Deschutes is an Underrated Treasure

Old pubs and breweries have a certain energy. It’s not calm exactly—they may be buzzing with energy—but stable. The impression is not unlike those movies where a person stands still amid the bustle of a city, the world around them sped up and moving in a blur. Sitting in a room in which people once drank by candlelight seems to slow time down like that. Beyond the sense of stability, one feels a ritual in the repetition within old breweries—pulling pints, drinking them, tapping kegs, slapping food on the table, eating our thousandth burger, trading familiar jokes. Those rituals seem to bind and hold the old place together, a communal exercise of the regulars as much as staff.

Most breweries don’t survive their first century. Economic decline, wars, deaths, mismanagement, and neglect all present existential threats few breweries can overcome. We don’t feel those hardships in the wood beneath our soles in the old places, but they are much more present, and obvious, in fledgling institutions.

Take a brewery like Deschutes, venerable in American terms at 36, but a century or more from being “old” by brewing standards. I was sitting in its even younger Portland brewpub (a mere 16-year-old) last week when an unusual emotion welled up. For decades, I have participated in the ritual of binding at Deschutes, and last Wednesday I felt its fragility and precarity. Forget centuries—how many of the founding era of the craft era are still around and in family hands? Look at the list of largest breweries: so many have become corporate brands. Others have already passed into the realm of memory.

Here in Oregon, Deschutes is an institution as immutable as the autumn rain, but nothing guarantees it will be around another year, never mind decades. The feeling that bubbled up in me was something like one of those wonderful German conjunct words: the grief over a thing not yet lost (please tell if such a word exists). Deschutes is truly one of our great American breweries, and I want our descendants to see what happens as it takes on the patina of another century’s life.

It has the hallmarks of durability. In 1988, then-brewer John Harris released a batch of beers that included Black Butte Porter, Bachelor Bitter—the cask version of which I was sipping amid this reverie—and Jubelale. Mirror Pond, sunny with citrusy Cascade hopping, would come a year later. These are extant beers, some of the oldest in America’s craft era. They are styles that seem passé to most drinkers—but isn’t that exactly one of those risks old breweries must inevitably endure? Hazy IPAs won’t seem fresh forever, and the practitioners who seemed so cool in 2015 will have to figure out how to escape their fogeyness in 2040. So it goes.

Deschutes’ original line are nevertheless delightful beers. Like so many 1980s-era beers, they were evocations of British styles, but age has exposed their Americanness. Bachelor Bitter has a malt base that tastes of that era in American brewing, not anything very British. More telling: not only is the beer listed at 50 IBUs (which I think is high), but the hops, with their gentle citrus, taste American. Jubelale was a kind of winter ale that Americans conjured from romance and some light reading about old British styles, and it tastes like nothing I’ve ever found in the UK. Mirror Pond? With that sunny Cascade hopping and hint of caramel in the background, it could easily appear on the first page of any brewing manual about classic American beer.

But Deschutes isn’t a brewery mired in the past. It has always experimented and evolved. It was early into hops, had a wonderful wild barrel-aging program (see The Dissident), had one of the first serious adjunct stouts in The Abyss, was experimenting with sweeter IPAs of the type that would lead to the hazy phenomenon (Fresh-Squeezed debuted in 2009). And lately they’ve been a big leader in award-winning lagers.

Indeed, despite the miscues any old brewery will invariably make, Deschutes has always invested heavily in brewer-led innovation. I remembered their performance at the recent GABF and wondered how well their peer breweries were doing at the competition (I was thinking older, established regional breweries). To smooth individual-year variability, I totted up medals for the past three years. Some of the breweries below didn’t have any, which may mean they’re not participating at the GABF anymore. Still, the results are striking:

Deschutes: 9 medals overall, 4 gold
Allagash (5, 3)
SweetWater (4, 1)
Russian River (4, 0)
New Belgium (3, 2)
Boston Beer (2, 1)
Sierra Nevada (2, 1)
Odell (2, 0)
Oskar Blues (2, 0)
Stone (2, 0)
Firestone Walker (1, 0)
Brooklyn (1, 0)
Cigar City (1, 0)
Boulevard (0) - last win 2020
Founders (0) - last win 2020
New Glarus (0) - last win 2015
Dogfish Head (0) - last win 2014
Victory (0) - last win 2014
3 Floyds (0) - last win 2013
Harpoon (0) - last win 2009
Great Lakes (0) - last win 2007

That’s 29 medals for twenty breweries compared to 9 for Deschutes. I mention this not to denigrate any of the other breweries at all (this is at best a very flawed and crude measure), but to emphasize that Deschutes remains an engaged, active, and creative brewery, not an old place living in the past and slowly fading away.

Deschutes has contributed a huge amount to the development of American beer. If you consider the knock-on effect of its training program, dozens of brewers have worked in the industry and many founded breweries. That Bend, a town of 100,000, has two dozen breweries is entirely a testament to the excitement Deschutes generated in and outside the brewhouse. That influence and the way Deschutes has become part of the Oregon consciousness is precious and rare (consider the fates of BridgePort, Portland Brewing, and Widmer Brothers). I have been drinking their beer my whole adult life, and I’m pretty old!

If I had ten golden tickets to hand out that would guarantee an American brewery survived to the 22nd century, Deschutes would be second in line after Sierra Nevada.

Sadly, there is no such program. While sipping that Bachelor Bitter, I sent erstwhile podcast co-host Patrick a text and wondered aloud how we establish and ensure “our Fuller’s” sticks around. (Not an apt metaphor, since Fuller’s, now owned by Asahi, is by no means safe—but it was the last of the grand old breweries to survive in London and a personal fave of ours.) He had no better ideas than I did, but he did suggest I meet him there the very next night for beers.

Therein, I suppose, lies the answer. To preserve Deschutes, we must patronize it. So do your part, Oregonians and Oregon visitors—get out there and drink some Deschutes. It’s not hard work and anyone can do it.