The Stoat and I at the 2010 Beer Bloggers Conference

Beervana at last!

Road Trips for Beer editor Gerard Walen will arrive in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday to attend the second annual Beer Bloggers Conference.

Beer writers and bloggers will descend on Portland from Friday to Sunday for three days of educational sessions, craft beer dinners, tours and trips, networking, and, of course, plenty of craft beer tasting.

Gerard will give away some special treats during the conference. Ted’s Cigars out of Louisville, Kentucky, was kind enough to supply us with samples of HOPZ Craft Beer Cigars as well as branded T-shirts and bottle openers.

These stogies infused with U.S. Centennial hops are a tasty tobacco treat, designed especially to complement hoppy IPAs.  The cigars, hand-rolled in the Dominican Republic with a Cameroon wrapper, Connecticut binder and Domnican filler, are not a gimmick.  Each comes in a sealed glass tube so you don’t need a humidor if you want to save it for a special occasion, or a special beer.

Want one of the goodies? If you’re attending the Beer Bloggers Conference, just be sure you’re following us on Twitter. Occasionally, Gerard will tweet that the next person to find him at the conference and mention HOPZ Cigars will win a cigar, T-shirt or opener, depending on what he’s carrying.

But we don’t want to completely leave out residents and beer road trippers in Portland this weekend.

There will be a pre-conference pub crawl Thursday night, and Gerard will be tweeting about some HOPZ Cigars giveaways during it, provided his flights leave and arrive on time. He’ll be checking in on foursquare as well to give clues on where to find him. The Thursday night giveaways will be reserved exclusively for non-conference attendees. And if you catch him on the street near the host DoubleTree hotel, you might get lucky and snag a cigar, T-shirt or opener.

If you aren’t able to get one of the freebies, HOPZ cigars are available in two sizes (6×50 Toro and 5×38 Petit Corona) on the Ted’s Cigars website.

Also at the Conference

On Saturday at 4 p.m. Pacific Time (7 p.m. Eastern), there will be a live beer blogging session where various brewers will have five minutes or so to pour and talk about their beer at each table, and bloggers will write about them, so tune in here for that. Expect more typos than usual. (See the post from last year’s session).

You can also expect photos, videos, tips and posts from the Portland beer scene on this site after the conference.