Dirt Road Brewing, Philomath OR

Sometimes, you just get lucky and end up at the place of your dreams. Philomath is a small-ish town and Dirt Road is in an old corner store in the middle of what might be the old downtown area. The owner was there and we talked for a bit – he started home brewing “a couple of years ago” and decided to open his own place as a second job, and what a place it is.

The bartender was half apologizing for not having all the taps running, but there was still a really good variety of drafts! You’ll just have to zoom in quite a bit to read the descriptions …

I started with a flight of four.

Juicy IPA – a hazy IPA and their best seller. I really liked it, and was thinking of a pint of this to follow if it hadn’t been for other tastes that followed.

Porter – I loved it, but this was more to see what it was like than to see if I wanted more; it’s not cold enough outside for me to really get into the dark beers yet.

Blood Orange Sour – if you’ve zoomed in on the beer cards, you’ll have noticed there were 3 sours on tap! I chose this one at random and it was fabulous. Again, it might have resulted in a pint except for other things. The owner’s favorite draft is a mix of this and the Juicy IPA. That was another contender …

Smoke Shifter – a rauchbier that was very smoky and flavorful.

As if the marvelous tastes of these beers wasn’t enough, their pizza is freshly made and as close to perfect as I’ve ever tasted:

As the owner and I were talking, he asked if I’d tried the Farm Pour #4 and I said no, so he poured me a splash of it. This is one of a series of test brews using the same yeast (Kveik) with different mixes of hops. In this case, he dry-hopped with freshly-harvested spruce tips. The result is just incredible, evoking the experience of breathing in the smells deep in a spruce forest without any “tree taste” to be had. So this was my follow-up pint – seen in the photo below – and I even picked up a crowler (a 32oz can, freshly filled) for the evening back at the hotel.

It’s going to be very, very hard to top this brewpub on the rest of this trip. I’ll do my best to find something as good, but the memory of Dirt Road will stay with me for a good, long time indeed.