Washington Beer News 2020

Posted this on it's own thread, but Waddell's Brewing Company is seceeding from the organization that created it aoparently. The brewery, on Spokane's North side near the 5 Mile area, is being renamed 5 North Brewing Co. The Waddell's Pub that gave birth to Waddell's Brewing is not changing names, however. Apparently, the two properties now have different owners.

 

Some of the comments from the Facebook post:

Doesn't sound like the kind of thing 5 Rights would publicly talk about.

 

Foeder saison cans? I'm excited! I hope this sees distribution. In all my lager consumption, I've unwittingly cut back on my saison intake. That needs to be rectified.

It is still strange to think of Logsdon as a WA brewery.

 

Agreed that peak Peche n Brett is in the rearview, but Shilpi at Logsdon continues to put out good beer and it seems as accessible as ever. Despite the move to Washougal, maybe Oregon still gets the bulk of their distribution?

 

Yes, they seem to be back to distributing enough packaged beer that I can find them in Spokane once again.

 

Logsdon is one of those breweries i thought was gonna get huge . Never happened. pFriem did instead..though at first i thought Logsdon far superior.

 

There’s no right/wrong answer here, but what makes you say that?

At the peak of Logsdon’s juice/hype/whatever, when you could visit the farm and they had a presence in downtown Hood River, their portfolio was something like 5 beers, all farmhouse-ish. To me, even if all 5 were world-class, that’s still no match for a brewery like pFriem who can produce farmhouse beers on a similar level plus hoppy stuff, lagers, and various classical Belgian/German styles at a similarly high level of quality. pFriem wasn’t as expansive then as they are now, but was still way more diverse than Logsdon and not so far behind Logsdon in quality that the diversity failed to compensate (in my personal calculus, YMMV). Maybe I value that style diversity more than you when deciding who’s “better”, but I’m surprised you think Logsdon’s beers were that much better than pFriem’s similarly styled beers in an apples-to-apples comparison.

 

I'm not going to comment on the current quality of Logsdon, but there is an obvious reason why OG Logsdon tasted different than the current lineup. Dave Logsdon (now retired) was the owner, but Charles Porter was the brewer. Porter left years back to launch his own, and super awesome, brewery 'Little Beast.' So the Logsdon of today is 100% a different brewery than before.

 

I'm going to derail this thread ( or at least, kick off a tangent). Last weekend,a bunch of us were discussing who we thought the best brewery in the US was. I threw my weight behind Upright ( I consider Hill Farmstead basically unobtainable), and my argument against the "oh, they only brew saisons" crowd was that they were able to use that style to create an incredibly wide flavor palette. Light saisons, hefty saisons, bright saisons, roasty and brooding saisons, crisp saisons, Fuller saisons, hoppy saisons, fruity/yeasty saisons,- and that's before you get into what they do with barrels and fruit. I admit there are many classic beers that score higher on the hedonic scale (and no, I'm not talking hazy juice or pastry bombs), but their craft, in the true sense of the word, makes them special.

 

My argument would've been all their lagers, IPAs, English pale ales, stouts, and beer/wine hybrids. But I like your argument too.

 

These are friends who convinced me that I needed to try Upright in the first place,so I knew they love them, and also where they were coming from.

Fun fact - for my first year in Portland, I avoided Upright because I was worried I'd like them too much. I'd seemed like a logically sound argument at the time, given I was trying to drink my cellar down instead of adding to it, but boy, was I dumb.

 

Rogue had an Issaquah location?

 

Yep, had been there nearly twenty years. Used to stop in there regularly for lunch after doing hikes up that way.