Part 4 - Zwickelmania & KLCC Festival in Eugene, OR - Oakshire
by Bob
Oakshire Brewing
The Oakshire Brewery is in an industrial area way on the outskirts of town near a large railroad yard, so you reallly need to have a car to visit. They are normally only open Saturday afternoons, but it's well worth the journey, especially since their beer is so good and is currently only available in Oregon. This stop turned out to be the highlight of the day.
The brewery is composed of two attached warehouses. A smaller one in front houses the tasting room and the brewing tanks. The larger one in the back contains the fermentation tanks, supplies, kegs, etc. The bus let us off on the road in front of the brewery. We walked through a parking lot to reach the large open garage door that led to the tasting room. On one side there is a bar where we were offered free samples of any of their beers. They had an experimental IPA called 2-Wheeler in addition to their excellent regular Watershed IPA. They also had 22 oz. bottles (3 of their beers are bottled right now), t-shirts, and hoodies for sale. To the right of the bar is the grain mill and stored grain.
The large white room has concrete floors and is lit by industrial florescent tubes on the high ceiling (as befits a working brewery). Opposite the bar against the far wall are the mash tun and brew kettle. In the space between are several wooden picnic tables. Seated here, you really feel like you are in the middle of a production brewery, and are truly sampling beer at the source.
The Brewmaster, Matt Van Wyk, conducted a magnificent tour of the brewery. Their small system has relatively little hard piping and no hot liquor tank as yet. (Currently they are relying on an on-demand hot water supply.) Directly in front of the brewing tanks there is a 10 gallon homebrew system that Matt intends to use to teach homebrewing classes.
We entered the larger rear building through one of the two large open garage-style doors. Here we were shown the fermentation tanks and the bright tanks, as well as a refrigerated area. Matt offered us samples of the Cornucopia Frog's Wort Pale Ale directly poured from the zwickel valve on one of the brite tanks. It doesn't get fresher than this. There is also a large coffee grinder that is used to produce the cold extract of coffee that ends up in the brite tank to make the delicious Overcast Espresso Stout.
We also tasted the Amber and the Collaboration Rye Cascadian Dark Ale made for the KLCC Microbrew Festival. All were quite good. They don't serve food but there is regularly a mobile foodcart (Devour) in the parking lot that serves grilled panini sandwiches and soups (the food looked quite good).
After the tour was over, we stayed a while to talk with Matt and sample more of his creations. When the shuttle arrived many of us in the tasting room rushed out to meet it. (It was now even further behind schedule, but there was still plenty of beer to keep us happy!)
