Grixsen

1001 SE Division St., 827-0249, grixsen.com. 3-10 pm Wednesday-Thursday, noon-10 pm Friday-Sunday.

Like many young brewers, 25-year-old DJ Moxley got his start in college. Unlike many young brewers, his first customers were Jesuit priests: At Gonzaga University in Spokane, Moxley sold six-packs of stout and chocolate brown, brewed and bottled in his dorm, to the clerics. Now he's taken those recipes to the 10-barrel system at Grixsen, which just opened a small taproom in a very beery corner of Southeast not far from Apex, the Beermongers and Baerlic. Moxley and partner Scott Petersen, head of the Fiction ad agency, say the goal is to strike a balance between anything-goes American experimentalism and age-old brewing traditions—they'd rather finely tinker with malt quantity than toss in buckets of grapefruit juice or cacao nibs. Count on collaborations, too: Grixsen has buddies at Portland's Heathen and Avery Brewing in Colorado, and even at a century-old brewery in Nuremberg, Germany.

Drink This: The saison has nice banana and clove notes, and the priest-approved stout is also solid.

Willamette Week

Rebecca Jacobson

Rebecca Jacobson is a writer from Portland (OK, she was born in Seattle but has been in Oregon since the day after she turned 10) who's also lived in Berlin, Malawi and Rhode Island. While on staff at Willamette Week, she covered theater, film, bikes, drug dealers-turned-barbers and little-known scraps of local history.

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