Portland’s First Seismic Brewery Closure Happened 20 Years Ago

Workers at Henry Weinhard Brewery, circa 1910. Oregon Historical Society / #OrHi 50626

As I was preparing to leave for a month in Europe, Portland passed an important anniversary that may hold lessons both about the city’s current condition—breweries closing at an alarming rate—and also the state of the beer market. On September 1, 1999, the Blitz-Weinhard brewery turned off the lights for the last time. The closure happened amid a nationwide setback for craft brewing, when it seemed beer was running out of gas. Of course, the doom it seemed to foretell was a mirage; craft beer revived itself and spent the next twenty years transforming the city. Perhaps there’s a reminder in this milestone.

When Henry Weinhard began brewing in Portland, the newly-named village was less than a decade old and housed perhaps 1,500 people. It was not much bigger when he moved the brewery several blocks west to what was then the outskirts of town in 1864—the location from which it scented the city with boiling wort for the next 135 years. It didn’t take long for Portland to grow around the brewery, which was soon located in its center, and there it remained, bubbling away.

The bones still stand between 11th and 12th on Burnside Street, a block from Powell’s Bookstore, and scenting the city isn’t a poetic exaggeration—the aroma carried halfway to Portland State university. The last full year of operation, 1.3 million barrels of beer poured out of the brewery, and the kettles cooked wort night and day. Blitz-Weinhard wasn’t just the oldest brewery in the state when it closed, but was one of the oldest companies still operating from the era when settlers were arriving by Conastoga wagons. Any list of the key emblems of “Old Portland” should start with the orange bricks of Henry’s old beer factory.

Weinhard’s ultimate failure had less to do with its business model, which adapted to the craft era earlier than most regional breweries, and more to do with the sale to Pabst, twenty years earlier. It passed through the hands of Stroh and Heileman along the way to Miller, and in the process lost focus. It’s great strength had always been its location in Portland and the connection locals had to it, but this weakened as successive owners lost sight of the value of local. This consolidation was near the end stage of a process that had played out since Prohibition, when large breweries pursued production efficiencies at the expense of maintaining community connections.

Once ownership passed to Miller, executives looked at their holdings and decided those brands could as easily brewed at the Oly plant 100 miles north in Tumwater. The brewery was actually doing well, but it was too small to be of value to a company making 40 million barrels of beer. They figured, wrongly, that if Northwesterners drank a million barrels of Weinhard beer made in Portland, they’d drink a million barrels of Weinhard beer made in Tumwater. But you can’t expect Wisconsinites to understand Oregonians.

The closure came at an interesting moment. It had been 19 years since the first new start-up brewery had debuted (Cartwright), and fifteen since the surviving wave of Portland breweries debuted: BridgePort, Widmer, McMenamins, and Portland Brewing. The city had established an identity as a beer mecca years before (the term “Beervana” was coined in 1994 and was already in wide circulation). I can’t find any brewery counts for Portland in that era, but by memory it was a dozen at a minimum, not counting the multiple outposts of the quickly-expanding McMenamins empire. Local beer had begun to permeate heretofore unexplored reaches: theaters, five-star restaurants, chain hotel lounges. By then the Weinhard and especially Blitz brands had seen their local status dented, but they were still doing fine business, and it’s hard to overstate how much pride locals felt in their local brewery.

I remembered this milestone as the torrent of brewery-closure announcements flooded us last week. There was something very familiar in the emotional experience back in 1999. It didn’t matter if you drank the beer regularly or not; it was such an integral part of the city its closure felt like the loss of a limb. Would a Henry-less Portland still be Portland? (The answer, to me, has never fully been yes.) Since the start of the year, BridgePort, Burnside, Alameda, Rock Bottom, Columbia River, and Lompoc have all closed. BridgePort hadn’t quite achieved the status of Henry’s in the city’s consciousness—literally every resident would have known about Henry’s in 1999—but it was the oldest brewery in the state and a pioneer just like Henry’s.

There’s no way to replace 143 years of history—and we haven’t. But brewing has more than rebounded. In its place has sprung an environment in which hundreds of breweries thrive in the state. The 1.3 million barrels Oregon lost when Henry’s closed have been more than replaced, and more Oregonians drink local beer now, albeit in smaller quantities, than when Henry’s closed. No single brewery has taken Weinhards’ place, but around the hole it left has risen a much larger, more vibrant industry.

Henry’s itself made a lot of this possible. Very few cities had their own hometown breweries in 1980, and fewer still as old as Weinhard. Portlanders understood local beer at a level most Americans couldn’t. More importantly, in the 1970s, Blitz-Weinhard introduced the Weinhard line of premium beers starting with Private Reserve. (Blitz was the flagship brand—a completely forgettable mainstream lager.) This line gave the new breweries an unintentional boost by prepping Oregonians for the idea of “gourmet” beer.

In much the same way, BridgePort was pivotal in creating the Beervana that had turned away from Henry’s by 1999. It helped launch local brewing in 1984, and it introduced an IPA that changed the style landscape permanently in 1996. Of course, the Beervana BridgePort helped create had changed and morphed so much that by the time it closed in 2019, BridgePort was itself obsolete. In its place are dozens of descendants—history rhyming along.

Twenty years ago were melancholy times in Portland. I had just started writing about beer for Willamette Week, and we were entering the first “shakeout.” William Abernathy, who had written the same column before me, documented the frothy last years of the expansion; I got to cover the grim reset, when Portland witnessed its first round of brewery closures. It was a depressing time, and it felt like the end of things, particularly that day Henry’s closed. For the next several years, very few new breweries opened locally or nationally, and the sense that beer was sputtering out deepened. Willamette Week even killed the beer column and replaced it with a cocktails column because beer was so 1990s.

But of course it wasn’t the end of things. It was the end of one chapter, a doomy cliffhanger that set up the next chapter, which detailed beer’s triumphant rebirth. That’s how things go, doom first followed by hope and excitement—the oscillations of history. Remember that as you think about the immediate past, the current moment, and what comes next. Yeah, it’s not so fun to say goodbye to old friends. We lose something irretrievably. But eventually, things do change. It may seem like the end is nigh, but there’s always another chapter. As for Henry’s, fewer and fewer people remember it ever existed, and its memory continues to fade. That is how things go. But on this 20th year since it departed, let’s stop for a moment of silence to recognize one of the pillars that helped raise Portland and create Beervana. You are gone but not (quite yet) forgotten, old friend—