Second Annual Portland Fruit Beer Festival

The second annual Portland Fruit Beer Festival is coming this June 9th and 10th. Expanding from Burnside Brewing Co.'s parking lot and out onto NE 7th Street off of E Burnside will effectively double the space and allow for an even greater selection of some of the best and most unique fruit beers in the world. A new website has been launched at www.portlandfruitbeerfest.com to track the progress, and it's also where you can read more about the just added Pre-Fest Homebrewers Dinner & Symposium on Friday, June 8th, and where you can buy advanced tickets for the dinner, festival and a VIP hour. Plus, a new website blog that will chronicle the making of many fruit beers for the fest by the brewers themselves.


Here are more details on the festival that were released today including the outstanding list of participating breweries:

Once fruit beers were a staple of every brewery, but when quality fruit became harder and harder to obtain at cheap prices, many breweries stopped making them or turned to cheap extract flavorings, which in turn helped to give fruit beers a bad name in the craft beer community. The Portland Fruit Beer Festival is bringing back the tradition with an outstanding lineup of the best fruit beers the world has to offer, many of them brewed specifically for this festival by local brewers. More than 30 breweries are sending entries to this year's festival, with another 20-30 special rare one-off kegs for our rotating taps that will change throughout the festival. Some of the more unique beers (and ciders) you can expect to find at this year's festival include:

• A chocolate- and orange-flavored beer modeled after everyone's favorite holiday treat (no need to crack this variety of chocolate orange open on the counter)

• A Saison modeled after Vietnamese-style cooking and made with fresh mangos, Thai basil, lemongrass, and lime juice

• Another beer from an innovative young Portland brewer that uses whole fresh baked strawberry-rhubarb pies added in every part of the brewing process from the mash tun to the boil kettle and fermenter

• One of the country's fastest growing brewers has created its first-ever bourbon barrel-aged beer aged with cherries just for this year's festival. It should be a sublime rare treat from this fan-favorite Eugene brewer

• The Brookland Cider - a cherry cider with Oregon apples, dry oak-aged, fermented with London ESB yeast, and infected with lactobacillus culture to try and get as much sour flavor as possible, made just for the fest.

Homebrewing Competition and Pre-Fest Homebrewers Dinner & Symposium
Innovative beers will come from not just the professionals, but the homebrewers as well. Just like last year, there will be a fruit beer homebrewing contest, but also a Pre-Fest Homebrewers Fruit Beer Dinner on Friday, June 8, in Burnside Brewing Co.'s south brewery space. Catered by Chef Nate Yovu with a menu designed to compliment fruit beers, 4 of the best homebrewed fruit beer entries will be selected to be poured at no charge for the dinner, alongside a few special regular festival entries. This will give the public a chance to taste some of the amazing beers our local homebrewing community has been concocting. This all-inclusive dinner ($50) will feature talks from some of the industry's foremost brewers of fruit beers,  including Eric Salazar from New Belgium Brewing, Alex Ganum of Upright Brewing, and Ben Edmunds of Breakside Brewery. Representatives of Oregon Fruit Products, which produces the finest antiseptic fruit purees for brewing, will also be on hand. Tickets for this dinner are limited to just 50 seats and are available online here. Find more info about how to enter the homebrewing contest here.

Vendors
The Portland Fruit Beer Festival is also welcoming back some of the finest mobile food providers that Portland has to offer, while adding some new favorites including: Tastebud Farms, 50 Licks ice cream, and PBJ's Grilled, to name a few. There should be something for every taste, whether adult, children, vegetarian, or vegan.

New Website & Blog
We are also excited to announce the launch of a new website www.portlandfruitbeerfest.com that features a blog where brewers will be writing their thoughts on fruit beers and the process behind the making of their festival entries. A handful of behind-the-scenes making of videos are also being produced that will debut on the blog.

Participating Breweries (so far):

1. Alameda Brewing
2. Bend Brewing
3. Breakside Brewery
4. Block 15 Brewing
5. Boneyard Brewing
6. Burnside Brewing
7. Bushwhacker Cidery
8. The Commons Brewery
9. Deschutes Brewery
10. Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom
11. Dogfish Head Brewing
12. Elysian Brewing
13. Falling Sky Brewing
14. Flat Tail Brewing
15. Fort George Brewing
16. Hopworks Urban Brewing
17. Laurelwood Brewing
18. Logsdon Farmhouse Ales
19. Lompoc Brewing
20. Lucky Lab Brewing
21. Naked City Brewing & Taphouse
22. New Belgium Brewing
23. Ninkasi Brewing
24. Oakshire Brewing
25. Schooner Exact Brewing
26. Short Snout Brewing
27. Stone Brewing
28. Solera Brewery
29. 10 Barrel Brewing
30. Upright Brewing
31. Widmer Brothers Brewing

Official PFBF Beer List info coming in May!

Pre-Purchase Advanced Tickets (skip the lines!)

 VIP Access 1 hour before the crowds or seats to the Pre-Fest Homebrewers Dinner & Symposium at: http://portlandfruitbeerfest.strangertickets.com/


Portland Fruit Beer Festival would like to thank their sponsors:  KINK.fm, Portland Mercury, Maletis Distribution, Oregon Fruit Products, Yelp, Burnside Brewing Co. and The Dougy Center