ZUKLE - IMAGE: rosnaps.com
- TOTALLY JACKED: Oregon officially makes the nation’s best IPA. At least according to judges at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, who named Barley Brown’s Pallet Jack tops out of 252 American-style IPAs. That award was the highlight of a very successful weekend for Oregon at the Colorado Convention Center. While Washington state took home only four medals, Baker City’s Barley Brown’s and its new offshoot won five, including gold medals for its American-style wheat beer and Handtruck pale ale, and a silver medal for a stout. Portland’s Harvester took gold in the gluten-free category, with Deschutes grabbing silver. Portland’s Old Town Brewing won gold in a the fresh-hop category, and the Commons Urban Farmhouse Ale, WW’s 2013 Beer of the Year, won silver in the French-Belgian-style saison category. The Commons Myrtle won silver. Portland’s Breakside took home two bronze medals for its passionfruit sour and ESB. >> Tickets for the next big Oregon beer festival and competition, the inaugural Portland Pro-Am featuring one-off beers made in collaboration with local homebrewers, are now on sale at wweek.com.
- BROAD BUZZ: Two shows with Oregon connections have landed on Broadway. Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2012, will head to New York sometime this winter. Along for the ride—and responsible for the production’s sold-out run in Cambridge, Mass.—is Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, who plays Lyndon B. Johnson in the political portrait, directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch. Meanwhile, A Night With Janis Joplin, which premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2011 (WW’s Jay Horton noted that its “comic touches fell flat,” adding that the opening-night crowd “cheered on the staple hits as they would a troubled daughter’s recital”) opened Oct. 10 on Broadway.
- BOILING OVER: The sterling Henry Higgins Boiled Bagels, run by former Kettleman general manager Leah Orndoff, will be getting a storefront again—sort of. Starting Oct. 19, Orndoff will have a new pop-up shop: a weekend breakfast and bagel cafe at Half Pint Cafe (537 SE Ash St.), open 8 am to 2:30 pm every Saturday and Sunday. Half Pint is usually closed weekends. Higgins had previously run a pop-up bagel shop at Hogan’s Goat Pizza in the Rose City Park neighborhood. Higgins’ bakery at the former site of the vegan Black Sheep Bakery (523 NE 19th Ave.) takes orders by phone for pickup the next morning.
- DEVIL IN GRESHAM: Casa Diablo—the Northwest Portland vegan strip club most recently in the news for stripper Lynsie Lee’s Twitter chat with Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker—is expanding. Owner Johnny Zukle is holding a grand opening for his second vegan strip club, the Black Cauldron, on Halloween. The club is located on Southeast Stark Street, two blocks from the Gresham border. Until 7 pm, the club will be an all-ages vegan restaurant staffed by Blossoming Lotus alum Jake Farrar, complete with a seven-course fine-dining menu. At 8, the dancers come out.
