Oregon Beer News (2020)

Damn. If this keeps up, pretty soon I won't be buying anything but Barley Brown beer when I go to the store.

 

I appreciate the fact that brewers are trying to come up with creative ways to move product, and if this works for them, then that's great. However, beers from these breweries are available all over town, so it's not clear to me what advantage there would be to driving over to Old Town for what's essentially a pop up beer market (with limited merchandise). At least in my experience, finding places where I can purchase a wide selection of craft beer has not been a particularly arduous task during the pandemic.

 

Likewise. I took "latest releases" to mean the current range of cans and bottles I can find at pretty much any beer store in town (and likely most grocery stores as well). If they would offer something a bit more unusual or unique (like you mentioned), then this would have a lot more appeal for me. However, there was no mention of that in the article, so I assume that's not going to be the case.

I'm trying to do what I can to support the local craft beer industry during the pandemic, but most of these events (pop up markets, virtual festivals, virtual tasting events, etc.) don't seem to offer anything really new or different, and mostly they just seem to be aimed at getting me to spend even more money on beer than I currently do. The last thing I need to do is to increase my current beer consumption over what is already a pretty significant norm.

 

Same here, and my guess is that goes for a lot of people. It would clearly be a draw, all by itself. Which is all the more reason why I'm fairly certain that's not happening.

If they were offering some of the beers you typically need to be in Seattle to buy (brewery only releases), I have to think that would be the sort of thing they'd want to advertise in the article (as that would be a huge draw). The fact they didn't make any mention of it tends to make me think that they're just going to be selling whatever is currently already available in our market.

 

Thanks for the tip Terry (had never heard of RedTwitGram).

I don't disagree with you (on the contrary), but I would expect they would post something like that in the article. That would be a game changer for a lot of people (me, for example).

While I'm not going to bother to go to this pop-up for beers I can easily obtain over at John's, I'd be over there in a heartbeat this Saturday if I thought they might be selling something I normally can't obtain around town.

 

You've piqued my interest...

 

Thanks. My bad...

 

Yeah, still down... but I'll take @vurt's word for it.

Sort of what I was expecting, but I held out hope they might have something out of the ordinary to offer. And if you're driving over, it sounds as if they're discouraging this from becoming a social event:

"Once [your order] placed, pull into a designated parking spot at the end of the market where someone will bring their order out to them. Leaving the vehicle is not necessary, walk-ups are allowed with social distancing measures."

 

The local news did a TV shoot over at the drive thru market today, and I thought it further confirmed that this is not something that is going to interest most local beer consumers. Maybe if you were unaware that most local beer stores are still open, or that you can still buy beer at your local Fred Meyer or Safeway, this might interest you. Otherwise... I don't get it.

According to the news bite this morning, the plan is to hold this market every Saturday throughout the Summer.

 

If you don't mind my asking, why?

I like most of the breweries represented at this market as well (according to the news bite, there will be new or additional breweries represented every Saturday), but it's roughly a 15 or 20 minute drive over to Old Town from my house. As near as I can tell, pretty much everything on offer I can pick up either at my local grocery store or beer store, which are no more than 5 minutes away. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of social interaction at the market... my understanding is that you place your order by way of an app (my understanding is that you can pre-order beer from the market right now in fact). You then drive up to the parking lot and drive through a number of booths... if you have a question about a particular beer, you can ask one of the service reps in one of the booths about it. At the end of the parking lot drive thru, you pull into a parking spot and someone brings out your beer.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I'm just curious what there is about this set up that you find attractive. If there was more of a social aspect to this market I might be interested, but it sounds like there really isn't (and in fact, based on the TV bite this morning, it sounds like they're trying to discourage this).

 

Agreed, and that's a good point. Even so, I like to think my purchases at my local beer store help out local breweries as well.

You raise a good point (especially as I also want to try to help out our local breweries as much as possible), but it still doesn't override the concerns I have about unnecessary travel and exposure to others. Even so, I do hope this turns out to be lucrative endeavor for the participants. It's something I might check out if I lived closer to the market, but considering where I live, I just can't justify it.

 

I think this is what the organizers are counting on (that and the community's strong interest in helping out our local brewing scene). It sounded as if that's the way the organizers were trying to pitch it on the news show this morning.