Sixteen Decades of Brewing
The first European-Americans arrived in what would become Portland in 1843. Just nine years after those first settlers arrived, with fewer than 2,000 people living in a stump-filled clearing by the Willamette River, the territory had its first brewery. One founded a decade later, in 1862, would stand in downtown Portland until 1999. Nearly each time a new village sprang up, a brewery quickly followed—in over fifty communities from Astoria to Enterprise, Bandon to Burns.
Henry Weinhard’s
Young Henry Weinhard arrived in Oregon from his home near Stuttgart, Germany, in 1857. He was involved in a series of area breweries before buying the Liberty Brewery in 1864. It would later bear his name and become Oregon’s largest brewery. In the mid-1970s, it helped create interest in what would become craft beer with the release of a Cascade-hopped premium lager called Private Reserve. The bones of the old orange-brick building, including the smokestack, still stand at 11th and Burnside in downtown Portland.
A Leader in Hops
Hop growing started soon after the first breweries were founded. New York State had been the original capital of hop growing, but summer rains led to problems with mildew. The Pacific Northwest, with its dry summers and northern latitude, was a perfect place to grow hops. George Leasure harvested his first commercial hops near Eugene in 1869, and by the turn of the 20th century, Oregon boasted fifteen hundred growers and rivaled Germany in pounds produced. In the 1950s, USDA breeders at Oregon State University began a project to create higher-quality hops. They released their first commercial crop, called Cascade, in 1971, and it would go on to become the signature flavor in craft beer. Oregon is also home to an important hops research lab, headed by Dr. Tom Shellhammer, as well as the nation’s hops germplasm repository.
Craft Brewing
Oregon was on the vanguard of the craft brewery revival in the United States. Chuck Coury founded Cartwright, one of the country’s first microbreweries, in 1979. Although that effort didn’t survive, a few years later, four more pioneers founded breweries in Portland: BridgePort and the Widmer Brothers (1984), The McMenamins (1985), and Portland Brewing (1986). Soon after, the trend spread across the state. Since the late 1980s, Oregon has always had among the most breweries per capita in the U.S., boasting brewing centers in Bend, Hood River, Astoria, and Portland. Oregon breweries quickly became national leaders, and since the 1990s, breweries like Deschutes, Full Sail, Ninkasi, Rogue, and Widmer Brothers have been among the largest craft breweries.
A Brewpub State
In the 1980s, Prohibition-era laws geared to large, industrial producers were still in effect. The early pioneers lobbied the state legislature to change those laws and, in 1985, the legislature did, passing Senate Bill 813. Legislators passed it through a strange bed-and-breakfast loophole, but its nickname, the Brewpub Bill, was appropriate. Within a few months of its passage, Mike and Brian McMenamin began brewing to supply their restaurant pubs, and soon brewpubs were the standard model in the state. In many places, taprooms—bars without food—are the default brewery model. But not in Oregon—brewpubs selling everything from Detroit-style pizza to barbecue tacos remain the model.
Barley, Malt, and Yeast
In order to supply its brewing needs, Oregon has long been a leader in malting barley, and remains a top-ten producer in the US. In 1934, a consortium of regional Northwest breweries set up Great Western Malting ten miles from the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in downtown Portland. It grew to become one of the few national resources for brewing malt, and remains a huge resource for the region. In 1985, Jeanette and David Logsdon founded Wyeast Labs in Odell, Oregon, to supply fresh yeast to the growing number of local breweries, and it became one of the nation’s two leading yeast labs.
A National Leader
Oregon is a relatively small state by population, with 4.2 million people (27th in the US). Nevertheless, its beer industry is a national leader. The state’s brewing industry accounts for $1.8 billion dollars annually (excluding the hop industry, valued at $65 million). All of Oregon’s breweries are homegrown—there are no brewing plants owned by large multinational breweries. These local companies produce nearly 900,000 barrels of beer (28 million gallons) per year, 7th in the country.