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Tucked behind a lighted garage housing bicycles built for 12, the BrewCycle touring company's new Pearl District BrewStop (1425 NW Flanders St., 971-400-5950) is a cleanly cut zigzag of a bar in hardwood and concrete, stocked with a smattering of local liquors and 14 taps of impeccable provenance: Upright, Pelican, Barley Brown's, Breakside and Pfriem. Somewhere along the way, bike fitness and craft brews converged in the local imagination, and so the clientele is every bit as streamlined as the décor, awash in the bull-headed cheeriness one associates with state-school athletics and good childhood orthodontics. The bar is open only Wednesday to Sunday, with pub trivia each Wednesday. At the moment, the question is where one might find our own solar system's asteroid belt. "Who reads sci-fi?" a young woman wonders aloud, bewildered that anyone might know the answer. But with its spare geometries and light filtering through a screen, BrewStop looks a little like a futuristic Kubrick set from the past. That is, when it doesn't resemble the house taproom for a design studio. Two flat-screen TVs adorn the upper wall, and elsewhere in the city a weary Blazers team is relentlessly hammering Orlando in the fourth quarter—but not on these TVs. This bar plays the college game instead, and it's very well-behaved.
WWeek 2015