Scoop: Looking Back, Falling Forward

1. The most successful local theater production of the year was Sweeney Todd, which sold 19,859 tickets at Portland Center Stage. Patton Oswalt was Helium Comedy Club’s biggest draw, selling outall three of his shows in June, cracking up a total of 1,400 people.

1. About 5 million people visited the Multnomah County Library this year. The most checked-out book was Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (3,826 checkouts). The most popular DVD was The Descendants (2,182 checkouts).

1. Safety Not Guaranteed ran at Laurelhurst Theater for 15 weeks, selling about 10,000 tickets and becoming the theater’s all-time highest-grossing film. The most rented DVD at Movie Madness was The Avengers (685 rentals).

1. Burgerville sold 1,140,575 individual Walla Walla onion rings and used 21,138 pounds of local pumpkins in milkshakes and smoothies.

1. Hot Cake House was open for 7,992 straight hours between the only days it closed, Christmas 2011 and Thanksgiving 2012.

1. There are now 463 wineries in Oregon. More than half—51 percent—of all Oregon wine sales are pinot noirs and another 23 percent are pinot gris. If you’re looking for a pairing, the most expensive cheese in town right now is Neal’s Yard Old Ford, a British raw goat cheese available for $49.90 a pound at Cheese Bar.

1. The most expensive liquor sold in Oregon this year were two bottles of Macallan in Lalique III, a 57-year-old Scotch priced at $15,268 per bottle.

1. The best-selling beer at Belmont Station was the India pale ale from new local brewer Gigantic—the shop has moved 96 cases since it became available in June. The second-best seller was from Harvester, a gluten-free brewery. Cascade’s Bourbonic Plague is the strongest beer currently made in Portland, at 12.67 percent alcohol by volume.

1. Music Millennium’s top-selling album of the year is...too close to call. At press time, Alabama Shakes’ Boys & Girls has sold a total of 470 copies on both CD and vinyl since its release in April. Mumford and Sons’ Babel, which came out in September, has sold 355 copies between its standard and deluxe versions, and is continuing to top the store’s weekly sales chart. Either way, both will be dwarfed by last year’s top seller, Adele’s 21, which moved 966 total units. That sounds impressive until you realize that, 15 years ago, Music Millennium sold 5,000 copies of Pink Martini’s first album—in six weeks.

WWeek 2015