Today, 1859 Magazine got the first look at the official designs for the James Beard Public Market (JBPM). Director of the JBPM project, Ron Paul, released the renderings, and the result is breathtaking. Plans for the new downtown food hub and cultural center have been fifteen years in the making and tomorrow’s JBPM Grand Reveal at OMSI will highlight the details of the designs.
There are those of us who have indulged in the fantasy of having a personal wine cellar. One that’s full to the rafters of dusty old wine bottles. Next comes the anxiety of how long we would age each one until it’s coaxed into perfection, and the fantasy becomes overwhelming and drifts away. While not all wines are made for aging, the ones that are made to age likely don’t need the years of storage or the precise conditions we fret over to reach their full and delicious potential.
It’s early spring and the old-growth forests of Oregon are ripe with prized wild mushrooms hiding in plain sight. A simple walk through an area dense with trees might be the home to hundreds of different varieties of fungi. From spring kings to morels to oysters, wild mushrooms thrive in the wet and warming weather of a changing season.
To mark its thirtieth anniversary, Portland’s Widmer Brothers Brewing celebrated the milestone by co-composing a series of collaboration beers with five fellow Oregon breweries. Among the collaborators was their kid brother, Deschutes Brewery in Bend, which is still one of the state’s most veteran beer makers. Widmer’s pre-Hefeweizen flagship, Widmer Alt, was mixed with Deschutes’s pre-Mirror Pond workhorse, Bachelor Bitter. Then they aged it in whiskey barrels for good measure. The project demonstrates that while craft brewers are ostensibly competitors tussling for shelf space and draft lines in the same market, wort is thicker than water.
KOMBUCHA—a fermented tea first sipped by the Chinese in the Qin Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago—is ripe with legend: Did it really give samurai warriors their swag? Was it Ghengis Khan’s on-the-road-again beverage of choice? Did it save the life of gulag-bound Alexander Solzhenitsyn? Here’s a fact: The kombucha market in the United States is exploding, poised for $600 million in sales this year, according to Inc. magazine. One of the most successful brewers is Bend’s Humm Kombucha. Cofounder Jamie Danek credits a twenty-year-old recipe, Bend culture—and “magical fairy dust.”
What do Highways 219, 99, 18 and Polk County’s Bethel Road have in common? They’re part of the long and winding road that serves as the modern Oregon pinot noir trail through the north Willamette Valley.
The post-Prohibition pioneers of Oregon’s now burgeoning wine industry were armed with one audacious idea—wine grapes could grow in Oregon. It was the 1960s, and California was the dominant American winemaking region. Oregon’s soil was considered too wet, the climate too cold. Beginning in 1961, a small group of entrepreneurs started trekking north across the border with vine clippings in hand. They came from various backgrounds but had one shared passion. They were unwittingly at the forefront of the New World of wine.
IT’S THE DEAD OF WINTER, but the soil at Whistling Duck Farm is alive with tiny shoots that resemble the first hints of spring flowers. There are bulbs hiding under this patch of Southern Oregon ground, but they aren’t the kind that yield crocuses or daffodils. The 600-foot-long rows will produce another harbinger of spring: garlic.
Father Martin Grassel is checking the gravity on a batch of farmhouse ale. He pushes up the sleeve of his black robe and, with an expert spin, drops a hydrometer into the golden liquid.
