.
-Das Boot – Dry Hopped Altbier – A hoppy German dark ale that they’ve made a tad “bigger” in every respect…”but that’s just how [they] roll.”
-Alpenbrew – Light nuttiness with spicy/herbal hops and some fruitiness