Skip to main content
Widmer Gasthaus
955 N Russell St., 281-3333, widmerbrothers.com. 11 am-10:30 pm Sunday-Thursday, 11 am-11 pm Friday-Saturday, .
[OLD AND WEIZENED] The Widmer Brothers
are the big boys of Oregon craft. Rob and Kurt's brewery is the largest
in the state and a few months shy of the being the oldest. Everyone
should tour the hops and vats at least once—it's more our Statue of
Liberty than poor unphotographed Portlandia. But the real fun is in the
vast reserve program of two- and three-year barrel-aged brews, from
stout to brown to the excellent toffee-accented Old Embalmer barleywine,
and the brewers' playground of a pilot program. Their 10-barrel pilot
brewery is larger than about half the breweries in Oregon, and turns out
a mess of experimental IPAs, including X-114, with what was later
revealed to be the now omnipresent Citra. They also do a lot of
collaborations on that system, including a tartly juicy,
half-kettle-sour brew with Gigantic called Craftylicious, or a floral,
peppercorned saison brewed with Breakside. A secret I probably shouldn't
tell? Widmer sets aside a certain number of kegs each month to donate
to local arts and nonprofits. Which means your next poetry reading or
horrible performance art could maybe host some free Drop Top.
DRINK THIS: As of press time, the brewery was serving up a pleasantly whiskey-nosed, vanilla-rich barrel-aged version of the brewery's very first beer, the Alt.
WWeek 2015