We heard some very sad news this week: the owners of Hood River's landmark Full Sail Brewing sold the compnay to Sazerac, the Kentucky-based whiskey producer who promptly shut Full Sail down.

Beyond this bombshell, it has been a mostly quiet couple weeks. We have the regular news and links, plus a remembrance of Full Sail below.

- News -

Terminal Gravity For Sale After 30 years, the owners of Eastern Oregon's iconic Terminal Gravity Brewing are retiring, and they'd love their brewery--with one of the prettiest settings in Oregon--to go to a good home. Details about TG's sale here

Oakshire Returns! Two weeks ago, Oakshire made an unexpected announcement. "Over the past few weeks, the outpouring of love and support from our community has reminded us why we started this journey 20 years ago"

"After a whirlwind of changes and uncertainty, we’re incredibly happy to share that Oakshire Public House is here to stay, under the same ownership!" The company will shift away from brewing, KLCC reports, but keep its taprooms open.

A New PDX pFreim? The sharp eyes at The New School noticed that pFriem Family Brewers had applied for a liquor license at the Hinterland cart pod at 2216 S.E. 50th in Portland. Will this be their latest outpost? pFriem has yet to confirm... More at The New School

- 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.

BrewLights This BrewLights beer festival (21+) returns November 13-14 at the Oregon Zoo. With an animal lantern train ride, vibrant sparkling tunnels and a variety of wildlife-inspired displays, BrewLights is the region’s most impressive light display--with beer! Details and tickets here

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Spotlight: Remembering Full Sail

We learned this week that the Kentucky-based whiskey distiller Sazerac had purchased Full Sail Brewing from its previous owner, the private equity firm Encore Consumer Capital. Sazerac announced it was immediately ending Full Sail's beer business, and converting the facility into a factory for its canned cocktail business.

“Sazerac does not have plans to continue to make or distribute Full Sail beer in the long term," the company said in a statement.

History​
Full Sail was one of the first few breweries founded in Oregon, the first to put their beer in bottles, and was the beachhead that turned Hood River (population 8,400) into one of the country’s most active brewing centers. As Prouty noted, brewers at Double Mountain, pFriem, Solera, Everybody’s Brewing, and Kings and Daughters all came through Full Sail. The brewery would have been forty years old in two months.

Full Sail was founded in 1987 by five partners: Irene Firmat was the leader, and she was joined by Jerome Chicvara, Meg Roland, Joe Hill, and Roger Barry. They chose an old Diamond Fruit cannery building that had sat abandoned for a decade and a half and installed what was then a pretty large system—fifteen barrels. Full Sail made just a shade under 300 barrels its first year, but in 1988 they started bottling Golden Ale on an old Italian line that could fill six bottles a minute. That started them on a decade of growth.

Dave Logsdon, now more famous for having founded Wyeast Yeast Labs in 1985, was the first brewmaster. He was replaced by Jamie Emmerson in 1988, who served as brewmaster for the next couple decades—and who later married Firmat. Early breweries in those days staked out territory in the form of a style of beer. Widmer had Hefeweizen, BridgePort had a pale ale, and Full Sail had Amber Ale. Now we think of amber ales as simple, naive little beers for people who haven’t committed to craft beer yet. Full Sail’s was different; it was made with a stiff load of hops (for the time), which became Emmerson’s signature. Full Sail had one of the first bottled IPAs on the market, and their beers were known to favor the upper band of IBUs allowed for style.

Growth and Employee Ownership​
The brewery grew incredibly quickly: by 1994, it was making 50,000 barrels a year and embarked on a $4 million ($9.2 million in 2026 dollars), 210-barrel expansion. In the next couple years, production approached 100,000 barrels, but that’s when things turned in the market. Saddled with a lot of debt and declining sales—67,000 barrels in 1998—they put the brewery on the block. In 1998, a large Indian company made a hostile takeover bid, driving the brewery’s price down in the process. (The man who led the effort, Vijay Mallya, is now wanted in India for graft and corruption; he was a bad enemy to have.)

For months it looked like Full Sail would just collapse. Amazingly, the owners figured out a way to refinance and sell the company to the employees as an ESOP. Its own volumes would never return close to the 100,000-barrel mark, though, and the facility became a contract-brewing hub. Then, in 2015, those employee-owners decided to sell to San Francisco-based private equity firm Encore Consumer Capital.

Decline​
It’s no surprise that this marked the beginning of the end for Full Sail. The mid-teens saw the explosion of breweries, and the shift in tastes to niche products sold at the brewery in expensive four-packs. From its massive facility to its industrially efficient mash-filter technology, Full Sail had been optimized to make supermarket beer—or other beverages—at volume. In the following decade, production of its own brands collapsed so that grocery stores only carried a few SKUs and draft beer never made it out of Hood River.

Private equity companies are not long-term owners. They purchase undervalued companies, make changes, and re-sell them a few years later. In Full Sail's case, this mean the new owners abandoned the creativity that once marked the brewery's beers. Encore, with a consumer food and beverage portfolio, took the same approach to beer that it might to soda or cookies: it aggressively expanded the number of "flavors," using the kinds of flavors that sell well in other categories.

It didn't work. The new direction wasn't in step with the hazy culture sweeping over beer in the mid- to late-teens, and these changes alienated its preexisting consumer base. The brand began a fairly precipitous decline, ultimately leaving so little value Sazerac was apparently not interested in keeping it viable.

A Legacy of Great Beer
​Up until the sale to private equity in 2015, Full Sail was a beloved and admired brand. Full Sail Amber was a landmark beer that did a lot to turn Oregonians into hopheads. Shortly after opening, Full Sail made Wassail, which helped solidify Northwest winter warmers (dark, hoppy, around 7% ABV) as a standard style.

In 1993, John Harris left Deschutes and founded Full Sail's Portland outpost, a test brewery that continued with the hoppy tradition. Harris created another classic seasonal that was basically just an uber-hoppy IPA, Wreck the Halls, and he led the state in making fresh hop beers at the RiverPlace brewery (even leading expeditions down to the hop fields during harvest).

Then there was Session Lager. In 2005, Emmerson led a project to reclaim light lager for craft breweries. Fifteen years before it would become a thing elsewhere, he created a throwback beer in little stubby bottles that recalled the long tradition of the Northwest's lager breweries (Blitz, Rainier, Oly, Lucky Lager, and Heidelberg, the last two which came in stubbies). It was a huge and unexpected gamble, and it really worked. When he released Session Black a few years later, Emmerson was again ahead of the curve, brewing a Czech-style dark lager eons before anyone had heard the term "tmavý."

Full Sail joins BridgePort and Portland Brewing as major, founding era Oregon breweries that closed after decades of business. It helped create the interest in beer that turned the state into such a special place for beer. It will be missed.

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Keeping Up

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Celebrate Oregon Beer is supported by the Oregon Brewers Guild and Oregon Hop Commission.

Excellent journalism is of the many ways Oregon is so special. In between newsletters, be sure to check out these sites for the latest happenings:

• ​The New School​
• ​The Oregonian​
• ​Astoria Beer Zone​
• ​Brewpublic​
• ​Beervana Blog​

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