(Portland, OR) – Widmer Brothers Brewing is clearly going big in 2009, the year of its 25th Anniversary. The brewery released both Widmer W ’09 Belgian Style Ale and Drifter Ale last month. Now the brewery turns its attention to a double alt and a doppelweizen.

Widmer Double River Doppelweizen

First a brief history of the project, courtesy of the Oregon Brew Crew Homebrew Club:

“The Collaborator Project is a collaboration between home brewers in the Oregon Brew Crew and Rob and Kurt Widmer of Widmer Brewing. It all started when the Widmers and fellow Oregon Brew Crew members were talking about how few craft beer styles were available. At the time, craft brewing was holding to the popular styles. If you lived in America and wanted a Belgian Wit or Schwarzbier, you had to depend on beers from Europe. The fact was that these esoteric styles would never be profitable for commercial breweries in the US.

Kurt and Rob looked at that as an opportunity and challenged the Oregon Brew Crew to have an annual competition where the best of the club’s beers, regardless of style, would brewed and served by Widmer Brewing. In the spring of 1998, the first beer chosen was Scott Sander’s English Brown Ale […]”

The bottle description reads: “A Bavarian-style wheat beer brewed to the intensity of a doppelbock, Double River has the banana and clove aromas of a weizen, overlaying the signature Munich character of a doppelbock. Very restrained Noble hop use surrenders to the gentle malt and wheat character […]”

Homebrewer, Jeff Fisher, is responsible for the beer, which was one of the competition winners in 2007. [ed: Does that mean there will be more of these beers released?]. You can read more about the project in the current Oregon Brew Crew newsletter (pdf link). The deadline for entries for Collaborator XI is this week. This should be an extremely limited release with the possibility that it only got approval so that it could legally be shared amongst those in the homebrew club.

Widmer 8409

Not nearly as much info is out on this beer yet. All we know at this point is that it is the brewery’s official 25th Anniversary beer, a double alt (Widmer released one in late 2006 on tap- did anyone try it?), and that it is 9.8% ABV. My guess is that distribution for this beer will be wider than the doppelweizen though it may still be limited.

More about the Widmer Brothers history.