History of Collaborator
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 but for whatever reasons, the Milk Stout was the first to be brewed by Widmer Brewing and was served in the summer of 1998.
This Stout became known as the Collaborator Stout and was an instant success. Over the years, this Collaborator beer has probably been brewed more often than all of the subsequent Collaborator beers combined. Its popularity was further boosted when it became the AHA's Big Brew recipe for National Homebrew Day in 1999. That was surpassed when Widmer tweaked the original recipe and introduced the Collaborator Milk Stout as Snow Plow Stout in 2004 as their annual winter seasonal and won a GABF gold medal. Snow Plow Stout is Widmer's best selling seasonal beer. Rob and Kurt honored the Brew Crew by including a short history of the Collaborator project and a Brew Crew Logo on the six pack holders.
All of this is not even the best part of the Collaborator Project. With every barrel of Collaborator beer that Widmer sells, they donate $1 to the Bob McCracken Scholarship Fund which supports students at the Oregon State University Fermentation Science program under the direction of Dr. Thomas Shellhammer. To date, Widmer Brewing has donated over $5,000.
Walk in to the Widmer Gasthaus any time of the year and you'll find a Collaborator beer or two on tap. If you can't make it out to Portland, the Snow Plow Stout shows up on your grocer's shelves in October.
Every year, more Collaborator beers are chosen during the annual competition held in May for Brew Crew members. Will your beer be the next Collaborator beer?
- The next Collaborator judging will be held in April (moved up a month from the traditional May). Entries will be accepted at the April meeting on April 8th. If you cannot make it to the meeting, you may drop off your entries at F.H. Steinbarts.
- Two bottles submitted for the judging and optionally two more for a complementary lab analysis; however, the lab analysis is not optional for the winner, so hold on to the second two bottles in case you win!
- All entries competition-ready: in glass bottles, clean of labels and markings with no tape, with a complete recipe, the name of the brewer(s), and contact information affixed to each entry with a rubber band.
- Open Style; No Brett/Bugs, no illegal ingredients.
- Only two brews per brewer (or team of brewers) will be accepted.
