Calum Craigie is currently the president of the Scottish Craft Brewers. He wrote an article for Brewer’s Contact, a journal made by the Craft Brewing Association in the UK. If you are in the UK, or plan to go to Scotland any time, you should check these guys out. I’m posting the article below but in summary, it is a review of my art/beer project that I mentioned in my last post, and he speaks to the success of the event and how it should influence the way the Scottish Craft Brewers operate. I believe that Calum has really captured the purpose and meaning behind why I do what I do, and so I will let him do the talking now. So, big thanks to Calum for coming to this project with an open mind and for putting a lot of thought into what I was trying to do. My responses and thoughts will be documented in a round-about way throughout these Glasgow Beer Experience postings. Here is Calum Craigie’s review:

(Calum Craigie checking his Hot Liquor Tank)

Visual Art is not something that I would usually associate with home brewed beer. I fully appreciate the craft that is involved in brewing a good beer. But…Art? I would need some convincing.

Throughout April the ambition to serve home brewed beer in a traditional pub environment was exactly what Eric Steen, artist and home brewer from the USA, had in mind. A series of “Pub School” events were held in Glasgow which included a brew night, brewing talks, readings and even a tour of a local brewery. The culmination was an event named The Market Gallery Pub on Friday 30th April which was, to quote Eric, “a one night, experimental installation inviting viewer participation through sampling home brewed beers that are presented as artworks.” The venue was the Market Gallery, an artist run facility in the East End of Glasgow which hosts and sponsors an eclectic mix of artistic events. It was certainly an interesting and challenging concept.

Eric attracted twelve all grain brewers who between then provided 26 beers. There was also some support from three commercial breweries to ensure there was enough to go round. On arriving at the event I was welcomed at the door by a steward who passed me the program for the evening which included a welcome from Eric as well as an opportunity for each of the brewers to introduce themselves and their beer. The look and feel of the venue was very much like a modern pub, there was the mix of seating and also standing space so that we could mingle with other visitors. For decoration empty bottles had been lined up on a high shelf and on the wall behind the bar all 29 beers were listed decoratively on wooden plaques. The frontage looked out onto the street through full length French windows. It could have been a trendy cafe bar in any city in Europe.

The event was to highlight Craft Brewed Beer and the interaction it encourages, however my own interest was to experience a different kind of brewing event. I was interested to meet the brewers, try their beer and ask if they enjoyed the events that Eric had championed. Most importantly, from my view, was to find out if there was an appetite to support and attend future brewing events? The Scottish Craft Brewers have found it increasingly difficult to attract new membership, and attendances for our events have been in decline for a couple of years. Here in Glasgow, Eric had managed to unearth an enthusiastic brewing community who appeared keen to showcase their beer, share their experiences and gain benefit from a community of brewing peers.

I thought a good strategy would be to select a beer, seek out the brewer and find out more about their brewing setup and preferred styles and then move onto the next one. This appeared to work very well, the brewers were happy to discuss their beers at length and also how much they had enjoyed the “Brew School” concept. What was disappointing was that most of the brewers were unaware that the SCB existed and the ones that did felt that we were only an Edinburgh focussed brewing group. However I was able to explain that the aim of the SCB was to attract brewers from across the country for the mutual benefits that can be gained. I think there was genuine interest in hearing more and there was definitely an action on me to ensure that this happens and to follow up with the contacts I made.

(There I am, pouring beer)

The Market Gallery Bar closed its doors just after 10pm and the shutters went up, albeit figuratively, on a very successful event. From an artistic perspective I think the event worked very well – the bar was well laid out, it attracted a good mix from both the brewing and artistic communities, the atmosphere was jovial and educational and it certainly left an impression of what can be achieved by bringing together various talents to work on an innovative project. This was all helped along as the general quality of the beer on offer was also very good. The event was able to ignite the enthusiasm of a group of brewers and allow them to showcase their beer to a wider audience.

My own take home message is that if the SCB want to engage with this new brewing community we are going to have to work harder at communicating the events than we currently do. There is evidently a group of brewers who appear to want to get involved in brewing events. They are a younger generation of brewers who are looking for more innovative events that will not only interest them, but also allow friends and family to be involved too. The events that we currently run miss this broader social interaction and perhaps we should be considering this when planning some of our events in the future. I am not advocating changing every event we run, but there must be room in the calendar to consider this.

I admit to starting off quite skeptical on the Market Gallery Pub concept. I did question “What was in it for the brewer?” I got my answer in the best way possible – a pub full to bursting with visitors enthusiastically consuming home brewed beer and the brewers enjoying the interaction. I thank Eric for opening my eyes on the possibilities over this aspect of our hobby and hopefully we can learn the lessons as we move forward.

Many of you know that I recently visited Scotland, but not many of you know that I was working, and that the purpose of the trip was to create a socially based art project that explores the craft beer culture in Glasgow. No joke! That’s what I did. So, I’m going to have multiple posts about my experiences and thoughts now that I’ve had a few months to digest all the information. In the coming weeks you’ll see posts about my experiences. Blog posts will start with the phrase “Glasgow Beer Experience.” I’m starting with my project, called Pub School, so those of you who were present for this project there is hopefully some new information in here for you, but you can look forward in the next couple weeks to more of: Thoughts on “Real Ale,” WEST Brewery, Williams Bros Brewing, Outside reviews of my project, and my forecast for the craft beer scene in Glasgow.

Where to start? To summarize, I was invited by the Market Gallery to create a project for the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. I created a series of events called “Pub School.” Each were types of participatory and experiential educational activities revolving around craft beer in the city. For the finale I built a temporary pub that served homebrewed beer from homebrewers around the area. I came to Glasgow with a basic skeletal structure – this “Pub School” – idea but I had yet to meet anyone in person that I had been in touch with, I had yet to visit any of the pubs and/or breweries I had been researching, and I had yet to drink beer in Scotland, so I came with an open mind and an open schedule. In the end, the Pub School events were weekly, for the entire month of April, and for each event the gallery had transformed slightly until by the end it was a full-service pub.

Pub School

The first four Pub School events were a lot of fun and pretty laid back. I invited Geoff Traill and Owen Sheerins, who I had met through an online homebrew forum to lead a public homebrewing demonstration. I had some drinks with these guys on one of my first days and I was really impressed with their knowledge of brewing, their knowledge of styles and traditions, and their commitment to understand the subtleties of flavor (flavour). So, these guys worked together to make a beer, with about 15-20 people watching and asking questions and eventually participating. They made an English style bitter and threw in some Willamette hops in my honor, as at the time I actually lived 22 blocks from the Willamette River in Oregon. They ended up with two fermenters so they used an English yeast in one and an American ale yeast in the other. These beers were both served at the final event, the homebrewers pub.

The second event was a beer-reading session where each person brought a text that they would be willing to read in front of the group. I brought information about the mystification of saints in the brewing tradition, others brought readings about the development of historical styles, reasons for drinking craft beer, there was a reading from Sam Calagione’s book where he talks about embarrasing moments in his early business days at Dogfish Head, and a novel where someone must drink an age-old beer in order to save the world. For the third event one of the brewers at Williams Brothers Brewing came to the gallery, which is based outside of Glasgow in Alloa. He brought us the line-up of historic ales and a few of their contemporary line and shared with us information about the brewery. I’ll have another post devoted to Williams Bros. For the fourth event we took a field-trip down to WEST Brewery and received a full tour of the brewery. They spoiled us there, we met the brewers, and had a few drinks. The reason I was excited about this place is that they make a beer with 100% wheat, so it’s great to see their equipment. Also, they keg their beer, which in this area of the world is against the grain of the craft beer world. I’ll have more thoughts on WEST in another post as well.

Market Gallery Pub

The final event of the Pub School series was the Market Gallery Pub. This event I had been planning in advance for months before I ever arrived. In the end, I worked with 14 homebrewers and they created a total of 27 beers that were served at this event. I also invited Harviestoun and Williams Bros. to provide extra beer in case we ran out. 30 different beers in all. These were served to the public for free…yes, free beer to anyone of-age that wanted it. There was a line out the door…I worked with many of the homebrewers closely, asking them ways to best present their beer so that it was poured properly, so it showed off what they did, and was presented as artwork. Together we came up with a system that I think worked really really well. We rotated the beers every 5 minutes or so and instead of pouring out of the bottle, we had a couple runners who were pouring the bottles into pitchers and avoiding pouring yeast into the beer. This turned out to be great because we had ten beers pouring at a time, and it made an incredible visual to have 10 pitchers filled with beer ranging in color from light yellow to orange to brown to the blackest of blacks, all different consistencies and textures, all ranging in flavors from a crisp ale, to a really bitter IPA, to a vanilla stout, to a mint ale, to a gruit, and much more. It was visually stunning and it also kept people coming back all night to make sure they tried as many beers as they could. We served nearly 800 bottles worth of beer and we were pouring 8oz or so at a time, so nearly 1600 glasses. There was some discussion of whether or not 8oz was too much for a sample, but this is one area where I stuck to my guns because I wanted the place to have a pub atmosphere and not only a tasting session. In the end, I believe it was a good decision.

The whole event-series was geared toward looking at the aesthetics of brewing as an art-form and beer culture as a world in which this art is cultivated, developed, and discussed, just like any other form of contemporary art. So one of my major goals was to highlight many different aspects of the beer as art. For the pub, as I mentioned, I wanted to create a visual element that would show the beauty and differences found in beer, differences that you could see, and then also taste. The bar itself served as a display for the bottles that had yet to be opened. I also had shelving on the wall where we placed all the empties so that as the shelves filled up, one could see the variations of the bottles, and the labeling that went onto the bottles. A good number of the homebrewers applied labels onto the bottles so that when displayed they were also represented as a type of sculptural element. There were also a couple shelves with bottles that I had brought from the Pacific Coast, along with beers that I drank with my new friends in Scotland.

The furniture in the pub was also something that I put a lot of thought into. The wood was donated by Glasgow Wood Recyclers, a non-profit organization that mostly use their wood to create raised bed planters for schools. When visiting their shop I was trying to figure out how to use the wood when I turned one of the planters on end and used it as a bench. Aha! The raised bed planter, turned on end, became the design for the benches, tables, and the bar itself, and when I was done, I could return it to the earth as a raised bed planter. Not only that but each piece could fit inside the other so that during transportation it took up less space. It was utopian furniture in my mind.

Lastly, I was thinking of ways to highlight the homebrewers as artists themselves, giving credit to them and not purely the product they made. I ended up making a 12 page menu for the event that was handed out to each visitor. The menu listed all the beers and general information about the beer, but also had a write up on each brewer. Much like an artist catalog for a good-sized exhibition of artwork, the catalog served as a way for you, the audience member, to learn something about the artist/homebrewer. So the menu was full of anecdotal stories about where they brew, what their brewing system looks like, how their wife won’t let them brew in the kitchen so they do it in the garage, what they do for a living, and more. This is one of the fascinating things to me about homebrewing. I truly consider it an art-form as the homebrewer must put a lot of time and effort into understanding what will happen during the cooking, fermentation, and conditioning of their beer. There is a lot of science involved and there is also a lot of creative thinking as well. It truly is art, and the great thing is that homebrewers do this for fun, not professionally. They do it in their spare time, after work, or instead of studying for their physics exam. It’s a beautiful thing.

More Thoughts

So, I am an artist, but I’m also a homebrewer. I believe very much in craft beer as a means to bring people together, that it gets people excited about creativity in a way that is possibly not accessible through visual art, and that it also inspires a type of mindfulness about history, land, and celebration. It’s a really great thing. As an artist I put together this event to showcase these things, but I wanted to say one last thing about my process. I believe that as an artist it is my duty to find interesting things that are happening in the lives of other people and to allow them to shine. That was my hope for the Pub School events. They would not have been possible if I had tried to generate the content all by myself. Much of what happened would never have happened if it weren’t for the interesting people that joined in. It was participatory, the credit is due to them as much as it is to me. This is how I operate as an artist, some might not call it art, but it’s an important part of my practice that I want to make sure other people understand.

I kept a general blog about the whole Pub School project, and there you can find a lot more pictures if you’d like.

Don’t stop reading here! I can’t go without saying a few thanks to some important people. Travis Souza was my main contact at the Market Gallery and worked with me the whole time to help put this together.  Robbie Pickering of the Refreshing Beer blog came to every single event, participated in everything, hung out with me, contributed beer, and was a really informative resource for beer in the area. I’m going to talk more about him in future posts involving my time in Glasgow, but just know that this guy will change Glasgow. Des Mulcahy was, at the time, doing contract work for Williams Bros. Brewing, and previously for BrewDog. He wasn’t from Glasgow so we hung out often and talked about how we didn’t understand anything anyone else was saying. He also showed me a bunch of great pubs and beers in the city, and he also attended every event and helped plan with me, and even volunteered and worked hard during the Pub. Mark Brannan helped me build the bar, that was super helpful. WEST Brewery and Williams Bros. Brewing were incredible, and I’ll post more about them soon too.

This is by no means a comprehensive look at good beer in NYC. I went to New York because I had some art up for the Incidental Person Exhibition at the Apexart Gallery. I was showing documentation from the Portland Art & Beer project. I figured that while I was in town I better find some good, and most importantly, local beer.

My time was very, very short so I had a big list of things I wanted to see and didn’t get to most of them. This is often what happens when visiting NYC and I’ve learned before it’s best not to try to cram it all in, I just tried to enjoy where life brought me. Ahead of time I found four bars online that looked worth checking out: The Blind Tiger, The Ginger Man, D.B.A., and 4th Avenue Pub. I only made it to the Blind Tiger and it seems no one that I talked to knew about the 4th Avenue Pub. I was specifically looking for beer from Sixpoint Craft Ales, Kelso of Brooklyn, and  Captain Lawrence Brewery.

The first and only bar on my list I was able to make it to was The Blind Tiger, as it was relatively near the gallery where I spent most of my time. They had a list of about 30 beers. They had the Sixpoint IPA, so I ordered one of those. It was a well-balanced NW style IPA that would earn respect here in Oregon. They also had a good list of Winter Belgiums so I tasted a few of those. I’m a little upset at myself for not sampling the He’brew RyePA on Cask, but beer is very expensive in NYC. The nice thing is that the microbrews are just about the same price as the bad stuff. I liked The Blind Tiger, although the neighborhood was lame, it was surrounded by expensive clothing stores. I would not normally find myself in this part of town.

I was able to visit a couple other bars that friends invited me to. Each place had a handful of local beers, always one from Sixpoint (either the IPA or the Otis Stout, which is also good) and usually the Ommegang Witte from Cooperstown, NY which I very much enjoyed. Friends brought me to a place called Union Hall in Brooklyn which has an indoor bocce ball area. There I sampled the Kelso of Brooklyn Dark Lager and was very happy with that beer. Although the bar was just a little too noisy for my taste. I headed north where another friend took me to a place where I finally saw a Captain Lawrence ale on tap! I ordered that immediately. It was their Liquid Gold beer, a super friendly tasting Belgium Ale. I’m sure they make even better beers, but I knew I could go home happy after that.

On my last day I visited the Sixpoint brewery. They told me that an excellent beer bar in town is Spuyten Duyvil but I was never able to make it to that one. All my friends had heard of it though when I mentioned it. The Sixpoint guys said that directly across the street from that bar is a restaurant that sells their Vienna Ale, which they make exclusively for that place. The visit to the Sixpoint Brewery takes some time. It’s in a part of town called Red Hook and requires a lot of subway transfers and then about 30 minutes of walking. But it was worth it. Check this place out:


The guys in the brewery were very hospitable. After showing me the brewery they took me upstairs to sample their beers. They sent me home with a bottled Wheat primed with honey, and a Wormwood Ale. Looking forward to that. They don’t bottle commercially though so you do have to go to NYC at this point.

Turns out these guys are running at full capacity and are looking to expand. It’s easy to see why. There are millions of people in NYC and only a handful of places making good beer. Sixpoint was easy to find but the other beers weren’t as easy. I think there is a room for a lot more beer in NY and I’m surprised that it’s not brimming over with beer. If Portland, with 2 million people can have 30+ breweries with 7-10 more opening up soon, then NY can handle a few more as well. The great thing is that opening new breweries is not necessarily a competitive business move, it really gets the locals further interested in local beer and helps grow a more sustainable and local-minded community.

From Cottage Link Magazine:
John Steinbeck wrote that redwoods, once seen, “leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always – from them comes silence and awe.” As we walked among them in several groves along the 31-mile long “Avenue of the Giants”, we could only echo Steinbeck’s emotion. It ‘s one thing to walk among the ruins of civilizations gone millennia ago amidst noisy shutterbugs and souvenir hawking vendors – it is another to touch the tallest and oldest living things in creation in a peaceful green gallery and feel time itself.

This is exactly what I feel when I visit these forests. My times in the Redwood Forest are some of the most memorable and inspiring I’ve ever had. When I am there I become quiet, realizing that my busy-ness and my striving to become important is not as important as I perceive it. My place in this world is not the center, and I am much less important than I have thought. But this is not a bad thing, it brings me to become less selfish, more caring, and more compassionate of a person. The joys of Friluftsliv.

I’ve been travelling this summer and I came across this amazing postcard in Bozeman, Montana. It reads “Bozeman Montana, where the past eats the present.” As I travelled South into Yellowstone National Park I couldn’t  help but think that, at least at Yellowstone, this is not as true. The present definitely eats the past. So I have a couple movies to recommend based off my experience there, but first let me tell you a little more about my experience.

I honestly thought Yellowstone would be a place where I would park the car, grab my gear and enter the wilderness to set up camp and I would probably run into a couple people along one of my hikes. This is not at all what it is!!! It’s a giant tourist attraction, much like Disneyland. People wait in lines and follow specially built pathways to experience nature. Actually most people don’t experience nature there, they just take a picture of it and move on. You can buy some ice cream right next to Old Faithful geyser as you wait for it to blow. Ever major stop on the route has a nice sized gift shop. My least favorite of all was everyone’s desire to “hunt for animals”… One person drives while the other people in the car will be on the lookout. “Oooh, there’s a deer, or is than an elk, or a moose? Quick stop the car!!!” The family pours out of their car, stand in the middle of the road and shoot pictures for a couple minutes before they hop back in and look for bison and bear. It’s a real wilderness experience, that’s for sure! After my initial bit of tourist shock I was able to allow myself to enjoy the park for what it was – an amazing display of nature. But here are the movies I recommend based off the tourist industry:

Jurassic Park (1993) and Grand Tour: Disaster In Time (1992)

I’ll start the recommendation with Jurassic Park because, chances are, you’ve already seen it so why make it the last movie you watch? But, it’s probably been a while. Grab a nice summery wheat beer that you’d take with you camping and get ready to enjoy the ride! This is the best account of the tourist industry gone wrong and reminds me very much of Yellowstone. The people in the movie are dying to see dinosaurs the way Yellowstoners are dying to see a grizzly bear. But with a little bit of luck, a little bit of chaos, a little bit of survival of the fittest, and a little bit of scheming, you’re tourists won’t know what hit em.

Grand Tour: Disaster in Time is much less known but is still a wonderful flick. For this movie you should grab yourself some trail mix for your journey. Get the healthy kind though please. So, in this movie beautiful people from the future travel back in time to watch horrible natural disasters because in the future everything is perfect and they love watching things go wrong. But you can’t watch something, even if from a distance, without changing it slightly right? Tourists from the future!!! How genius is that? It’s genius.

Click on the image above to go to the Portland Breweries Google Map that I created.

Portland is known as Beervana and the Microbrew Mecca of the Planet so I thought I’d make a google map of all the various breweries here in the main city region (not suburbs). The map shows breweries only; if it’s a public house or a pub without a brewery, it’s not on the list. I know that eliminates a lot of really great pubs from the list, but we can always create another one with no spared expenses.

First, here is a list of breweries that are about to open, or that don’t list an address for various reasons:
- Solstice Brewing (not open yet)
- Beetje Brewery

A list of breweries:

Alameda Brewhouse
4765 NE Fremont St Portland, OR 97213
503-460-9025

Amnesia Brewing
832 N Beech St Portland, OR 97227
503-281-7708

BJ’s Pizza Grill & Brewery
12105 N Center Ave Portland, OR 97217
503-289-5566

Breakside Brewery
820 Northeast Dekum St. Portland, OR 97211
503-719-6475

Bridgeport Brewing Co
1313 NW Marshall St Portland, OR 97209
503-241-3612

Cascade Brewing (Raccoon Lodge & Brew Pub)
7424 SW Beaverton Hillsdale Portland, OR 97225
503-296-0110

Clinton Street Brewing
2520 SE Clinton St Portland, OR 97202
503-238-5588

Columbia River Brewing Co.
1728 NE 40th Ave Portland, OR 97212
503-943-6157

Deschutes Brewery Portland Public House
210 NW 11th Avenue Portland, OR 97209
503-296-4906

Full Sail Brewery Co Riverplace
307 SW Montgomery St Portland, OR 97201
503-222-5343

Green Dragon Bistro and Brewpub
928 SE 9th Ave Portland, OR 97214
(503) 517-0606

Hair of the Dog Brewing Co
4509 SE 23rd Ave Portland, OR 97202
503-232-6585

Hopworks Urban Brewery
2944 SE Powell Blvd Portland, OR 97202
503-232-HOPS

Laurelwood Public House
5115 NE Sandy Blvd Portland, OR 97213
503-282-0622

Lompoc Fifth Quadrant
3901 N Williams Ave # B Portland, OR 97227
503-288-3996

Lompoc – New Old Lompoc
1616 NW 23rd Ave Portland, OR 97210
503-225-1855

Lucky Labrador Beer Hall
1945 NW Quimby St Portland, OR 97209
Portland, OR 97209

Lucky Lab Brew Pub
915 SE Hawthorne Blvd Portland, OR?
(503) 236-3555?

MacTarnahan’s Tap Room
2730 NW 31ST Ave Portland, OR 97210
503-226-7623

Mash Tun
2204 NE Alberta St # 101 Portland, OR 97211
503-548-4491

McMenamins: Fulton Pub & Brewery
618 SW Nebraska St Portland, OR 97239
503-246-9530

McMenamins Hillsdale Brewery & Public House
1505 SW Sunset Blvd Portland, OR 97239
503-246-3938

McMenamins Oak Hills-Brewpub
14740 NW Cornell Rd # 80 Portland, OR 97229
503-645-0286

McMenamins Ringlers Pub
1332 W Burnside St Portland, OR 97209
503-225-0627

McMenamins Kennedy School
Also a movie theater and hotel
5736 NE 33rd Ave Portland, OR 97211
503-249-3983

Migration Brewing
2828 NE Glisan Ave Portland, OR 97232
503-206-5221

Natian Brewery
1321 NE Couch St. Portland, OR 97232

Old Market Pub & Brewery
6959 SW Multnomah Blvd # 101 Portland, OR 97223
503-244-0450

Philadelphia’s Steaks and Hoagies
6410 SE Milwaukie Ave Portland, OR 97202
503-239-8544?

Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
206 SW Morrison St Portland, OR 97204
503-796-2739

Tug Boat Brewing
711 SW Ankeny St Portland, OR 97205
503-226-2508

Upright Brewery
240 N. Broadway, Suite 2, Portland, OR 97227
503.735.5337

Widmer Brothers Brewing Co
929 N Russell St Portland, OR 97227
503-281-2437

Recently I made a trip out to The Dalles, Oregon which is up through the Columbia Gorge. The drive is up one of the most beautiful highways I’ve been on. The Dalles is situated right where the gorge turns from lush waterfalls and mountains to a desert. While we were there, it was recommended that we have a bite and some drinks at the Baldwin Saloon, which is in downtown and has large windows that open to traintracks with trains that rock the building every 20-30 minutes.

The saloon began in 1876 but I’m not sure if anything in the building is still that old. There is a fantastic mahogany bar that is from the early 1900′s with original mirrors and stained glass that you can sit at. They’ve also kept some of the old furniture, including a gigantic old cash register, pendulum clocks, and some old landscape paintings.

The bar had a small selection of beer, but a good selection at that. They had your classic Oregon beers like Deschutes Mirror Pond, Bridgeport IPA, and then a few smaller breweries that are located in the gorge. They were carrying the Double Mountain IRA (India Red Ale!) and a beer from Walking Man in Stevenson, Washington that I probably would have tried if it weren’t for the Double Mountain beer. With a small but quality selection like that I am assuming that they will always have some good beers on tap, so it might be worth stopping in if you are going through town. The food was okay, but the appetizer was great. It was a bacon-wrapped dates with cheese, grapes, and apple.

Here is a picture of the trains that were rolling by our window as well as a picture of the building next door.

There were a lot of landscape paintings hanging all over the walls of the gallery including this one by Joseph J. Englehart. I can’t say if this is true for this Englehart painting, but landscape paintings were sometimes used as propaganda to help the United States fulfill manifest destiny. Many travellers following the Oregon Trail would have waded their supplies down the Columbia Gorge if they hadn’t gone through the passes around Mt. Hood. The landscape paintings offered settlers a view of how the new world and the west looked, inviting the viewer into the picture through multiple eye-guiding techniques. Ironically the painters didn’t always paint the land they saw; they added and subtracted and exagerrated as they felt necessary.

So, if you are heading up the Columbia Gorge and have some time, stop in at the Baldwin Saloon in The Dalles. But as you pass through Hood River, one of the best places for windsurfing in the world, you definitely won’t want to miss out on Full Sail Brewery or Double Mountain Brewery for that matter (Double Mountain is about 2 blocks from Full Sail and was started by a few ex-employees). Full Sail offers some alright dining overlooking the Columbia River. They also have free tours of their facilities every day (I think) and at the end of my tour I got a free Full Sail pint glass. Full Sail, being one of the largest microbreweries ever, is worth going to for a tour.