Why Breweries Concentrate: the Ballard Example
This is the final chapter in an ongoing collaboration between the Beervana Blog and Reuben's Brews. In today's post, I consider the incredible density of breweries in neighborhoods like Seattle's Ballard--and why they developed there and not the next neighborhood over.
Sitting in front of Great Notion in Ballard, you can gaze at Reuben’s across the street.
An item appeared in the May 5th edition of the Ballard News-Tribune back in the early months of the Reagan adminstration. The neighborhood weekly alerted readers of a new business opening. “Redhook Ale,” the unattributed story began, “to be brewed in Ballard at Seattle’s first new brewery in over 40 years, will be available at a limited number of Seattle-area restaurants, taverns, and bars in July.” It was one of the very first new breweries to open in the US, and enjoyed some pretty impressive backing—Starbucks co-founder Gordon Bowker and wine marketing exec Paul Shipman. They even managed to coax a senior brewer from Rainier to make the beer.
Shipman and Bowker might have placed the brewery anywhere in Seattle’s large footprint, but they chose Ballard because they found an old transmission shop they thought would make a nice brewery. The early branding leaned into the history of Scandinavian immigration to Ballard, and its native Minnesota-like accent. Perhaps all this is coincidental, but forty years later, this four-square-mile neighborhood may be home to more breweries and brewery taprooms than any similar tract in the world. Over the summer, I was astounded to find that you could fit nine of them into a half-mile stroll. That doesn’t exhaust the list for all of Ballard, nor has the concentration reached critical mass, as the new Pike taproom that opened there last month attests.
Ballard isn’t the only example of this kind of concentration, even if it may be the most acute one. Southeast Portland, North Park San Diego, Gowanus in Brooklyn, South Slope in Asheville, and Denver’s RiNo are other examples (and the list goes on). Is there something special about these neighborhoods that attract breweries? Some kind of momentum that builds? To go back to Seattle, a city with breweries scattered throughout the city, why didn’t they collect in, say, Fremont or Magnolia instead of Ballard? There are a lot of reasons why these pockets develop—but do mundane reasons explain them all, or is there something ultimately mysterious about them?
Pragmatism
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess why breweries settled in Gowanus rather than Manhattan. The famous neighborhood developed an industrial character because factories could dump their gunk into the Gowanus Canal—leaving behind many larger, brewery-appropriate buildings. Manhattan, by contrast, has some of the most expensive real estate in the country and not a lot of cheap old warehouses ripe for conversion. Or take Portland. Three of the first four breweries that opened here selected a similarly industrial zone that even had rail tracks servicing the big old Weinhard Brewery a few blocks away.
In Ballard, once an independent city, where industries shifted over the decades, hard work was the constant. Lumber mills and shingle-making, shipbuilding, and commercial fishing all had their moment. As in Gowanus, Fremont was left with buildings suitable for breweries. Yet it’s not just warehouses. Across the country, brewery districts tend to follow a similar pattern. Successful patches develop along the spines of former industrial districts where they’re snuggled up next to residential neighborhoods. There brewers find buildings appropriate to their craft, on roads accessible by trucks—and patrons live nearby to fill their taprooms.
Industrial districts have other advantages. Local jurisdictions typically limit breweries to certain zoning types that force them to the edges of residential neighborhoods. These properties tend to be a lot cheaper than those in central business or residential neighborhoods because they’re surrounded by gritty urban landscapes. While cities site new industrial and warehouse districts on city peripheries, historically, factory districts were often relatively close to city cores—located along rivers or shores where they had ready access to water and shipping channels. Indeed a lot of the blight that drove people to the suburbs decades ago were decaying factory zones. People don’t like to live near warehouses or steel castings or transmission shops. But once breweries take over the shells they used to inhabit, they become far more desirable destinations. And their central locations usually place them near public transportation and highways, making them accessible for people across a region.
Breweries are the rare manufacturer that drive reinvestment and neighborhood improvement. Once people start coming to visit breweries, it makes nearby sites attractive to other businesses, including other breweries. As brewery pockets form, they become destinations, making them even more attractive for other breweries. A virtuous cycle develops. Cities now understand this dynamic and some offer breweries incentives to move into run-down areas.
This phenomenon is one writer James Fallows noticed when writing his 2018 book Our Towns. In the book, Fallows and his wife Deb visited 22 small cities, both thriving and struggling, to see what accounted for the differences. Among his many findings was one that surprised him (but not beer fans): “A city on the way back,” he wrote, “will have one or more craft breweries, and probably some small distilleries too… You may think I’m joking, but just try to find an exception.” Craft brewing got its first push in Portland and Seattle in the 1980s, but now look at Bellingham, Bend, and Astoria—all small communities like the ones Fallows described with tremendous local brewing scenes.
Lucky Envelope in Ballard.
Stoup, across the street from Urban Family.
Obec Brewing.
Ghost in the Machine?
It’s one thing to take a forensic look at how existing brewery pockets develop. But why do they develop in one place and not another? Let’s return to this question: why did the breweries collect in Ballard and not Fremont or Magnolia? Like Ballard, Fremont started as its own city, and with water access, quickly developed industry. Rail and trolley lines came later, but they were dismantled during the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, and then the neighborhood went into steep decline. In the ‘60s, though, the neighborhood enjoyed a funky renaissance and subsequent revitalization. Everything about it seems just as attractive as Ballard, and yet that’s not where the breweries went (with notable exceptions).
Portland is another head-scratcher, one I’ve written about before.
Portland, Oregon is divided in half by the Willamette River (pr. wuh LAM it, rhymes with dammit, for those of you from elsewhere). And when I say divided, I mean divided. It's essentially two cities that overlap, like a Venn diagram, in the downtown region. On the east side are the things Portland is most famous for--distinctive neighborhoods, bikes, good restaurants, pubs, and coffee shops. It is a very social, connected part of town. The west side is more like standard American cities, a hodgepodge of national chain stories and strip malls with indistinct neighborhoods tied together by a tangle of major roads.
Nearly every brewery in Portland is located on the east side—well over 90% of them. Why haven’t breweries opened in Hillsdale (site of the first McMenamins brewpub) or Multnomah Village? Beyond the east-west division, there are other curiosities. Much like Seattle, the breweries aren’t distributed evenly on the east side, either. Ribbons of industry stripe the east bank of the Willamette and elsewhere, but Southeast Portland has by far the greatest density of breweries. If you went around the country and looked at cities with brewery pockets, I’m pretty sure you’d find the same thing: we can explain why certain pockets formed, but not why they didn’t form elsewhere.
If I had to boil beer down to a single, unifying concept, it would be culture. It’s a vaporous force we can only observe without wholly grasping. It’s a what without a why. Why did spontaneous fermentation survive in Pajottenland and almost nowhere else? What accounts for Cologne and Düsseldorf’s unique, hyper-focus on single styles? Why did lagers develop in Bavaria? Train your eye on any particular brewing expression, and you find a mystery. As with Ballard’s crazy brewery density, we can describe how these things developed, and it seems to fit into a comfortable, neat explanation—only falling apart when we ask why Ballard and not someplace else. One thing we do know is that these forces have inertia, and once they begin to form, they strengthen. Ballard’s momentum continues forward, even while other parts of Seattle remained relatively under-served by breweries. (They struggle to get by with sometimes as few as two or three breweries.)
The ghost in the machine of beer is culture, and while we can’t quite explain it, places like Ballard continue to prove its power.