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Once, seven strangers were picked to live in a house in Portland to find out what happened when people stopped being nice and started being real.
Mostly, they hung out at Splash Bar, where at least some staff members still remember them. ("Their place was a few blocks away," says one bouncer. "It was pretty accurate. There's probably worse things they could've shown.")
Well, that bar has gone through a soft reboot, and is now Splash Bar & Brewing (904 NW Couch St., 893-5551, splashbarpdx.com). It's basically every college town's vaguely tropical meat market—think for-display-only surfboards, Japanese fishing bobbers and a yellow hippie van with a snow-cone machine inside—except it's now selling its own beers for just $1 at happy hour.
They're only half-brewing it here. The beer actually starts on the other side of the world, and gets shipped here as unfermented wort. ("Making the wort would take all kinds of special vents and stuff," says another staffer. "There's no room for that.")
Once it arrives from New Zealand, Splash Bar's house beer gets local water, plus yeast and hops, and sits in big, steel tanks for a few weeks to become beer—a process that truly is cheaper than buying kegs of American macro lagers.
It'€™s just 15 feet from tank to tap, and once the beer has completed those last few inches of its transglobal journey, it's released unfiltered into the world from a whiteboard handle that bears its name in dry erase marker.
Upon arriving at about 5 pm on a Friday, the place is mercifully unbusy as the staff congregates around the bar, waiting for the bros and ladybros to arrive. Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" plays from the kitchen.
The lager tastes like lavender soap and the American Hefeweizen tastes like slightly sweeter Widmer. But it costs just $1 then. In the Pearl. On Friday night. Wait till the crowd at Tony's Tavern hears about this place. It was on TV, you know.
Willamette Week