Westwood Beer Review: Grand Fir Brewing’s Rye Pale Ale

Westwood is Grand Fir Brewing’s rye pale ale, a 6.0% beer built around sweet orange, papaya, and a subtle rye spice, poured out of the brewery’s own SE Portland taproom rather than shipped out to grocery shelves. I rate it 4.03 out of 5, a score built on public community ratings rather than a single pint. A separate public beer-rating database logs the same beer at a slightly higher 6.6% ABV and files it under an “IPA, Rye” category, a reminder that even a brewery’s own current tap board and a beer’s aggregate database listing do not always agree down to the decimal, and I am not going to pretend one of those numbers is wrong just to make the copy tidier.

Westwood at a glance

My starting point with any rye beer is the grain itself. Rye adds a peppery, slightly dry edge that a straight two-row pale ale does not have, and it is a style choice rather than a hop choice, which is worth knowing before you order one expecting a straightforward citrus pale ale. If the difference between an IPA and a pale ale is still fuzzy, my explainer on what actually separates a pale ale from an IPA covers the hop-rate and bitterness gap between the two families, which matters here since Westwood sits closer to the pale ale side of that line despite the separate database entry filing it under an IPA subcategory.

What is Westwood, and who brews it?

Westwood is brewed by Grand Fir Brewing, a brewpub and supper club that opened in 2022 in Southeast Portland’s Buckman neighborhood, at 1403 SE Stark Street. The business is the first joint professional venture from a married couple who each built a career in Portland food and drink before teaming up: Whitney Burnside is the brewmaster, and Doug Adams runs the kitchen.

Burnside’s brewing career started at Laurelwood Brewing in 2009, after she talked her way into working there for free following repeated rejections. From there she moved through Upright Brewing and Elysian Brewing, then became Head Brewer at Pelican Brewing, before spending nearly eight years as Brewmaster at 10 Barrel Brewing’s Portland location. Adams, meanwhile, trained under chefs Gregory Denton and Vitaly Paley in Portland, became a Top Chef: Boston finalist, and led the kitchen at Imperial to an Eater PDX Chef of the Year award and a James Beard semifinalist nod before opening his own restaurant, Bullard, in 2019 and co-founding Holler Hospitality. Grand Fir is the first time the two have built something together rather than working at separate companies.

Grand Fir’s beer program leans heavily West Coast: the brewpub’s own tap list runs mostly to West Coast IPAs, pilsners, and lagers, with fresh hop releases rotating through in late summer and fall. Westwood is the outlier on a typical tap board, a rye pale ale sitting alongside a wall of hop-forward pilsners and IPAs, which is part of why it is worth calling out on its own rather than lumping it in with the rest of the lineup.

Westwood ABV, IBU, and ingredients

Grand Fir’s own brewpub menu currently lists Westwood at 6.0% ABV, a twenty-ounce pour, at $8. A separate public beer-rating database lists the same beer at 6.6% ABV. Neither source is obviously wrong; taproom-only beers sometimes get re-brewed slightly differently batch to batch, and a beer profile page built from an earlier check-in can simply reflect a different batch than what is pouring today. I am reporting both numbers rather than picking one and pretending the other does not exist.

IBU is not published for Westwood in either the brewery’s own menu or the public beer-database listing, so I am not attaching a number to it. What Grand Fir does publish is the flavor profile in the brewery’s own words: sweet orange, papaya, and subtle spice. That reads as a beer built around rye’s natural pepperiness and a hop bill chosen for citrus and tropical fruit character rather than pine, resin, or heavy bitterness, more in line with a fruit-forward pale ale than a dank West Coast IPA.

Rye itself is the ingredient doing the most structural work here. It behaves differently from barley in the mash: it is huskless and higher in beta-glucans, which can make a rye beer harder to lauter at homebrewing scale and prone to a stuck sparge if you are not careful with your grain bill and mash technique. My own rye beer homebrew recipe walks through a grain bill and process built specifically to avoid that problem, and it is a useful reference even if you never brew it yourself, just to understand what rye is contributing to a beer like Westwood beyond “some spice.” For the ABV side of the equation, my explainer on how gravity and ABV are actually calculated is worth a look if you want to understand why two sources can legitimately disagree on a beer’s strength without either one being fabricated.

How Westwood tastes

Based on Grand Fir’s own flavor description and the wider profile of rye pale ales at this strength, Westwood should pour a warm copper-amber, closer to an amber ale in color than a pale golden IPA, with a moderate off-white head. Rye typically adds a faint reddish tint and a slightly oily body compared to an all-barley pale ale, and at 6.0-6.6% ABV this is a beer with enough backbone to carry both the orange-papaya hop character and the grain’s natural spice without either one washing out.

On the nose, expect sweet orange peel and ripe papaya up front, the two notes Grand Fir calls out directly, with rye’s characteristic white pepper note sitting underneath rather than dominating. On the palate, a well-made rye pale ale keeps that spice as a dry, slightly tannic finish rather than a heavy bitterness; if Westwood is doing its job, the citrus and tropical fruit should feel juicy through the middle of the sip, and the rye should show up mostly in how the beer finishes rather than how it opens. That combination, fruit-forward hopping over a rye backbone, is a different kind of complexity than a straight West Coast IPA offers, and it is a big part of why Westwood stands out on a tap board full of pilsners and IPAs.

I would serve this one cool but not ice-cold, in a standard pint glass or a tulip if you want the aroma to collect a little more. My guide on getting more out of a beer through serving temperature and glassware covers this in more depth, and it applies directly here: too cold, and the orange and papaya notes stay locked down; at the right temperature, rye pale ales like this one tend to open up fastest in the first few minutes in the glass.

How Westwood compares with other Pacific Northwest pale ales and IPAs

Rye beers are a small enough category that direct comparisons are useful. Within the broader West Coast IPA and pale ale world I have reviewed, Mountain Haze and Crowd Control both show what a citrus-and-tropical hop bill looks like without rye’s spice layered underneath, which makes a decent side-by-side if you want to isolate what the rye grain is actually adding to Westwood’s profile. Elephant’s on Parade and El Rhodeo both sit in the same general West Coast IPA family that dominates Grand Fir’s own tap list, useful if you want to understand what the rest of the brewery’s lineup tastes like around Westwood.

For a beer built on a different fruit-forward IPA angle from a different independent brewery, Dot Brew’s Side Step IPA is worth a look; it is not a rye beer, but it shows how another small operation approaches citrus-heavy hopping at a comparable strength. If you are building a Pacific Northwest tasting flight more broadly, my Seattle brewery guide rounds out the regional picture with the other major PNW brewing city, useful context if you are comparing Grand Fir against its neighbors up the I-5 corridor rather than just against beers from the same taproom.

Within Grand Fir’s own lineup, Westwood is the clear rye-forward outlier. The rest of the current tap board, names like Fox Glove, Pink Sky, and the brewery’s rotating Fresh Hop releases, leans almost entirely on West Coast IPA and pilsner styles built around hop aroma rather than grain character. If you visit the taproom and want to taste the difference rye makes, ordering Westwood next to any of the straight West Coast IPAs on the board is the fastest way to feel it.

Food pairings for Westwood

A rye pale ale with orange and papaya notes wants food that can meet both the citrus and the grain’s dry spice. My first instinct is a smash burger with a sharp cheddar; the char and fat cut against the hop character, and the rye’s peppery edge plays well against a well-seasoned patty. Grand Fir’s own kitchen, run by a James Beard semifinalist chef, leans into this kind of approachable, flavor-forward pub food, so a burger-and-pint pairing at the taproom itself is a reasonable way to test this.

Smoked or grilled meats are another strong match. My guide to pairing beer with barbecue gets into how smoke, sauce, and malt interact at different beer strengths, and a 6% rye pale ale sits in a comfortable middle ground: enough body to stand up to a smoky brisket, not so strong that it turns the meal into a slow-sip event. For something spicier, dishes built around chili, lime, and citrus (a fish taco with pickled onion, or a green chile-forward dish) echo the beer’s own orange and papaya character back at the plate rather than fighting it.

If you want to build this into a full tasting session rather than a single pairing, my home beer tasting party guide has a simple structure for comparing a rye beer like Westwood against a straight pale ale or IPA side by side, which is the fastest way to actually taste what the rye grain is contributing.

Where to find Westwood

Grand Fir Brewing operates as a single brewpub location in Portland’s Buckman neighborhood, and Westwood is a tap-list beer rather than a beer packaged for retail distribution. The brewery’s own menu notes that the tap list is “subject to change based on availability,” so Westwood’s presence on any given visit is not guaranteed; it was on the board as of this writing alongside a run of fresh hop releases, but a brewpub this size rotates its lineup often. If you want to try it, checking the current tap list before a visit, either on Grand Fir’s own site or by calling ahead, is the most reliable way to confirm it is pouring.

Because Westwood is not currently listed among live Saucey product pages, I am not going to leave you with a dead-end “check the brewery’s own site” note. The five beers below are genuine, currently available rye and citrus-forward pale ales and IPAs with their own live Saucey listings, picked because they sit in a similar flavor lane to Westwood.

Similar rye and citrus-forward pale ales to try

Showdown Rye is my closest true style match: same rye grain, same peppery backbone, and a widely distributed bottle where Westwood is a single-taproom pour. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is the useful control beer if you want to isolate what rye adds by comparing Westwood against a straightforward, non-rye American pale ale built on similar citrus hop character. Hazy Little Thing and Torpedo sit at opposite ends of the hazy-versus-firm IPA spectrum, both without rye, useful if you decide the grain character is not what you were after and want to chase the citrus and papaya notes in a more conventional IPA instead. Hercules is the pick for drinkers who want more bitterness and alcohol than Westwood’s session-friendly 6% delivers.

If you like tasting hop-forward beers side by side, I would put Westwood next to a straight American pale ale and a West Coast IPA in the same flight, exactly the comparison Grand Fir’s own tap board invites given how much of its lineup runs IPA and pilsner. That makes rye’s dry, peppery finish much easier to identify on its own rather than lost in a wall of citrus and tropical hop character.

My verdict on Westwood

Westwood earns its 4.03 rating by doing something genuinely different from the rest of a strong West Coast-leaning tap list: building a fruit-forward beer around rye’s dry spice rather than another round of pine and dank resin. Grand Fir’s own description, sweet orange, papaya, subtle spice, reads as a beer designed to be approachable and a little bit different, not a showcase for extreme bitterness or haze, and that fits a brewpub built by a chef and a brewmaster who clearly care about food-and-beer pairing as much as raw hop volume.

My main reservation is practical rather than a knock on the beer itself: Grand Fir is a single taproom, Westwood is not bottled or canned for retail, and the brewery’s own menu explicitly warns the tap list changes based on availability. I also cannot responsibly give you a single confirmed ABV, since the brewery’s current menu and the public beer-database listing disagree by six-tenths of a percentage point, and I cannot give you a published IBU at all. None of that changes how the beer is described tasting; it just means this is a “check the tap list, then go” beer rather than one you can order online.

If you are in Portland and want to see what a rye pale ale looks like from a brewery built by a genuinely accomplished brewmaster and chef pairing, Westwood is worth seeking out at Grand Fir’s Buckman taproom. It is also a useful beer for understanding what rye actually contributes to a pale ale, side by side with the rest of the brewery’s mostly West Coast IPA lineup.

FAQs

What style of beer is Westwood?

Westwood is a rye pale ale from Grand Fir Brewing in Portland, Oregon. Grand Fir’s own brewpub menu lists it as a rye pale ale; a separate public beer-rating database files it under an IPA, Rye category.

What is the ABV of Westwood?

Grand Fir’s current brewpub tap list shows Westwood at 6.0% ABV. A separate public beer-database listing shows 6.6% ABV, likely reflecting a different batch. Both figures are reported here rather than picking one and ignoring the other.

What is Westwood’s IBU?

An IBU figure is not published for Westwood in the brewery’s own menu or in the beer-profile information I could verify, so no specific number should be assumed.

What does Westwood taste like?

Grand Fir describes Westwood’s flavor as sweet orange, papaya, and subtle spice. The rye grain typically adds a dry, peppery finish underneath the citrus and tropical fruit hop character.

Where can I buy Westwood?

Westwood is a taproom-only beer from Grand Fir Brewing, a single-location brewpub in Portland’s Buckman neighborhood. It is not currently listed on Saucey or other retail delivery platforms; check Grand Fir’s own tap list before visiting, since availability rotates.

Who brews Westwood?

Westwood is brewed by Grand Fir Brewing, a Portland, Oregon brewpub opened in 2022 by brewmaster Whitney Burnside and chef Doug Adams, a married couple whose earlier careers included stops at 10 Barrel Brewing, Pelican Brewing, and the restaurant Imperial.