Bar Guide 2014: The Horse Brass

By Martin Cizmar

4534 SE Belmont St., 232-2202, horsebrass.com. 11 am-2:30 am daily.

If you want some sense of Horse Brass' stature within the local beer scene, consider how it handled Pliny The Younger. While Russian River Brewing's other favored accounts were determining how to best leverage their keg of the highly sought beer, the Brass brass simply tapped it on a random Thursday night without fanfare. There was no limit to how many 4-ounce pours you could you could buy and no hullabaloo when the keg finally blew just before 8 pm. Across the dimly lit Brit-styled pub, you could see table after table look up from their plates of crispy fried halibut and chunky chips sopped in brown sauce, to learn the news, suffer a moment of disappointment and then contentedly order something else from deep lists spread over two pages of water-pocked paper menu.

WWeek 2015

Martin Cizmar

Martin Cizmar

Culture editor Martin Cizmar writes about food, beer, jam bands, country music, gangsta rap, bikes, cannabis and the outdoors. He’s originally from a smallish city in the part of Ohio that was once part of Connecticut and has worked as a reporter at dailies in Michigan, Virginia and Arizona and as music editor at the alt-weekly in Phoenix. He’s a passionate advocate for unfettered access to public lands, the repatriation of Oregon wolves, increased urban density and good machaca burritos. He is unwelcome in the cities of Salem and Lake Oswego.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office.

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