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