Portland Beer: Widmer Brothers Brewing Company

Optical illusion: Joe Casey looks short

Widmer’s brewmaster Joe Casey is not short but the 1,000-barrels-of-beer (on the wall…) fermenters he’s standing in front of tend to dwarf things. I met up with Joe Casey recently and even though I’ve lived in Portland since 2002 and really dig Widmer beer I’d never taken a brewery tour. I highly recommend it. I learned a lot including the fact that beer regularly flows underneath Russel Street between the two Widmer buildings which gives a whole new meaning to walking on sunshine. Walking on Widmer Hefeweizen…

The fermenter behind Casey in the photo is filled with that liquid sunshine — Widmer Hefeweizen — the brew that made 20-plus-year-old Widmer Brothers Brewing Company famous. The Hefeweizen (pronounced HEH-feh-vite-zen) sits in the fermentation tank for only about a week since it ferments quickly and doesn’t need a lot of cold conditioning. Most Widmer beers spend two weeks in the fermenter.

Here are a bunch of other things I learned while walking around the brewery with Casey…

* Widmer brews about 320,000 barrels of beer in their North Portland brewery annually.
* They brew 24 hours a day.
* They use a New Zealand variety of hops that Joe Casey says sometimes tastes like onion.
* Widmer operates a 10-barrel pilot brewery at the Rose Garden where they brew a lot of small batch Gasthaus Pub beers that aren’t available anywhere else (Including the Collaborator Series beers in conjunction with the Oregon Brew Crew) and festival beers.
* Their 100,000 pound malt silos are filled by tanker trucks several times a week.
* The spent grain and yeast goes to a cattle ranch in Central Oregon and a farm on Sauvie Island.
* In the summer the brewery often pushes 110 degrees.
* Widmer hops come from Oregon, Washington and New Zealand.

No that's not rabbit food it's Oregon hops pellets

Most commercial brewers brew with hops pellets or extracts these days. Casey told me that Anheuser-Busch was one of the last major breweries to hold out on pellets and use whole hops.

Where eight to nine Widmer beers are brewed daily

If you’re looking for Widmer’s version of the Everlasting Gobstopper — the Widmer Altbier yeast strain that Kurt Widmer brought back from Bavaria in the early 1980s — head to OHSU and book flights to Chicago, the UK, and New Hampshire because its safeguarded in labs in all these places.

Take a tour and the mystery of this photo from Widmer will be solved

Widmer Brewing Company
929 N Russel St.
503.281.3333
www.widmer.com
Schedule a brewery tour