{"id":13764,"date":"2017-06-15T16:19:14","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T23:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/?p=13764"},"modified":"2020-04-27T16:48:07","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T23:48:07","slug":"beers-made-by-walking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/hike\/beers-made-by-walking","title":{"rendered":"Beers Made by Walking"},"content":{"rendered":"

How one group is blending the age-old crafts of foraging and brewing<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twenty hikers follow Cody Chambers through the 5,000-acre Forest Park near downtown Portland, Oregon. Chambers, the program manager with the Forest Park Conservancy, stops to point out a\u00a0thimbleberry plant 90 minutes into the 2-hour hike.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s too early in the season for the plant\u2019s reddish berries to appear, so Chambers paints a mental picture: \u201cWhen the fruits come out, they look like a thimble that would fit on your thumb,” he says.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cBlackberries are tasty, and salmonberries can be tasty, but there\u2019s something about the thimbleberry. They\u2019re tart and sweet at the same time. It\u2019s not an overpowering tartness, it\u2019s pretty mellow.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

He tells the hikers he\u2019s used thimbleberries in cider, to great effect, and directs his next words at one of the hikers. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen it in beer, but I sure would like to.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The hiker is Trever Bass, head brewer at <\/span>Hopworks Urban Brewery<\/span><\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to find enough to make a pie with,\u201d Bass says. \u201cIt takes a lot of work, and they\u2019re so delicate. They\u2019re best when you find them on the side of the trail.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A post shared by Beers Made By Walking (@beersmadebywalking)<\/a> on Jun 18, 2015 at 8:40pm PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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To the untrained eye, it might look like a nature walk at adult summer camp.\u00a0<\/span>But this is Portland, a.k.a. “Beervana,” and a handful of those hikers brew for some of the city\u2019s best-known breweries. Seeking inspiration, they\u2019ve joined a cavalcade of beer enthusiasts for the season\u2019s first <\/span>Beers Made By Walking<\/span> hike.<\/span><\/p>\n

“The process of discovery is just as important as the beer itself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beer enthusiast Eric Steen launched Beers Made By Walking in 2011 as part of a broader homebrew project. Living in Colorado at the time, Steen put together hikes and nature walks, invited local brewers to join, and asked them to dream up beers inspired by their natural surroundings. Along the way, hikers learned about the medicinal and edible characteristics of the plants they encountered. <\/span>The participating breweries then devised new recipes and released their creations at special end-of-season tapping events, with proceeds benefiting a local nonprofit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is that, when people go on the hike, they learn something about the natural world, gain a better appreciation for it, and begin to see the world through someone else\u2019s eyes,\u201d Steen says. \u201cThe brewer has been tasked to create a beer inspired by what we find on the trail, so the process of discovery is just as important as the beer itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A post shared by Beers Made By Walking (@beersmadebywalking)<\/a> on Sep 29, 2014 at 3:51pm PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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What started as a fun way to combine two of Steen\u2019s passions\u2014craft beer and the great outdoors\u2014soon blossomed into an annual event that expanded to nearly a dozen cities in five states.\u00a0<\/span>Now in its seventh year, Beers Made By Walking hikes and special release events are planned for Portland, Corvallis, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle in 2017. (As details are announced, each city\u2019s hikes and tapping events will be shared on <\/span>the official Beers Made By Walking<\/span> website<\/span><\/a>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

“This sense of place through beer can happen very easily by connecting people to something they learned how to identify on a trail.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Steen brought Beers Made By Walking to Portland in 2012, and the Rose City has been a program mainstay ever since.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly before the hike sets off in Forest Park, Chambers gives a brief history lesson about the area and its trails. Located entirely within Portland city limits, it\u2019s one of the largest urban parks in the country. Springville Road, where the hike begins, had been used by Native Americans as a route to the nearby Willamette River and by farmers as a trade route in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A century later, Oregon grape, orange honeysuckle and trillium are just some of the plants that grow alongside the dirt path.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chambers stops the hike a dozen or so times over the next two hours, routinely pausing to discuss a particular plant\u2019s edible and medicinal characteristics.<\/span><\/p>\n

He points out a salal plant early in the hike, mentioning that its berries should appear later in the season. Bass chimes in and likens its flavor to a cross between blueberries and pine sap. \u201cIt\u2019s a really fun berry to play with in beer because the amount you use changes the intensity and whether it comes across as a sweet fruit or more savory.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A post shared by Beers Made By Walking (@beersmadebywalking)<\/a> on Jun 24, 2015 at 9:18am PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Later on, Chambers talks up the Oregon grape\u2019s prickly leaves and bright flowers; its bark can be used as an anti-inflammatory, he says, and the berry\u2019s enzymes can activate stomach bacteria.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of the licorice fern, Chambers says: \u201cIt\u2019s spicy, and it\u2019s a little bitter, like black licorice. I\u2019d love to see it in one of the beers this year.\u201d (In fact, Bass created a beer with licorice fern, wild ginger and maple syrup two years ago.)<\/span><\/p>\n

They\u2019ll taste their own backyards and even a sense of history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bass is one of a handful of Portland brewers tasked with developing a Beers Made By Walking ale in 2017. It\u2019s a natural fit for Bass, who cultivated a love for the outdoors as a child growing up near Joshua Tree National Park. In many ways, Bass\u2019 youth (much of it spent outdoors) prepared him to brew for <\/span>Hopworks Urban Brewery<\/span>, which champions environmentally-friendly business practices and uses locally-sourced ingredients whenever possible.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe talk a lot about a sense of place, being connected to place, and how that\u2019s probably more important than anything for people to get behind,\u201d he says. \u201cThis sense of place through beer can happen very easily by connecting people to something they learned how to identify on a trail.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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A post shared by Hopworks Urban Brewery (@hopworksbeer)<\/a> on Jun 12, 2017 at 7:06pm PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Hopworks is one of five Portland breweries and one cider maker that will debut nature-inspired beverages at tapping events between June and August, with proceeds benefiting the Forest Park Conservancy<\/a>. Similar events, each raising money for a different organization, will follow at four other cities throughout the summer and fall.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whatever Bass comes up with, it will be the latest in a long line of innovative libations. Some of the nearly 200 ales brewed for Beers Made By Walking\u2014a few of which were foraged for and created by Bass himself\u2014have been made with stinging nettles and salmonberry, ginger root, huckleberry, pine needles, sagebrush, elderberries, spruce tips, foraged rose hips and prickly pear cactus fruit.<\/span><\/p>\n

In sampling the ales, craft beer fans won\u2019t just taste unusual ingredients; they\u2019ll taste their own backyards and even a sense of history. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt truly feels innovative in the accurate, honest sense of that word,\u201d Bass says. \u201cA lot of this stuff hasn\u2019t been done in 250 or 500 years. The body of knowledge we used to have about the things that grow in the forest\u2014the forest was our medicine kit, the forest was our spice kit, it was our herb kit for cooking\u2014we\u2019ve lost that. It\u2019s sort of like going back to very early man, where we had to figure some of that stuff out, and it feels a little bit like being on the edge of the frontier.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How one group is blending the age-old crafts of foraging and brewing Twenty hikers follow Cody Chambers through the 5,000-acre Forest Park near downtown Portland, Oregon. Chambers, the program manager with the Forest Park Conservancy, stops to point out a\u00a0thimbleberry plant 90 minutes into the 2-hour hike. It\u2019s too early in the season for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":13771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[387],"tags":[883,8,707],"internal-tag":[1673,1678],"class_list":["post-13764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hike","tag-beer","tag-hike","tag-hiking","internal-tag-pre-redirect-hike","internal-tag-pre-redirect-hiking"],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/rei.com\/blog\/hike\/beers-made-by-walking","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Beers Made by Walking","url":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/hike\/beers-made-by-walking","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/hike\/beers-made-by-walking"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/06\/Old-growth-forest-hike-Portland.jpg?resize=150%2C150","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/06\/Old-growth-forest-hike-Portland.jpg?fit=2000%2C1500"},"articleSection":"Hike","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Michelle Flandreau"}],"creator":["Michelle Flandreau"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Uncommon Path \u2013 An REI Co-op Publication","logo":""},"keywords":["beer","hike","hiking"],"dateCreated":"2017-06-15T23:19:14Z","datePublished":"2017-06-15T23:19:14Z","dateModified":"2020-04-27T23:48:07Z"},"rendered":"