Island Towns Goes Year-Round Under Islands That Are Bears

The bears on the can have been here before. The artwork on Fort George Brewery's Island Towns is by Portland illustrator Jesse LeDoux. The brewery first used it in 2025, on a collaboration with the band Minus the Bear marking the 20th anniversary of their album Menos el Oso. Different beer, same art. The design reads at first as a chain of small forested islands and then resolves into a row of bears sitting in the water. That is a fair visual translation of an album title that means "minus the bear."

The beer underneath it is a Tropical West Coast IPA at 6.5% ABV, and the news is a format change. Island Towns has moved into a year-round 6-pack, in 12-ounce cans and on draft. Fort George describes it as lush, a little sweet, and suited to activities in any season - "as bright and aromatic as an island in the sun."

Shifting a beer to year-round is a quiet but real commitment. It means committing tank time every month rather than for one stretch of the calendar, and it takes a beer out of the category of things that appear briefly and are gone. The brewery makes the argument through its hometown:

Like Astoria, Island Towns isn't just a summer destination for the out-of-towners.

Astoria is not an island, as Fort George cheerfully concedes, but it is surrounded by water on three sides and behaves like one. It is a small, self-contained place with its own customs, its own artists and craftspeople, and a set of unspoken rules that visitors work out eventually. A summer town that keeps going through the winter is a reasonable thing for a summer beer to model itself on.

Island Towns is pouring at the Fort George pub in Astoria this weekend and reaches shelves across the Pacific Northwest later this month.