Beer Tour in Downtown Portland

Saturday, June 1, 2012

Our host gave us directions to get to downtown Portland and we got on our unloaded bikes and headed into town.  It is very strange riding an unloaded bike after carrying around 40-50 pounds for two weeks.  The bike wobbles and is hard to keep straight.

Portland has a fantastic biking system and a lot of people get around by bike.  They have designated bikeway system that dedicates certain roads for cyclists to keep them out of the high traffic areas as much as possible.  In fact, at 5 pm we saw the bicycle rush hour.  They have all of this information detailed in maps as well as signed on the roads.

Our priority was to ride to a local microbrew to reward ourselves with a job well done. We asked a few people and were guided to Rock Bottom Brewery.  We had a beer and ordered lunch.  We then decided it would be fun to find other microbrews for a "mini-microbrew tour" and that gave us our goal for the day.

Our next stop was Deschutes  Brewery.  The decor was impressive and they had a nice porter.  We ended up splitting that beer to make sure we could get to the next stop.

We visited some local bike shops, outdoor stores, and stopped to take a picture by the river.  We also hit the bicycle "rush hour" -- so cool!  We then made it to our final craft beer destination, Cascades Brewing Barrel House.  They specialized in sour beers and they were very good.  It was our favorite stop of the day.  When writing this post I learned that Portland as a "Breweries Map".  If we had a smartphone, it would have been a useful feature to help us on our adventure!

We made contact with the bike tourer we met on our first night and rode to his house to talk about our respective trips.  We got to meet his family and it was really neat to be able to hang out and share stories with the person we met on the first day of our trip, on the last day of our trip.  I doubt that would have happened had we been in a vehicle.

Total Miles on the trip: ~975 miles