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Celebrating Oregon Beer
Your fortnightly round-up of all the beer and hop news from the Beaver State.
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Disastrous news arrived last Friday: Rogue Ales, one of the shining jewels among Oregon's founding-era breweries, announced it was closing. The details remain unclear, and as of this afternoon, we still haven't heard directly from the brewery. This is dark news for Rogue's employees, the cities and towns that host their breweries and pubs, and the many fans around the state and country. We're thinking of you and mourning this loss.
Next week is Thanksgiving, so our newsletter is a little shorter this time. Enjoy the holiday with your family and friends--and a tasty Oregon beer!
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News
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ColdFire Public House
Eugene's ColdFire opened their new Public House last week--right around the corner from their brewery. Alex Dakers, chef at the Yabai Nikkei food truck, is bringing his Japanese-American grill into the kitchen. Go check 'em out!
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Newport Brewing Closed
Newport lost not one, but two breweries in recent weeks. Newport Brewing, founded in a cool warehouse off the bay, opened in 2019, just before Covid hit. Despite a great space and good beer and food, it never fully found its footing.
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Chinese Hop Growers
The Portland Chinatown Museum has an exhibition on the artist Bue Kee, and it surfaces some of the lost history of Oregon farming. The Kee family managed a hop farm in Aurora in the early 1800s, and young Bue documented their life on his Kodak camera.
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Are You on Instagram?
If you're on Instagram, make sure to follow Celebrate Oregon Beer to keep up on all the happenings around the state. Each week, we not only post fun and informative posts on our feed, but we repost dozens stories of Oregon brewery and hop growers in story feed. You will never miss another cool event, unusual beer listing, or important bit of news if you follow us.
Follow Celebrate Oregon Beer Here
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Upcoming Events
Please send us all your upcoming event information at the following email so we can include them in our weekly roundups: events@celebrateoregonbeer.com
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Dark Lager Fest
Join ColdFire on Nov 21-22 for a celebration of dark lagers. The weekend features a full slate of incredible dark lagers from participating breweries.
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Black Beers & Black Hearts
On Fri, Nov 28th (6-10p), Living Haus will also feature a range of black beers from schwarzbier to Black IPA to Export Stout. Beers from 14 breweries incl Brujos, Burial, Grand Fir, Great notion, Hetty Alice, Highland Park & more!
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12 Beers of Gristmas
Kicking off at Away Days on Fri, Nov 28, the 12 Beers of Grismas is a passport-based ale trail. Pick up your book and collect stamps from all the breweries for fun and prizes. Closing party is at Threshold Brewing on Dec 14.
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Spotlight: Rogue Ales
The following is an excerpt from an article written by our executive director, Jeff Alworth, at his site, Beervana. Read the whole thing here.
Rogue Ales was founded in Ashland in 1988, though it didn't take long before founders Jack Joyce, Rob Strasser, and Bob Woodell moved it to Newport, where it would become one of the most important breweries of the craft era. The three founders were former Nike executives, but Rogue was fundamentally an expression of two very different minds: Joyce, the business leader, and longtime head brewer John Maier.
They were in some ways contrasting figures; Joyce was a corporate lawyer who understood brands while Maier was one of those homebrewer-turned pro tinkerers who understood beer but not business. In many breweries, the impulse to market and sell the beer undermines work in the brewhouse, but Rogue achieved a strange harmony as the visions of the two men converged.
John Maier
Most articles start with Joyce, a big, boisterous presence who was always available to give a quote, but what he did for the brand was predicated on what Maier did in the brewhouse. While the branding work was critical as Rogue grew, it wouldn’t have gained a toehold if not for Maier’s beer. (Many ambitious and well-funded projects died in the 90s because breweries focused on branding instead of the beer.)
John Maier was a giant figure in brewing in the Pacific Northwest. Well into the aughts, he was revered by beer fans in a way few brewers ever are. He was a homebrewer’s brewer, a beer geek’s brewer, a pied piper for people who wanted to go deep on craft beer. “Microbrews” were a fringe product then, and Rogue was known as the weirdest and most experimental of the early American breweries. Those were the last days of the Grateful Dead, and Rogue had a similar—and overlapping—cult following. If you thought Widmer was too yuppie and Full Sail too tame, you were probably a Rogue fan. And John Maier was the brewery’s gnomic Jerry Garcia, letting his voice speak through his strong, hoppy, or flavored beers.
Dead Guy would become Rogue’s flagship, but only later—in the early days they were making beers like Shakespeare, an early oatmeal stout, the impossibly hoppy Old Crustacean Barleywine, Rogue ‘n Berry (made with marionberries), and Mexicali, a very early pepper beer—among many others. It’s also an irony that Rogue is no longer associated with hops, because in the early Maier years, pushing the envelope on bitterness was part of the brewery’s DNA. Maier’s nickname was “More Hops,” and he played a big role in developing the hoppy beers that would define the Pacific Northwest.
Continue reading →
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