Years and years of beers and beers

If you walk into the Horse Brass Pub on a weekend night, you’re guaranteed to find it packed with smiling, beer-guzzling folks. Yet you’re likely to find at least one small table for you and your friends where you can sit and enjoy some of the best beer on tap in this city.

This Sunday the Horse Brass Pub is celebrating its 33rd anniversary by doing what it does best: serving delicious beer. The pub will be serving up a number of specialty microbrews, including some they have been saving all year for the occasion.

Perhaps the beers the Horse Brass is best known for are its stouts and porters. It’s one of the few spots in Portland where you can find Young’s Double Chocolate Stout—an import from England—on tap, not to mention Walking Man’s Black Cherry Stout, which is best described as a mix of cherry, chocolate, beer and heaven.

One of the premiering beers at the anniversary will be Black Butte XXI from local Deschutes Brewery.
Introduced this year, the XXI is a special reserve described by Deschutes’ Web site as “a tribute to Black Butte Porter,” which is poured in many of Portland’s bars and pubs. Unlike the gentle porter, this beer is only in its second year. The first version came out in 2008, called Black Butte XX, in celebration of Deschutes’ 20 years of business. This time the beer marks Deschutes’ 21 years.

Deschutes worked with a number of businesses to create the special brew. It incorporates cocoa nibs from Theo’s Chocolate in Seattle, Wash., it was dry-hopped with Bellatazza coffee beans from Bend, and then a share of it was aged in Stranahan’s Colorado whiskey barrels. If that’s not enough to make your mouth water, you should question your taste in beer.

There will be a number of other beers tapped for the event and a list will be released soon. As always, the Horse Brass will serve its usual beers, in addition to the guest beers on tap right now. All in all, the pub will be offering over 50 beers on draught. There’s a reason they’ve stuck around for 33 years.

When you’ve had enough to drink at the bar, you can stroll over to one of the four dartboards and show off your drunken skills. After all, another thing that Portland bars are good at is giving us games to play—like darts and shuffleboard—after we’ve talked the bartender’s ear off.

The Horse Brass is also a good spot for football fans. No, not the sport where players don hefty protective gear, but that sport that the rest of the world likes to call football. In other words, you’ll never miss an English soccer match at this pub.

In any case, if you haven’t checked out the Horse Brass before, now is the time to do it. Their 33rd anniversary requires no entry fee and any beer tapped for the occasion is bound to be seriously delicious.