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.

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 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.

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.

The ones with red markers are the ones that I think visitors would enjoy the most.

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

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

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

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 Pizza Co.
1728 NE 40th Ave Portland, OR 97212
503-943-6157

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Roots Organic Brewing Co
1520 SE 7th Ave Portland, OR 97214
503-235-7668

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

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.