Pendleton, Oregon, is a cow town—literally. Located in a farming and ranching region of the northeastern part of the state, it is home to the Pendleton Round-Up, one of the most famous rodeos in the country. If you’re in town looking for a beer, you might stop in to the Packard Tavern around the corner from City Hall. In any other state, a conservative, rural county hundreds of miles from the nearest city would be a beer desert. But the Packard has 18 taps of Oregon nectar pouring at all times. That kind of beer selection can be found if you’re in Brookings (pop. 6,762) on the remote southern coast, or Rhododendron (pop. 147), a village in the deep forest beneath Mount Hood, or any place in between.
Or consider this curiosity: In 2018, a division of the Nielsen company did a survey on the demographics of drinkers. They found that women constituted just 31% of beer drinkers. But they also delved into the numbers and looked at city-level consumption. While most of the cities tracked national figures, there was a standout. In Portland, they found that a majority of beer drinkers, 52.7%, were women.
These facts wouldn’t surprise an Oregonian. The culture of beer is just different here. Local beer is available everywhere, and the people who drink it cut across every demographic. Walk into a busy bar or restaurant and survey the crowd. You’ll see a lot of beer glasses on the tables, and the hands holding them will belong to young people, old people, men and women. Children won’t be drinking, but you’ll see them, too. In Oregon, beer is a part of life the way it is in just a few other places, like Germany or Belgium.
Below are a few markers of this deep culture and how to find it.
Local Beer Styles
When you go to Brussels, you might have an abbey ale. In Germany, a pint of helles lager. In the United States, you’re likely to find IPAs on the menu. This style developed in the US because our native hops are so expressive. They needed their own kind of beer to showcase their tropical and citrus fruit flavors. All of that started in Oregon, beginning with the development of the first truly American variety of hop (Cascade), and continuing with the development of beers like IPA that highlight them. IPAs were being brewed in Oregon as early as 1986, and by the turn of the century, hoppy ales were the default style. As beer became an everyday beverage in Oregon, other styles grew popular. Today, breweries specialize in lagers, cask-conditioned ales, wild barrel-aged beers, and of course, hoppy ales like IPA.
Link to OPB video on IPAs here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXy_tDqyWVE
Airport Hotels, Theaters, and Bowling Alleys
If you want to assess whether a region has a robust beer culture, go to places you don’t expect to find it. That corner dive bar, the one that still smells faintly of cigarettes even though smoking was banned in 2008? It will have one mass-market lager and four to six local beers. Go to the Moda Center or Providence Park to see a Trailblazers or Timbers game and you will have a vast selection of great beer—as has been the case for decades. Movie theaters? Have a beer. Bowling alley? Try an IPA. Gas station? If they have a refrigerated case, you’re certain to find a selection of local beers.
Movie Theater Pubs
In 1987, one of the big four of Oregon brewing, the McMenamins, opened a movie theater in a 1912 building that had started life as a church but served as everything from union hall to warehouse. At the time, the concept of sipping a beer while watching a movie seemed outlandish—and even a little illicit. But their experiment with the Mission Theater, the first brewery theater in the US, was a hit. Soon, small neighborhood theaters around town started following suit, and soon the only place you couldn’t find a beer was at one of the Regal multiplexes—that is, until they, too, saw the writing on the wall and joined the crowd.
Pink Boots Society
In 1991, two entrepreneurs needed a brewer to head the new brewpub project they were calling Steelhead Brewing. They found Teri Fahrendorf, the first woman to be president of a brewing class at the Siebel Institute for Brewing. She was one of the only women brewing in the United States at the time, and Steelhead would go on to win many awards and accolades. Years later, in 2007, Teri looked around and saw that women were still very rare in the brewing industry. She founded the Pink Boots Society to encourage women to get into brewing. Pink Boots now has chapters in 38 states and three continents. It has transformed brewing in Oregon, where scores of women now brew professionally.
Oregon Beer Awards
Founded in 2015, this was the state’s first Oregon-only beer competition. Of course, in the hallmark Oregon fashion, it’s not like other state competitions. Organizers decided to rethink both the judged categories of beer as well as the judging criteria and design. Rather than focusing narrowly on styles—the approach of the Great American Beer Festival and most others—the competition tries to identify the truly exceptional beers in Oregon based on their aesthetic merit. This approach has appealed to other states like Texas, New York, Alaska, Montana, Colorado, and Ohio, which have taken cues from the Oregon Beer Awards. Around half of Oregon’s breweries submit over a thousand beers each year, and winning a medal is a source of real pride.
Fred Eckhardt
No place can be said to have a truly complete culture until it has its own poet. Dublin has Joyce, Paris Baudelaire, and Portland has Fred Eckhardt. Fred was born in San Francisco in 1926 and served as a Marine in WWII. He moved to Portland in 1958 and worked as a photographer and swimming instructor. But his real calling was the intersection of beer and words. A founding member of the Oregon Brew Crew homebrew club, he wrote his first major work, A Treatise on Lager Beer, in 1969. His expertise in international beer styles helped informed the new breweries that cropped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, which he then covered in newspaper and magazine articles. He became the funny, philosophical spokesman for Oregon beer and was a constant presence at pubs, beer fests, and homebrew competitions until his death in 2015.
Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive
In 2013, Oregon State University archivist Tiah Edmunson-Morton began an ambitious archive of the Pacific Northwest’s rich brewing and hop-growing history. It includes research at OSU dating back to 1890, records of the Oregon Hop Growers Association, the brewing logs and materials from a number of regional breweries, the papers of Fred Eckhardt, national brewing periodicals, and much more. In addition, Edmunson-Morton also recorded oral histories of well over a hundred growers, brewers, scientists, brewery owners, and writers, preserving their voices.