StormBreaker Brewing next Saturday will bring back its Brewstillery festival, a gathering at its Mississippi Avenue brewpub that teams up breweries and distilleries to create a lineup of beer and spirit pairings.
The popular event at the North Portland brewery was paused the past two years because of the pandemic, but StormBreakers’ owners recently decided to bring it back for a seventh year. At the end of January, StormBreaker brewing also brought back its St. Johns Winter Beer Fest at its St. Johns location, also after a two-year pause.
“Bringing the Winter Beer Fest back, we had such amazing feedback from that, and it made us realize even more how much people are missing events and opportunities like this to get together,” said general manager Caitlin Melanson. “There’s still a lot of events being canceled, and people really want to see them come back.”
Brewstillery will be managed similarly to the winter festival, with two ticketed sessions throughout the afternoon and evening to manage crowd size. It will be on StormBreaker’s main property and on the covered patio, as well as in the StormBreaker Right As Rain Room, a former retail space next door that the brewery acquired in 2021.
For the event, StormBreaker gathered 17 breweries and 17 distilleries and asked them to work together to create pairings of their beers and spirits. The most common approach is for each to collaborate on existing products and see what pairs well, though in the past breweries and distilleries have produced offerings specifically for the event.
Festival-goers can try all the offerings either with their designated pairing or individually.
“Primarily, we recommend everything as a pair, so you get 4 ounces of beer and a quarter ounce of a shot, and you sample how the makers intended and see fit,” said Dan Malech, who founded StormBreaker with brewer Rob Lutz in 2014. “But you can also mix and match if you want, or you can just try the beers or try the spirits too.
“If you hate spirits, you can make it a beer festival,” Malech said. “Or if you hate beer, you can make it a spirits festival.”
The pairings are wide ranging, Melanson said, offering spirits from whiskey, to gin, to apricot liqueur and beyond.
“There’s something for everyone,” she said. “Even if you’re not a big whiskey drinker, you’ll be able to find some pairings that are really interesting and unique. People really put time into this, working together to really try to come up with something fun and that’s really going to stand out.”
Brewstillery and the Winter Beer Fest are among the ways StormBreaker is trying to reconnect with the community after the pandemic crushed patronage at restaurants and pubs across the city. The brewery today is also launching a brunch program at its original Mississippi Avenue location.
The program will offer a wide food menu, said front of house manager Misty Anderson, including a breakfast bau, veggie and meat quiches and skillets, plus sweeter offerings such as a Dutch baby with grilled apple maple syrup and whipped cream. Breakfast nachos of corn chips, cheese mix, black bean salsa, pulled pork and creme fraiche will be topped with two poached eggs.
A cocktail program will include a hot pink Mimosa made with dragonfruit syrup, Anderson said. The menu will also offer a Bloody Mary flight, including a beet juice Bloody Mary with Akvavit, a Verde Bloody Maria made with a tomatillo base and tequila, and a carrot juice Bloody Mary.
“We’re just doing some unique plays on a Bloody Mary, so it’ll be a really interesting and colorful experience,” Anderson said. “But really, the Dutch baby is the star of the show.”
They will also offer beer cocktails, such as one including a whiskey and aperitif lemon base, a hazy IPA floating on top, and served over a large rock. The menu will have a blackberry lemon sour beer, which will be turned into a sour mimosa as well.
Malech said StormBreaker has wanted to offer brunch for years but, again, the pandemic happened.
“We’re looking at a post COVID world, so we’re trying to make brunch fun again,” he said. “We think there’s a definite need for it in this neighborhood. I think people will be pretty excited about it, and it’s Mississippi only right now, but if it looks good we’ll branch out to the St. Johns location.
“We know it’s going to be a slow burn, but come late spring we hope to deck the patio out, and I think it’s really going to hit when people come sit out under our covered heated patio, with our fire pits,” Malech said. “This is the brunch spot that Portland didn’t know it needed.”
He said it’s all part of StormBreaker wanting to get the community more involved again.
“We want to shake Portland out of its COVID coma, because I think people are still in it,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been dying to do for a couple of years now, so doing it in a more beer-intimate setting is something people are ready for, if they can get themselves over here.”
If You Go
Brunch: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday starting today, Saturday, March 4; pub switches back to regular food menu at 2 p.m. Mississippi location only, 832 N. Beech St.
Brewstillery: 17 brewery and distillery pairings on Saturday, March 11, sessions noon-3:30 p.m. and 4:30-8 p.m. $25 per session, buys eight tickets and a seventh anniversary Brewstillery glass. $40 VIP tickets in limited quantity include beer and whiskey glasses and 12 tickets. Tickets available online. Full menu all day, with brunch until 2 p.m. 832 N. Beech St. Live music by Matt Mitchell Music Co.
- Breweries: Culmination, Baerlic, Ecliptic, Via Beer, Von Ebert, Old Town, Wayfinder, Migration, Vice Beer, Stickmen, Little Beast, Level Beer, Grains of Wrath, Gilgamesh, Crooked Creek, Gigantic, and StormBreaker.
- Distilleries: Westward, New Deal, Rose City, Shine, Stone Barn, Freeland, Bull Run, New Basin, Clear Creek, Aimsir, 4 Spirits, Ewing Young, Eastside Distilling and Hood River Distilling.
— Andre Meunier; sign up for my weekly newsletter Oregon Brews and News, and follow me on Instagram, where I’m @oregonianbeerguy.
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