Beers get weird at Washougal festival

Last year’s Weird Beer on the River festival included fermented flavor visitations from pina colada, pickled ginger and seaweed, beets, Vietnamese beef-pho broth, and, well — death itself.

“Land of Durian” was voted the winning innovation at Washougal’s inaugural celebration of bizarre brews. Key ingredient durian fruit is often called “zombie fruit,” thanks to its rotting-flesh stench; online reviews posted on one beer-enthusiast site during the 2015 event added comparisons like “middle school boys locker room,” “amoxicillin” and simply “bad.”

“I hadn’t heard of” durian fruit, said event organizer Erik Erickson, who sampled that existential brew at last year’s inaugural Weird Beer festival and gasped: “Wow, they weren’t kidding.”

And yet, Land of Durian was the prizewinning brew last year, and evil genius Mt. Tabor Brewing is expected to be back with something equally evil — and popular — this year.

Weird Beer on the River returns to the Washougal waterfront July 8 and 9. Twenty-six local and regional beer and cider breweries have accepted the challenge to create and serve up something unexpected. (There will be local food and a DJ spinning tunes, too.)

Some clearly want to blow your taste buds away; others say they’re not in it for shocking novelty.

Mike Davis of Railside Brewing in Hazel Dell said he considers the Weird Beer festival an opportunity to explore and innovate — but not to concoct anything that’s a true test to force down your gullet.

“I like to make beer that’s enjoyably drinkable no matter what,” Davis said. “The wow factor is not that important to me. I don’t want to make something that’s so super-funky, it takes you two hours to see if you can get it down.” (Davis grew up in Florida at a time when his beer options consisted of Busch and Busch Lite, Coors and Coors Lite, he said. Moving to the Pacific Northwest at a time when craft breweries were sprouting everywhere made for welcome relief — and encouragement to keep home brewing.)

Last year, Railside made a “scorpion pepper porter” — which was flavorful but all not that stinging with peppery heat, Davis said. “I’m not huge on lighting people on fire,” he said.

This year, Davis said, he’s mindful of how popular citrus always is. He plans to add lots of lemon zest to one batch of Railside’s popular spicy rye IPA “and see how it turns out,” he said.

At Fortside Brewing in Vancouver, brewmaster Mike DeFabio brewed up over-the-top beers for the festival. The first is a version of Fortside’s French Belgian saison, wood aged with cherries added.

“It gives it this tart cherry oak complexity that actually turned out to be a really good beer, not just a really weird beer,” DeFabio said. “But that’s the point, right? A weird good beer, not a weird bad beer.”

The second offering a tiramisu ale, “with the biscuity carmely flavors of tiramisu with a little bit of cocoa packed into basically a Northwest ale,” DeFabio said. “It’s going to be a real interesting one for people to try there.”

Fortside hadn’t come up with names that live up to the brews. “They’re both wacky.”

Washougal’s own 54-40 Brewing is working up a batch of something ‘shroomy, called “Chaga-lug chuga-lug porter.” The base ingredient is a folk-medicinal fungus that’s believed (but not scientifically proven) to fight cancer and other maladies. It grows on birch trees and looks like burnt charcoal.

“I tried some chaga mushroom tea and I liked the maple syrup and vanilla flavors that came out,” said 50-40 brewer Bolt Minister. “So I chose to use a chocolate porter as the beer’s base to play with the vanilla.”

Erickson launched this festival as a fundraiser for the nonprofit agency he heads, CDM Caregiving Services, which provides in-home care, day care and care referrals for seniors, the disabled and others in need. CDM has long been housed in a building on Broadway in downtown Vancouver, but it’s now hurrying to finish raising funds for a new, larger home alongside Share Vancouver’s headquarters on Andresen Road, Erickson said. CDM must raise its share of construction dollars this year, or return a matching grant to the state — so all proceeds of this Weird Beer on the River will be earmarked for that project, he said.

Erickson brushed off the idea that he’s anything like a beer connoisseur — but he and his wife do hit three or four area beer festivals every year, he said. A “Strange Brews” gathering in Port Townsend is what inspired this weird Washougal fundraiser, he said.

“We just like sampling different ones,” he said. “The huge festivals that just feature everybody’s top-selling beers — we like it a little weirder.”