Ted Sobel’s Modest, Radical Dream
Ted Sobel, the founder of Brewers Union Local 180 and one of America’s most ardent champions of cask ale, died on October 10th. In one way, his homey brewpub, hidden deep inside the Willamette National Forest in Oakridge, was a modest endeavor. In another, more important way, it was an experiment aimed at changing the way people lived.
Ted Sobel was a romantic. He did not start a brewery, like so many people do, because he wanted to take a homebrew hobby pro, or because he thought it would be a fun business. Certainly not to make money. No, Ted started Brewers Union to breathe life into a vision he first sighted in a London pub in 1991, one that grew ever more vivid in his mind as the years passed. The brewery was his way of bringing to life a tiny little universe filled with all the things he loved. It started with cask ale served on proper hand pulls in capacious, generous glasses. It included a cozy pub where a person could while away the hours or the days or even a lifetime. And over time, it might become the chamber into which people could pour their lives, the good times and bad.
Find a true romantic, and I’ll show you a zealot. Where true, painful love is involved, there’s no room for compromise, and cask ale was Ted’s abiding love. He loved everything about it, from the simplicity of the craft to the hands-on attention it required in the cellar. He loved the way it tasted, the ritual of buying rounds, the way it was brewed to be drunk, in a warm, happy pub, for hours with friends. He loved saying things like “spile” and “shive” and “firkin”—and telling you what they were.
Making any pub thrive in a tiny former logging town at the height of the great recession was always going to be a tough pull, but Ted wasn’t about make concessions to patrons who wanted a Bud Light—or even, really, a regular IPA. He made session-strength beer served “warm and flat,” and spent the next eleven years teaching people why it was better that way. Had he decided to locate his brewery in a bigger city, with a larger pool of potential fans, it might have been easier, too. But that wasn’t the vision. He wanted a pub with cask ale, and he wanted his pub in Oakridge, amid those giant fir trees.
Photo: Three-Legged Crane
Some evangelists are humorless, but Ted was a happy warrior. He knew what he was doing was not going to rake in the bucks nor convert everyone to cask, and he found the humor in his quixotic adventure. Back in the early years of the brewery, he kept a diary, documenting his adventure as it unfolded. You hear in his writing Ted’s penchant for self-effacing humor and comically-formal language. If you had a chance to meet him during his life, you might have heard him say something very much like this:
“Running a pub is a silly business. It's a one-sided marriage to a building, a mostly-organized collection of property contained within, and a handful of people rummaging about trying to bring a pleasant experience all around to what one hopes is more than a mere handful of other people.”
* * *
“Today I had the freedom of choosing what I was going to do, and when I was going to do it, within certain constraints…. I can see the purpose behind what I'm doing. It's satisfying in a non-monetary sort of way.”
* * *
“Eagerly, I tallied up the production numbers for the four quarters of 2010, and am delighted to declare that we have busted the 100 BBL mark. For 2009 we only cranked out 92.07 barrels. 2010 witnessed a staggering production of 104.64 barrels, an increase of 14%. Cask ale is on the rise.”
Those last numbers tell part of the story: it was a slow slog. Cask ale has never been broadly popular in the US, even when English-style ales were. Yet as far as I know, Ted never considered a different approach. He encouraged other breweries to make cask, encouraged pubs to carry firkins of it, and sought it out wherever he went. He championed the short-lived Portland cask fest and taught breweries how to handle their ale. Bit by bit he became a national figure among the rare diehards like him who revered cask ale, and eventually many of them went on quests to track down pints in Oakridge.
That’s how Ted did ultimately spread the gospel of cask—slowly, a person at a time. One of his regulars was Jim Coey, former city councilperson and mayor of Oakridge. “I’m not a huge beer drinker,” he told me. “But I love the cask ales.” Oakridge is a major mountain-biking destination, and that gave Ted the opportunity to spread his message to many tourists over the years as well. Coey mentioned how valuable the pub had been to the town as it was getting back on its feet, and how those mountain bikers would often fall for the beer.
“You have to have a pub, a place where people can gather and eat and drink and and because they’ve gone out and exerted themselves and now they need to have a burger and a beer. They may have two or three beers, and a lot of times they may stick around another night and another day, because, well, they had so much fun being there that they want to stay longer.”
He touched others, too, including my podcast partner Patrick and me, who did our best to promote his vision and get people down to Oakridge. I’d been a fan of cask where I could find it, but under Ted’s tutelage, my knowledge took a huge leap forward. We had the incredibly pleasurable fortune to join him for a pint or three in London in 2011 with his friend, the English brewers Dave Bailey and Ann Wedgwood of Hardknott. For once, he didn’t have to cajole—everyone was drinking cask, and we all loved it.
Patrick, Ann Wedgwood, Ted (L-R)
Finally, Ted’s passions spread to John Crane, who would go on to tend bar there, become a brewer in Springfield, and finally take over Brewers Union when Ted sold it last year. “I discovered Brewers Union a few weeks after Ted opened, and fell in love the moment I walked through the door,” he said. John has renamed the place the Three Legged Crane and carries forward Ted’s vision of cask ale and snug pub. After building up the place, Ted was happy to take a break and let someone else carry the dream forward.
The vision wasn’t just cask ale—Ted also built a great pub. As denizens of those establishments know, that’s a tall order. It requires more than wood-paneling and a few well-placed bar signs. A good pub evolves and grows with the people who call it home. A good publican shapes the spirit of a pub by creating the atmosphere and letting people live within it. In the best ones, this looks effortless, but it requires a lot of work.
In our conversation, Jim Coey, the former mayor, focused on that piece. He was talking about how different businesses helped make Oakridge an important destination before adding, “But the pub—a pub is the most important.” He continued:
“You know, we he's always he's always made his place available. When somebody in the community had a hardship, to have some sort of benefit gala for them to raise money, I mean, one individual, was a guy that was an old blues singer, guitar player. And his house burned down over in Westfir and and there was a fundraiser and I mean, the place was shoulder to shoulder and raised around like four thousand dollars or something. And then the musicians came through and reminisced. And, you know, it's just like Ted. Ted was always about the community.”
Ted himself reminisced about a more typical evening, when that same musician and others were performing on a regular weekend night.
“Norm, Kelly T, Erika, and Kip put on a great house gig. I sat there in the back of the pub that night, on a stool with a pint of cask-conditioned Tanninbomb (from a brewery in Oakridge, Oregon, can you believe it?), and watched the magic that makes a pub a pub. That’s a good enough shot in the arm to keep it up for another week or two.”
A life is full of ups and downs, and so is brewery ownership. Especially in the early years, Ted often found himself hitting up other breweries for malt just to make the next batch of beer. The business side of thing, including the money and people management, were burdens, and some former workers noted that they sometimes made it a hard place to work. Toward the end of his life, Ted was going through a rough time, in part driven by those very business-y elements of the brewery.
A gathering at cidermaker Nat West’s house in February. Ted brought a firkin of porter.
But this is a time to celebrate Ted’s vision, and the unlikely way they bore such delicious fruit. Most brewers would have compromised. They would have added regular draft handles and maybe even light beer. They would have installed video poker to help the bottom line. Fortunately, Ted wasn’t most brewers. He was an unusual, funny, curmudgeonly, lovable, and gentle man with a big smile and a big dream. He was one of the most original people in the beer world, and a gem among Oregon brewers. He loved and championed certain beers, a way of drinking, and a kind of community in a way no one else does. The brewery and pub were his legacy, ones I hope live for decades.
Also, he was a friend of mine, a fellow traveler, and I will miss him enormously. Rest in peace, my friend, and save me a seat at the bar.