Wayfinder Has Beer Now—Including Maybe the Best New Hefeweizen in Portland

It is great patio beer, for a very large patio.

By Matthew Korfhage
It may have taken them eight months after they opened—and a year after they were supposed to open—but lo, Wayfinder is a brewery now. Brewmaster Kevin Davey, Bavarian at heart, threw down an Augustiner-style helles as the brewpub’s first official beer, and it’s already all gone for the time being. But that’s OK: The beer you really want on that huge, sunny patio is the terrific hefeweizen—quite possibly the new best hefe in town.
Davey threw in the same hefe yeast they use in the oldest brewery in the world—Munich’s thousand-year-old Weihenstephaner—and then beat the living shit out of it until it off-gassed every phenol and ester it had to offer. That Mindstürm hefe came out hazier than a Great Notion IPA and tasted like clove, banana and bubblegum all at once. Consider it Munich in a glass, but turnt to 12.

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