Some breweries flirt with madness; Great Notion married it in the woods, fed it pancakes, and handed it a paintbrush. Portland’s high priest of the weird and wonderful returns to Peaks & Pints for a pre-Halloween flight that laughs in the face of subtlety — a trick-or-treat parade of fruit-soaked mayhem, pastry-stout indulgence, and hop-fueled hallucination. These aren’t beers so much as fever dreams in aluminum: skeleton robots, jam-splattered breakfasts, peanut-butter barbarians, and an army of dankness marching through haze. Each pour feels like a sugar séance, a neon ghost story told in malt and mischief. This is Great Notion unmasked — the brewers who turned breakfast into art, dessert into weaponry, and Halloween into a flavor you can’t quite wake up from.
Peaks & Pints Pre-Halloween Beer Flight
Great Notion Brewing Boo Berry Muffin
5.5% ABV | Fruited Kettle Sour
Half breakfast, half haunting, Boo Berry Muffin drifts from the graveyard of your childhood pantry smelling of blueberries, vanilla, and cereal sin. It pours violet and alive, foaming like a ghost mid-laugh. Tart fruit gives chase to creamy nostalgia, marshmallow sweetness dancing with sour sparkle until the whole thing dissolves into giggling sugar smoke. Sweet but spectral, playful yet faintly unholy — this isn’t dessert’s afterlife; it’s proof dessert never dies.
Great Notion Unbalanced Breakfast
6.4% ABV | Fruited Tart Ale
This one doesn’t rise and shine — it staggers gloriously out of bed and spikes the syrup. Blueberry purée, maple, milk sugar, and coffee collide in Great Notion’s anarchic brunch ritual, a tart ale that smells like pancakes on fire and tastes like Sunday gone feral. Blueberry acidity pirouettes through roasted coffee and maple velvet, the sweetness flickering just long enough to misbehave. Breakfast, reimagined as beautiful chaos — and absolutely worth missing lunch for.
Great Notion Army of Dankness
6.6% ABV | West Coast IPA
Here comes the cavalry, riding waves of Mosaic, Nectaron, and Chinook, banners soaked in resin. Army of Dankness swaps Great Notion’s pastry spellbook for hop warfare — crisp, electric, and cut with citrus shrapnel. The first inhale detonates grapefruit and pine; the sip snaps sharp and clean, bitterness marching in perfect formation. It’s the West Coast IPA reborn as war hymn: bold, lean, defiant, the taste of victory poured straight from the fog.
Great Notion Mega Ripe
8.9% ABV | Hazy Double IPA
Imagine a skeletal robot stitched from the heads of Ripe, Over Ripe, and Super Ripe, all pulsing with Citra in every incarnation — T-90, Lupomax, Spectrum, Hyperboost, CO2 extract. That’s Mega Ripe, a citrus-fueled cyborg stomping through clouds of mango, papaya, and mandarin. The aroma is electric fruit static; the mouthfeel lush and humming, bitterness ghosted beneath layers of juice. Subtlety didn’t survive the upgrade. This is hop evolution at its juiciest — a monster made to taste like power.
Great Notion Barbeerian
11.2% ABV | Imperial Pastry Stout
Barbeerian arrives swinging a peanut-butter-cheesecake warhammer, thick as midnight and twice as merciless. It pours like obsidian lava, smelling of cocoa, caramel, and conquest. Beneath the head lies molten chocolate and roasted peanut wrapped in cheesecake smoke — a flavor melee where sweetness wears armor and restraint is the first casualty. Each sip hits slow and heavy, a decadent blow to the senses. This isn’t a beer so much as a legend retold in sugar and flame — a toast to the dark gods of excess.
LINK: Peaks & Pints beer and cider cooler inventory
