It’s been a whirlwind 17 years for Fort George Brewery. The Astoria, Oregon, started with an actual whirlwind and this month, created a whirlwind with their flagship Vortex IPA. This April 2024 they are celebrating Vortex Month, a great time to revisit or try an all-new version of the now classic Oregon IPA. You can try them all tonight at Peaks & Pints in Tacoma’s Proctor District. We’ll be tapping Vortex IPA, Double Dry Hopped Vortex, Cryotex, and Vortex Hands, a collaboration with their friends at Block 15 Brewing, plus other draft beers from the Fort George and Block 15. In celebration of Vortex Month and the launch of Vortex Hands, Peaks & Pints presents an all-day flight of Fort George and Block 15 beers — a flight we’re calling Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Fort Block.z
Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Fort Block
Fort George Sunset Empire
5% ABV
Oregon’s North Coast and Lower Columbia area has been dubbed the “Sunset Empire.” If you’ve ever seen the sun dunk into the Pacific Ocean from the Columbia River on a summer day, you’ll know why. There’s nowhere on earth where a sunset can take up more space or time. Sunset Empire, the wheat beer, is sessionable enough to drink from the beginning of a North Coast sunset to the end, with enough body, heavy coriander, and tropical hop notes to carry you along.
Fort George Tide Land Stout
5% ABV
Tide Land marks the place where the land meets the sea, a confluence of life forces — fresh and salt water — in a landscape built by centuries of erosion and transformation. What is Tide Land, the beer? The place where stout meets barrel aged stout, a confluence of the rich, nuanced flavors of 15-month, barrel aged imperial stout and fresh, young, low-ABV stout. In other words, all the malty, thick complexity of a barrel and none of the high alcohol content.
Fort George Double Dry Hopped Vortex 2024
7.2% ABV
In 2006, Chris Nemlowill and Jack Harris flew to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to salvage an 8.5-barrel Saaz brewing system and drive it across the country to install it in their soon-to-open Fort George Brewery in Astoria. While traveling with the equipment strapped to a flat bed, they met up with a tornado that nearly spread the brewery across a Nebraska cornfield. This became the inspiration behind the name Vortex IPA. Fort George has dubbed April as Vortex Month — a celebration of firsts and bests and the wildness of the natural forces that could have crushed them before they even launched. In celebration, they doubled the dry hop to produce a fiercer, bolder, wilder version of Vortex IPA.
Fort George Cryotex 2024
7.2% ABV
This month, Fort George switched up their beloved Vortex recipe to produce a wild, fruity, futuristic version of their year-round favorite pint with Cryo hops, hop hash, and thiolized yeast for extra earthy and dank flavor conversion.
Block 15 Sticky Hands
8.1% ABV, 110 IBU
Block 15’s Sticky Hands double IPA is a “Hop Experience Ale” featuring ample additions of sticky, resinous, lupulin-packed hop buds grown in the Pacific Northwest. Sticky Hands begins with an aromatic blast of tropical fruits, citrus, and dank herbs; transitions into luscious hop flavor; and ends with a balanced bitter finish, gently propped up by pale malted barley and fermented with Block 15’s privately banked Brewers yeast.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
