Checking in With Assembly’s George Johnson
“I am a patient man,” Assembly owner and brewer George Johnson conceded. We were about a half hour into the story of how he came to found Assembly. Starting a brewery is in most cases a massive, life-altering, prematurely-aging experience. But I have never encountered anyone who worked as hard and long as George did to open his own brewery.
Assembly Annex
2934 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211
11a - 10p daily
Website
We had gotten together because George opened the Assembly Annex over the weekend, a second beer and Detroit-style pizza place on NE Alberta. The native Michigander developed his love of both of those local expressions more than 30 years ago, and he’s as fiercely defensive of proper Detroit pizza as he is old-school, citrusy IPAs. The new place is a homecoming of sorts, taking George back to the neighborhood he first landed when he arrived in Portland. It is a sign that Assembly has made it through Covid and is flourishing—and it gives me an opportunity to tell George’s tale of perseverance.
Listen to enough how-I-started-my-brewery stories, you will begin to identify familiar milestones. Things usually start with the discovery of good beer, and that’s where George’s story starts as well. He discovered Bell’s in Michigan before heading off to Boulder to attend the University of Colorado—where of course he found one of the most vibrant centers for craft brewing. “I’ve been a snob from the beginning,” he said. He liked beer enough that he took his passion to the next level. “I got into brewing beer when I was 19 in 1993.”
The beer life would wait, however. In Boulder he got into music and started a band. This different kind of creative passion took over. He joined a band that became the centerpiece of his life after college. Touring the vast, open spaces of the Mountain West was a slog, though, so the band relocated to Portland, where the cities, and gigs, were closer. “We called it post-industrial tribal music. It was weird, and it was great.” The band’s name was Feral.
During this period of his life, he retreated into a kind of ascetic lifestyle, trimming away everything that wasn’t essential—including the house he was living in. When I mentioned Buddhist retreats, George nodded and said this period of his life was like that as well. “I made a conscious effort to just … be,” he said of the period.
By the mid 2000s he had settled down, buying a house near Foster, where he would later situate Assembly, and began bartending and brewing. “After work, I’d invite people over to the house. I was brewing ten gallons a week,” he said. Hopworks, the closest brewery, opened in 2007, and “I am pretty sure I was the first homebrewer to show up for a pitch of yeast,” he said, laughing. Beer had moved to the center of his life, and in 2008, he was looking for a place to start a brewery. “Little-known fact,” he said. “Back around 2008, I almost got the lease on the place that became Breakside Dekum.” Keep in mind that this was a decade before he would finally found Assembly.
During this period, he was also making pizza at home, perfecting the art of the Detroit-style pie. Throughout the hour we spoke, George’s equanimity only cracked once. There is a proper way to make this kind of pizza, and it involves letting the dough rise in the pan, or not baking it before you put on the ingredients, or… (Honestly, I know so little about cooking that it sailed by me. You can ask George the next time you stop in.) In any case, most Portland places don’t make it properly, and he’s worried it’s giving the style a bad name. When he got serious about opening a brewpub with pizza, George returned to Detroit to learn how to make pizza at scale. He trained with Shawn Randazzo, the late chef who was instrumental in popularizing Detroit-style pizza. Randazzo gave him the recipe for his own dough, and that’s what you’ll taste when you order a square of Assembly’s pizza.
After failing to secure a place, George decided to get more training. He completed the Business of Craft Beverage certificate program, and, after some good luck on timing, earned a diploma from the American Brewers Guild. His first professional experience came when he returned to Hopworks and interned there. At this point in George’s story—we’re in the middle-teens by now—I think we’ve established his patience, and good thing, because he then spent four years negotiating for the building that would house Assembly’s brewery and pizza restaurant.
Assembly Arrives
George was finally able to realize the dream of opening Assembly in 2019. After all that planning and waiting, everything was on track. “We were killing it,” he said. Foster Road cuts through two large neighborhoods in Southeast Portland that have no other breweries. The space is comfortable and airy, and while Foster is starting to have some restaurants, it’s still sparse compared to the rest of the city. It’s an area desperate for a great brewpub. Covid arrived a year later, however, with all its attendant difficulties. Beyond that, the relationship with his business partner, a regular he knew from bartending, soon fracture. Fortunately, his mother, a lifelong Detroit public school teacher, helped him take over the business, and he managed to get through the Covid years. He didn’t go into the kind of debt that put a lot of breweries at risk. In fact, last month he paid off the last of his loans.
I believe Assembly is on its way to becoming a Portland institution, though its rep is likely to rest in its pizza rather than beer. Sally and I visited the new Annex on Saturday and it was packed. The Alberta neighborhood, like Foster, has lots of families, and I think half of them were there that night for the pizza. The neighborhood was also part of the historically Black part of town. Many of the businesses lining the road were Black-owned up through the 90s, before gentrification changed everything. It’s very cool to have a Black owner come back to the neighborhood—and they certainly seem ready to welcome Assembly. George emerged from the kitchen as I was buying my second pint and I congratulated him on the opening, saying it’s nice to see people show up when you throw a party. He looked around at the bedlam and nodded. “Yeah, but you don’t want to have to call the cops!”
Detroit-style pizza, at least the way Assembly makes it, is the real deal. The concept is strange—it’s an upside-down pizza baked in a deep metal pan. The dough is thick, producing a tasty two-texture pie. In the center, the bread is light and soft, but it gets satisfyingly crunch at the edges. The “toppings” sit on the bread, and the cheese on top of them, and on top of all that goes the sauce. It’s a version of deep-dish pizza, but it’s not heavy like Chicago’s. In a city where a lot of the pizza is made in the style of New York or New Haven, Detroit-style offers a nice counterpunch, and Assembly is the main evangelist.
I have been telling people not to overlook the beer, though. Assembly started out with a very old-school approach, and George readily admits that’s his sweet spot. But in the past year, I’ve found more modern hoppy styles on the menu, like a Strata-hopped pale (Oregon Origins) I had on Saturday that was juicy-dank in all the right ways. Sally had a great stout, which is one of Assembly’s specialties, but my favorite beer was Prophetic Pils, a deeply quenching, tangy German example. George’s Kolsch (no umlaut) has already become my regular go-to when I stop in. The beer has continued to grow in breadth and accomplishment, and Sally’s stout (Doublin’ in Dublin) picked up the brewery’s first award last year.
Anyone who has lived in Portland more than about five years begins to talk wistfully about “old Portland,” which is a nonspecific term that recalls the nostalgia of our city’s essence as typified by that moment the speaker happened to arrive. Unique local businesses are always a big part of that essence. George mentioned that he loved Portland and been here longer than he’d lived in Detroit. This is another truth of our city—its Portlandness is always composed of and maintained by immigrants to the city. Even before he opened the Annex, George Johnson materially added to the character of the city. Now, with a place on Alberta, it will become even more influential. Come back in another ten years and it might be one of those places people fondly cite as quintessential Rose City. It was a long time coming, and I’m delighted George was so patient.