Breakside Brewery Opens New Slabtown “Hop Lab” Brewpub

GENERAL INFO
The Slabtown brewpub features a custom-designed 10 barrel system from JV Northwest (Canby, OR). The brewery includes a 3 vessel brewhouse, 2 10-barrel fermenters, 3 20-barrel fermenters, and six serving tanks (3 x 10 barrel and 3 x 20 barrel).

BREWERS
Will Jaquiss will lead the brewery at Slabtown. A graduate of Williams College and the Siebel Institute, Will has been the R&D Brewer at Breakside since 2015, and he is responsible for designing award- winning beers such as Will’s Alt and Hop Delivery Mechanism Double IPA. During Will’s tenure as our R&D brewer, he turned our “3 barrel basement brewery” at the Dekum pub into one of the most award-winning breweries in the world, including multiple medals at the World Beer Cup and Great American Beer Festival.

Joining Will as co-brewer will be Tom Fischer. Tom has worn many hats and is one of our longest tenured employees at Breakside, originally starting as a server and bartender. Tom has been a production brewer since early 2014 and has been involved in all aspects of brewing and cellaring.

Brewmaster Ben Edmunds and Director of Brewing Operations Jacob Leonard will work closely with Will and Tom on recipe design, process refinement, and overall brewery management.

FOCUS & STYLE
The Slabtown Brewpub will serve as our “hop lab,” and the majority of beers brewed here will be hop-forward.

“HOPPY BEERS” BEYOND IPAS
Brewers today have the greatest pantry of ingredients available to them in the history of brewing, especially hops. In the quest to discover the next Citra, Mosaic, or Simcoe, hop breeders have grown and developed numerous other varietals, many of which are wonderful hops but not great for American IPAs. We want to focus on these “non IPA” varietals and try to expand the vocabulary that we use to talk about hops and hop forward beers.

A BREWHOUSE DESIGNED AROUND MAXIMIZING HOP FLAVOR AND CREATING DIFFERENT WAYS TO USE HOPS
We’ve designed a brewery around the idea of optimizing hop flavor and aroma.

BREWPUB FRESHNESS AND EXCLUSIVITY
Get it here, get it now, get it fresh. For the past years, we’ve focused carefully on shelf stability, on the perfect “30 day” IPA. Slabtown is our opportunity to swing the pendulum the other direction and focus on intensely fresh beer. We won’t be kegging the beers from Slabtown and sending them to our other pubs. Save for the occasional special event or two, they’ll be available on site only. We’ve crafted a lineup of entirely new beers that we think will shine with this sort of showcase.

“THE SEEKER SERIES” OF IPAS: BEERS THAT HONOR THE DIVERSITY OF INDIA PALE ALE
We want to pay tribute to the great IPAs that we’ve encountered over the years. Rather than argue about which regional variant of IPA is the best, we want to brew them all. Our “Seeker” series of IPAs will be our take on what we feel are the paradigmatic regional IPAs found worldwide:

• the golden, resinous, strong IPAs of SouthernCalifornia typified by friends at Pizza Port, Bagby, Beachwood, Noble Ale Works, and Ballast Point

• the soft , hazy and estery IPAs of New England in the vein of Hill Farmstead, Nightshift, and Trillium

• the piney and citric IPAs of the P acific Northwest and Northern California made timeless by Firestone Walker, Russian River, and Barley Brown’s

• the over-the-top, weighty IPAs of the Midwest inspired by Fat Heads, Columbus Brewing, Brew Kettle, Three Floyds and Surly

• the rich and saturating IPAs of the Mountain West a vein that runs from Melvin in Jackson WY south through Denver to Albuquerque, home of Bosque, La Cumbre, and Canteen
• the fruity and oily IPAs from the Southern Hemisphere. 

BREAKSIDE BRINGS AN ADVENTUROUS SPIRIT TO SLABTOWN WITH A SHOWPIECE BREWPUB

OPENING BEERS

Collaboration beer with Night Shift Brewing
** Denotes beers will debut starting Mar 15.

We’ll eventually establish a few of the beers as our full-time house beers, but the tap list will rotate with a wide range of different new beers. At any given time, customers can expect 2-3 house IPAs, 2-3 additional hop forward beers on draft, a lager, a dark beer, a fruit/culinary/sour beer, and 1-3 additional rotating selections. Beyond that, we’ll supplement the draft list with core beers from the Breakside lineup brewed at Milwaukie, and a large selection of bottles including many limited, barrel-aged and sour beers.

FUTURE BEERS AND PROJECTS
Collaboration Beers with Nightshift, Figueroa Mountain, Reuben’s Brews, Pinthouse Pizza, Little Beast and more friends
Hop School Series: “G is for Grungeist,”
“C is for Cashmere”
Chef Collaboration Series Redux

Breakside Brewery Slabtown, 1570 NW 22nd Ave Portland, OR 97210