An Overview of Portland
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When travelers visit a city and do a quick Google search on “X’s best breweries,” they may well find some great beer. But parachuting into town and visiting a few breweries may not tell you much about the city’s drinking culture. (No judgment—this is exactly what I do when I’m traveling.) Yet every city has a history and specific context. Shiny new craft breweries, because so many follow a familiar model, may obscure a city’s particularity. Portland has become one of the world’s great beer-drinking cities, a place where you can get a spectacular beer at a beer bar or brewery—but also a dive bar, five-star restaurant, movie theater, or strip bar. There are reasons for that, and they help explain why we have the breweries we do, and why they look the way they do. I thought it would be helpful to offer a deeper look into Portland’s drinking culture as a backdrop to the list I’ll publish on Friday.
A Three Paragraph History of Portland
Brewing didn’t arrive when Chuck Coury started his ill-fated Carwright Brewery in Southeast Portland in 1979. People had brewing continuously here since the 1850s, when the town was a few years old and had maybe 1,500 residents. By the time Coury founded Cartwright, the Blitz-Weinhard brewery, the shell of which is still visible on West Burnside, was 130 years old. It wasn’t alone in the Pacific Northwest, either, which had a rich tradition of brewing. A string of old regional breweries ran from Seattle, home to Rainier, down to Tacoma (Heidelberg), Tumwater (Olympia), and a plant of San Francisco’s Lucky Lager (Vancouver, WA). These old, large breweries required supportive industries, and Oregon still has those, too. Hop fields, which dated back as far as Weinhard, are an hour south, and Corvallis is home to the USDA research center where Cascade and Willamette hops were bred in the 1960s and ‘70s. A local steel company started making breweries in the 1980s here, and that led to a cottage industry of brewhouse fabricators. One of the first yeast labs started an hour east (Wyeast), and now Portland has another (Imperial).
When the craft era dawned the 1980s, Portland was already primed to accept local breweries. As a final precursor, Portland was a great draft beer town, and that more than anything encouraged entrepreneurs to launch their own breweries (four between 1984-’86). After a legislative battle to change the laws and make brewpubs legal, they started sprouting up around the city. One of the most important early breweries was created by a couple tavern owners named Mike and Brian McMenamin, who quickly started assembling a small empire of pubs and breweries to complement standalone “micros” like Portland Brewing, Widmer, and BridgePort.
The first Oregon Brewers Festival drew attention to local beer-makers in 1988, and was a watershed moment when they went from fringe to something bordering on popular. Craft beer would go fully mainstream within a few years and in the early 1990sWillamette Week writer Marc Zolton coined the phrase “Beervana” to describe Portland. So while most cities didn’t see a proliferation of craft breweries until the aughts or 2010s, Portland experienced a proliferation throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. It was possible to buy craft beer in almost every corner of the city by then, and craft had such a large share it sparked Anheuser-Busch to buy a portion of Widmer (and Redhook in Seattle, which was experiencing the same explosion) to stay in these local markets. Craft penetration, especially on draft, far outstripped the rest of the country, and even by the early aughts they were outperforming mass market lagers. All of this has had a downside: maturity meant stiff competition. By the late 2010s, three of the four founding breweries were either closed or sold off, unable to compete in the city they’d helped create. Most of the breweries founded here before 1995 aren’t around anymore—but of course they’ve been replaced by a fleet of newcomers.
Orientation and Geography
Portland is a grid city, which makes it fairly easy to navigate. Burnside Street, one of the few thoroughfares that runs uninterrupted on both sides of the river, divides the city between north and south. The Willamette River (wuh LAM it, rhymes with dammit) mostly divides east and west, though slightly confuses things by doglegging off-course in north Portland. That carves out the “fifth quadrant” of North Portland to go along with Northeast, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest. (A sixth has emerged, South, but the less said about that the better.) Still, it’s easy to guess where you need to go by looking at an address. (Behold my exquisitely-handcrafted—artisanal—cartography, for those of you who are visual thinkers.)
Another thing to know. Portland is a city divided, more in a literal than figurative way. With the exception of the downtown core (including the Pearl etc), the east and west sides are pretty self-contained, and people don’t usually travel much between them. If Portland were a Venn diagram, the overlap would be downtown. If you’re looking for breweries, you’ll find the greatest concentration located in the inner core, mostly on the east side, though Slabtown and the Pearl District have quite a few as well. Until recently, points west of downtown have been largely barren, though they’re starting to get some satellite taprooms now.
Portland in a Nutshell
Portland is in some ways very much like West Coast cities from Vancouver, Canada to San Francisco. It’s liberal, outdoorsy, and very relaxed. If the forecast calls for a sunny Friday, you can bet half the city will be on the road to the mountains or coast by 2pm. Yet it’s also the most insular by far of any of those international port towns. Portland looks inward, and that insularity has been a huge benefit for breweries who feast on the loyalty of locals (Washington breweries are less amused).
In terms of beer, Portland no longer has the most breweries in the country. There are around five dozen companies making beer, and some have multiple brewing locations and many have multiple pubs/taprooms—while a few borrow or share breweries. Beer has permeated culture in a way it has nowhere else, and this isn’t mere boosterism. If you look at who has pints in front of them, you’ll see the full range of Portlanders. That includes women, who constitute at least half the drinkers here. It helps that the Pink Boots Society was founded in Portland, and we have a growing number of women brewers as well. Portland is famously a White city, and while that’s true, it’s less so than it used to be and getting more diverse by the year. Breweries have gotten better about acknowledging BIPOC drinkers and reaching out to them, particularly since the reckoning of 2020.
Drinking Culture
Portland is a sleepy little town, and not a hard-drinking one. Covid has only accelerated these trends. I joke that Portland is the “city that sleeps,” but now it’s not uncommon to see restaurants and pubs empty out by 8:30p. The crowds haven’t rebounded to their pre-Covid levels, either, and at least in the short term you shouldn’t have to wait for a table. Brewpubs welcome children and many taprooms do as well, though check listings before you visit. While drinking beer is widely popular and accepted, visible drunkenness is not. You’re going to find good beer literally everywhere you go, including gas stations, so if you want a nice meal out, count on the restaurant serving good local beer. Beyond these generalities, a few more notes.
How We Do Hops
IPAs have become the default style of American craft breweries everywhere, and that’s true in Portland as well. The evolution of IPAs goes back all the way to the 1980s, and the juice revolution started as early as the mid-1990s (though of course no one called it that then). A bit of haze has been common for decades, but so has bitterness. That’s true today and the hazy/WC dichotomy is beginning to fray quite a bit. You’ll find beers that look like New England hazies, but few that are as sweet as those. At the same time, you won’t find many dry, clear, sharply bitter West Coast IPAs, either—those were mainly a San Diego thing. In general, brewers and drinkers like a bit of bitterness, they find the classic citrus/pine note comforting and familiar, but they also love deeply aromatic, juicy beers—so most IPAs have those elements in some combination.
McMenamins
Thirty-nine years ago, Mike and Brian McMenamin bought a pub on Southeast Hawthorne called the Barley Mill. By the time they and other pioneers got the laws changed to allow breweries to have pubs onsite in 1985, their tiny empire had grown to three—and their Hillsdale Pub became the first to start brewing beer. Since then they’ve added dozens of sites, many in gorgeous, historic buildings they restored. (I count about two dozen in Portland alone, though their empire extends across Oregon and Washington.) McMenamins’ beer has never been better than “meh,” and their food not much tastier, either so you won’t find them on many “best-of” lists. They have nevertheless been instrumental in shaping the drinking culture in Portland. Early on, they were champions of family dining and opened pubs up to that broad public who now drinks. Their venues are so cool and funky that stopping into one periodically is a rite of citizenship. Portland would be a very different place without the McMenamins, and visitors could do worse than stopping into one of their pubs to soak in a bit of the culture.
Pubs vs. Taprooms
The McMenamins created a very specific expectation among Portland drinkers: you will be able to get a burger or something to eat when you go to a brewery. For the first three decades following Hillsdale’s debut, the default position was full-service pub. In the past few years, the taproom revolution has encroached even on Portland, but it’s still the case that a substantial majority of breweries have a full menu. When you’re out and about, it’s easy to target one of these at mealtime.
Satellite Locations
I don’t know if the McMenamins get credit for this too, but a surprising percentage of Portland’s breweries have multiple locations, especially the more established ones. (It may surprise some to learn that uber-cool Great Notion name checks McMenamins in their approach of creating a chain of pubs.) It’s more common for satellite locations to fly sans kitchen, but another feature of Portland is a massive supply of food trucks, so most of these will have food options. And some of those trucks—Level’s Sandy Blvd location, with the best tacos in town, and Gigantic’s Glisan location, with great sushi, Ethiopian, and pies—might be the primary draw for some folks.
Fresh Hops
Eight thousand acres of hops sun themselves an hour down the Willamette Valley from Portland (that’s more than are grown in all but two other countries). That makes it very convenient for breweries to make annual trips to the fields to grab loads of hops that will have been off the bines just a couple hours before being hustled back and plunged into warm wort or conditioning beer. Starting in September, the result, fresh hop beers, start appearing around town and will continue to do so for the next six weeks. It is easily the best time to visit, because until you’ve blasted through a dozen or two different examples, you don’t really get fresh hops. The flavors and aromas are distinctive, but it takes a minute to locate them. Because the hops fade so fast, you need to drink them fresh, and those six weeks become an ongoing celebration of the harvest and all things hops. It’s absolutely one of the best things in the beer world.
One could say more, but doing so would risk turning this from an overview into a tome, and nobody reads tomes. For further info about the city’s non-beer sites, food, art, and so on, you’ll have to Google around. For beer-centric info, stay tuned—I’ll have everything you need in upcoming posts this week.