Whitney Burnside’s New Brewery, Grand Fir
Whitney Burnside is a working brewer. She scrapped her way into the profession the way many brewers do—sideways. In her case, that meant discovering homebrewing while in Colorado attending culinary school in the late aughts. Because she hadn’t seen it as a career path, she didn’t get into brewing by attending brewing school or studying fermentation sciences in college. Instead, she started hustling, first reaching out to every brewery she could find in Seattle, near where she grew up. It went about as you might expect. Here’s an excerpt of her discussion with Tiah Edmunson-Morton at Oregon State University:
“It was a joke. I went to culinary school and I don’t have any brewing experience. They looked at me—and I don’t look like a brewer. I’m just this little blond girl, and they see me and like, ‘Is this a joke? You’ve got to be kidding me.’ So I got turned down at every single brewery in Seattle. I thought, ‘Well, what am I going to do? I know I want to brew beer.’ Oh man, I bugged them; I was incessant. I would call and show up all the time: ‘Hi, hi! Just following up!’ If I couldn’t get ahold of them, I just went on a brewery tour so I could put myself in there and be like, ‘Hi!’”
Eventually, Chad Kennedy took her on as an intern at Laurelwood in Portland. That led to a part-time job at Upright. From there she went back to Seattle and Dick Cantwell hired her to wash kegs at Elysian. She was working in the cellar there when by chance she met Pelican’s Darron Welch, who was visiting the brewery to look at Elysian’s new brewhouse. Whitney gave him her card and was surprised when he called a couple months later. She would relocate to Pacific City to brew on the 15 barrel pub system there, staying three years. That was the place she finally got over the hump and went from scrapping to leading. While at Pelican, she won her first GABF medal (of many), and became head brewer of the pub brewery there. Her success at Pelican led to an opportunity in a bigger town. In 2014, she was hired to by 10 Barrel to be the new head brewer at the site they were building in Portland. (A week after she was hired, the brewery announced Anheuser-Busch had purchased it.)
Last week, Whitney launched her own brewpub, Grand Fir, which is a partnership with her husband, chef Doug Adams. Because she has become a leader in the local brewing community, the brewery has gotten a lot of attention and press (Doug’s own reputation is an important part of the attention). Grand Fir is one of the biggest openings we’ve had in recent years. I’ll talk about why in a moment, but it’s worth keeping the spotlight on Whitney just a bit longer.
For obvious reasons, accomplished brewers don’t love people constantly focusing on their gender. Any brewer who manages to work their way up from keg washer to celebrated brewery owner deserves attention and respect, and yet it’s something of a watershed moment for Portland to see a woman do this. When I interviewed Teri Fahrendorf last year, it was a point she emphasized. Teri also had to work her way up, and her story of showing up at brewer doorsteps to hustle for jobs was strikingly similar. Even though Whitney started her journey twenty years later, little had changed. That’s why it’s so important to see her succeed and become a visible leader. When she left 10 Barrel, she hired another of my favorite young working brewers, Madeleine McCarthy, to replace her. The ranks of working brewers are increasingly filled by women, and I hope that in coming years the gender of the brewer won’t be germane to a story like this. But today it is, and we should celebrate it. Now on to the beer!
Brewery and Beer
Despite her nearly a decade and a half of experience, Whitney is only 35, so it’s not surprising she has a youthful approach to recipe design. “You can expect fun, experimental beers that showcase my background in food and baking,” she told me as we stepped into the compact brewery. At 10 Barrel, hoppy ales were the workhorses, but she often expressed her personal flair in barrel-aged, culinary, or cocktail-inspired beers. Underneath that experimentation is her fidelity to traditional style, however. You find that in her debut lineup, which included an export stout, a West Coast IPA, a pale ale, and a lager. The most exotic style was an American-hopped pilsner.
She’s also a precise, meticulous brewer. I visited the week of the grand opening (Nov 18), and she recounted how she calculated the production schedule of her lagers so they’d be ready. “I looked at the schedule and timed it to the day.” I’ve seen a fair number of excellent breweries in my day, and order and planning seem to be highly correlated with success.
Whitney kept the brewery she inherited when they took over the West Coast Grocery site, but modified it to make the brew days more efficient. That will be important, because she plans to keep the brewery small and intimate, with no plans to grow: “We’re never going to need to get bigger,” she said. She added serving tanks to the walk-in on the upper level, and that gave her more tank space in the brewery. They’ll distribute themselves and do limited packaging, but the best place to try the beer is Grand Fir’s pub.
The beer is excellent, and my unexpected favorite may have been the collaboration she did with Maddy and 10 Barrel—a strong hazy IPA that was lush and tropical but balanced and crisp. Yet the regular IPA is probably a better peek into the brewer’s approach. It has the look of an IPA from ten years ago, with some color and a bit of haze—neither pilsner-pale nor milkshake cloudy. (Recall that Oregon IPAs have been hazy for a quarter century.) It has the lush aromatics you expect from a 2022 IPA, but here comes the tradition: they’re all C-hop grapefruit and pine. Whitney smiled when I tasted it. “I like to blend a little bit of old school, a little bit of new school,” she said of the blend of influences.
It has a full, malty body, which is so useful in softening the pine and enhancing the beer’s juiciness. Yet she includes sugar in the grist to get it to finish with a dry, quenching snap. Her approach is brewing to a higher gravity and then cooling the wort to 185 degrees with cold water during whirlpool. It’s a technique she uses commonly.
That old-school/new-school philosophy seems to be where most brewers are right now. After wild experimentation, brewers are finding that anchoring flavors and styles in tradition makes them more approachable. The pale ale and “East Texas Lager” (not a style, but a tip of the hat to beers like Shiner) are great examples. They have a grounding in the familiar and then have a few Whitney-specific flourishes.
I was curious how the lineup would be different from the one she had at 10 Barrel. It was a near-perfect job in many ways—great income and benefits from a big brewery, yet total freedom to do what she wanted in the brewhouse. 10 Barrel has an interesting vibe and clientele, though. Located in the Pearl District, it’s slick and sleek and attracts a corporate, bro-y crowd. That’s very different than the homey, crunchy, inner Southeast she landed with Grand Fir. “Even though I had all the freedom at 10 Barrel,” she said, “I had to brew what the demographic wanted. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to put out there.” At Grand Fir, she’s going to be able to experiment until she finds what the neighborhood wants, and she’s guessing that means fewer hazy IPAs. For the coming months, she’ll be trying different things until she see what lands.
They opened up the upstairs bar to improve sight lines.
I asked if the wood mosaic was made of Grand Fir. Maybe! (Confirmed!—see first comment.)
The compact brewery.
Just before 5 pm.
A crowd gathers.
In the Kitchen
A big part of Grand Fir’s identity will be its kitchen, helmed by Whitney’s husband, Doug Adams. I would love to tell you I know something about cuisine and that I’ve followed his career as he went from Paley’s Place to Imperial to Bullard, becoming one of Portland’s premier chefs as he went. I cannot. Indeed, when he described the sauce he uses on the burger, which involved a reduction (I think) and possibly some of Whitney’s beer, it was so unfamiliar I couldn’t capture it.
I was more curious how he felt about going from haute cuisine to the rather less august world of pub grub. Especially after the drama of the pandemic, he seems excited to create food in what he described as a “deceptively simple” way. (That’s when he mentioned the burger sauce.) “I love the idea of doing things in a casual/playful way—pub food done my way.” He added that this was a trend in Portland as well. “A lot of chefs are thinking in those terms.”
1403 SE Stark St, Portland
Hours: Tues-Thurs and Sun: 3p - 10p
Fri-Sat 3p - 11p
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In coming months, he does plan to introduce some higher-end items on the menu, and he will do periodic supper club events in a space in the back of the building. This is something he’s been doing since leaving Bullard,l. (He hosted his Royal Coachman pop-ups out in natural settings.) “Once or twice a month we’ll throw down serious high cuisine,” he said. He might focus on themes for these, and offered a honey tasting menu as one example.
I was also curious about the work dynamic. Marriages and business partnerships are intense, and combining the two seems especially delicate. “We have to stay in our own lanes!” Whitney said, laughing. She mentioned recent negotiations over space in the walk-in, where she carved out some room for the kitchen. “We joked about putting down tape,” she said. “He has to stay within the lines!”
Of course, there are benefits, too. They originally wondered if they could do this project in Oregon City, where they live with their three-year-old daughter. Although Portland ultimately made more sense as a location, “creating that connection between Doug’s food and my beer was ultimately what convinced us.” Thematically, Grand Fir works better in the Buckman neighborhood, but they would like to expand, eventually creating a satellite taproom—and that might be a fit for Oregon City.
The brewery is currently enjoying the kind of debut we haven’t seen in recent years. I arrived a few minutes before 5 pm on the Saturday following the launch, and the waitlist was two hours long. In the ten minutes we stood there deliberating, dozens of people arrived. A week later, I drove by and saw a similar throng. (Moral: don’t try to visit on a Saturday night unless you’re willing to wait.) No doubt it will slow down in the coming months—even as the food and taplists develop.
It’s exciting to see a new wave of brewers mature and create the next generation of breweries. Grand Fir isn’t like breweries that arrived in previous decades, but with a little luck, it hints at what might be coming.