Some collaboration beers exist purely for the marketing photo. Buckshot is not one of them. Threshold Brewing & Blending teamed up with Rhinestone PDX, a nearby restaurant chef Graham Chaney describes as "Vegas meets Cowpunk," to build a Mexican-style dark lager born out of a mutual, borderline obsessive love of Modelo Negra. The result is smooth, balanced, and crisp on the finish, with just a hint of caramel sweetness rounding things out at 5.4% ABV.
The story behind it is genuinely local in a way that is easy to root for. Rhinestone PDX opened its brick-and-mortar restaurant just this past year, after chef Graham Chaney had already partnered with Threshold on multiple beer and food pairing events during Portland Beer Week. Buckshot is the two teams making that ongoing friendship official in can form, which is a much better origin story than most collab beers can claim.
Threshold itself has an unusually personal founding story for a brewery. It is owned and run by wife-and-husband duo Sara and Jarek Szymanski, with Jarek having grown up in Wloclawek, Poland before immigrating to Portland in 2004. He brewed his first batch back in 2008 using a basic IPA kit, then spent years quietly refining his process as a backyard homebrewer, sharing beers with friends and neighbors and entering local competitions, long before Threshold ever became a business. That engineer's instinct for systematic improvement still shows in how deliberately the brewery approaches both its fresh beers and its barrel-aged, blended projects, which is where the "Blending" half of the name comes from.
Buckshot leans into that same patience, taking a beer style built for hot weather and executing it with real care rather than just slapping a lime on the can and calling it done. The rich, balanced dark malt character plays nicely against the lager's crisp carbonation, making it a genuinely versatile food beer alongside the smoky, spicy fare you would expect at a place like Rhinestone.
This one was canned fresh this past Tuesday and is now available at the Threshold taproom alongside the rest of a stacked new release lineup. Grab it while the collaboration cans last, and while you are there, say hello to the neighbors who helped make it happen.