Douglas Lager: When Micros go Macro
This spring, something happened with the Rainier beer supply in Seattle. It just affected draft sales, but seemed to be pervasive—by mid-April, bars were running dry. This presented Chris Smith and John Marti with an unexpected decision. The two co-owners of Seattle’s Lowercase Brewing had been working on a side project to bring unfussy domestic lager back to Seattle. Lager like … Rainier, which had been located in Seattle for over a hundred years until it closed in 1999. But they weren’t thinking solely of Rainier. For a century, a string of breweries ran from Seattle down to Portland—Heidelberg in Tacoma, Olympia in Tumwater, Lucky Lager in Vancouver, and Blitz-Weinhard in Portland. For decades, and well into the craft era, these breweries featured quirky ads and had a big following, especially Oly, Blitz, and Rainier. That’s why Rainier still sells well in Seattle, and why the draft shortage was a real crisis.
Today, Rainier is brewed wherever Pabst, its parent company, can find a contract. The John and Chris’ idea was to reintroduce a Washington-brewed, easy-drinking lager back to Washington. They thought Northwesterners deserved better than a contract beer owned by an LA company, and last fall created a retro brand called Douglas Lager to serve the region. The plan was to sell it in bottles, but this Rainier shortage presented a rare opportunity to get the beer out across the city. “Our ethos rests on the bottles,” John told me when we spoke recently. “We love bottles. We were only going to do bottles so people could see the branding and see that it was old-school.” But that posed a dilemma. “Do we jump on the draft ship, or do we stick with the bottle?”
They decided to go for it. Chris: “Within a few weeks we had it in kegs and we were on the market by late May.” One brewery’s misfortune is another’s opportunity, and it looks like Chris and John made the right call. Bars bought kegs to replace the lost Rainier, and it has found a new and interested audience.
While the two announced Douglas Lager’s launch last fall, it took a while to actually get it into bottles and out into the world. The project is in many ways a quixotic one. Douglas Lager is designed to be a genuine replacement for Rainier, at a price point that will nearly compete with it. Yet it will be made of more expensive Northwest ingredients on modest-sized equipment (at least compared to the industrial plants it will compete with). It’s a love letter to the Pacific Northwest by two guys who aren’t sure it will work—and are even less sure it will make them any money. But that’s how love works, right?
The Beer
I happened to bump into John Marti at the recent Bitburger Challenge here in Portland, and he reminded me of Douglas. We chatted a bit and I became fascinated all over again with this project. He agreed to send me some bottles, which aren’t available in Oregon yet, and I later jumped on a call to talk it over with Chris and him.
I admit I was unusually curious about what I’d find in the bottle. Would it be a stealth craft beer, with a richness that my Dad, part of their target audience—would eschew? On the other hand, if it was truly a typical light lager, would it then be as clean and faultless as the best examples? Domestic lagers are actually really hard to make well—they can’t have too much flavor or density or they slip into a different category, but they also need to be perfectly clean, which is hard when the base beer is so slight.
John Marti
The verdict? Douglas is a proper domestic lager.
It’s soft and very lightly malty, with a tiny hint of herbal hopping. My Dad would approve. They make a lot of lagers at Lowercase, and this beer seemed to be an extension of their approach—in surprising ways. John, the brewer, discussed coming up with the recipe. “We did a bunch of malt steeps, and craft malt is often grassy and nutty.” In other words, too characterful. “We kept coming back to Baronesse from LINC malt,” he said. Grown in Colfax, in far eastern Washington, it is “the most expensive LINC malt,” he said, laughing ruefully. He described it as having notes of vanilla and cinnamon, though it is mainly very straightforward, low-flavor malt. It also produces a thinner body appropriate to domestic lager. “Most American lagers use adjuncts, and I wanted to avoid that,” Marti said.
John mentioned Oregon hops, and I expected him to tell me they used an older (and cheaper) variety like Mt. Hood or Willamette. This is a mass market lager, and they are very light. “I didn’t want it to be around 10 or 12 IBUs like Rainier,” he said, and boosted it to around 15. If you’re not familiar with your IBU scale, that’s still barely above threshold, though John and Chris spoke as if they felt it might be too assertive. (It’s not.) Instead of the old-school hops, they used Oregon-grown Lorien, the new lager variety from Indie Hops. They do a single 60-minute addition “and that’s it.” They were committed to using Northwest ingredients and would like to bring Douglas to Oregon, so working with Indie Hops appealed to them. “They’re a ragtag group, like us.”
Finally, they ferment with the Imperial Pilgrimage yeast strain, which is the one from Andechs. The beer finishes out at 4.7% and is easy to drink.
Neither Chris nor John mentioned this, but my sense is that they’re hoping Douglas will impress lager fans with advanced palates, not just the casual Coors Light fan. “It’s like getting people into drinking something like a German helles, but not so much that it will turn off fans of Rainier and PBR,” John said. I will be curious to talk to brewers and see if this is how it lands with them. For my money, it drinks more like a domestic lager than a helles, but it is on the flavor-forward side of the domestic lager spectrum. If you’re the kind of person who knows what a helles is and recognizes it in this beer, I suppose that’s a wink from John, but for everyone else, it’ll just taste like a regular beer.
A Strange Kind of Romance
Lowercase isn’t the only brewery making a throwback domestic lager. Beers like Kalamazoo’s Finest, Peoples Beer, Garage Beer, and Old Time are other entrants into this field. Portlanders may have seen Yovu Beer on tap in dive bars around town; owner/brewer Nate Yovu has been pursuing a similar vision to bring locally-made lager back to neighborhood bars at rock-bottom prices (I recently had a $4 pint). And of course, there’s the contract-brewed behemoth, Montucky Cold Snacks, which was so successful Gallo recently invested in the company. What makes Douglas stand out is that it’s not just a gambit to turn nostalgia into dollars. It’s an attempt to offer customers a high quality beer at a low price while carrying the torch for a kind of beer that just isn’t made locally anymore.
“Douglas Lager is a macro beer with a craft soul.”
This isn’t John and Chris’ first experiment with throwback lagers, either. Five years ago, a startup approached lowercase to make a product they called Seattle Lite. Like Douglas, it was a no-frills light lager, and it was even packaged in a throwback stubby bottle. The idea behind it seemed simple, Chris said. “You know what would crush? A low-alcohol light lager in 11-ounce stubbies.” It created immediate buzz and sold well out of the gate. At Lowercase, that made an impression. “That was really the beginning of this thing—seeing the product perform.”
Douglas emerged out of this experience as a more ambitious project. Chris and John want to establish the beer as a regional brand with serious capacity—maybe not the reach of Rainier back in its heyday, but not a boutique retro beer to service nostalgia, either. In order to make Douglas price competitive, they knew they couldn’t produce it on their 15-barrel system. They ended up finding a facility to brew it, and an auspicious one at that. Seven Seas had taken over and later resurrected another of those old brands in Tacoma: Heidelberg. With a large brewhouse and 80,000 square feet of space, they can manage up produce up to 50,000 barrels of Douglas, if it were to grow to that size.
They found another piece of Northwest history when they picked up a bottling line from the defunct Fish Brewing that had once belonged to Olympia. They got the line for free—sort of. “We had to raise a bunch of money just to install it,” Chris said. The parts on their bottling line are 35-50 years old, and consequently they’re fussy. But it all seems very on-brand for what they’re trying to achieve with Douglas, by connecting it to this older regional brewing lineage. It also sets the beer apart, and the early response has been positive. “People loved the bottles,” Chris said, reporting that they told him “Oh my god, nobody bottles any more! That is so cool!”
Will it pencil out? The pricing is going to be very competitive. They are benchmarking their prices to come in close to domestics, or “just a shade above Rainier,” Chris said. “If Rainier comes in at a dollar, we want to be a dollar ten.” At the moment, they’re more committed to getting Douglas into drinkers’ hands and building an audience on the premise that Northwesterners will support local. It is a hypothetical proposition at the moment. “Do young people actually care that this is locally made out of local ingredients?” Chris asked. “We don’t know.”
“It is a long-term plan,” John said. “We don’t need profitability now—but we do need to break even.” The turn to draft may help out. When they had to scramble to get kegs on line, Seven Seas couldn’t help them, so they turned to Talking Cedar. That has expanded their footprint, and will allow them to grow. “We are in select bars, bottle shops and restaurants from Bellingham down to Olympia,” John reported when I emailed yesterday. “We're currently solidifying some distribution in Eastern Washington and Southern Washington with the eventual goal of distributing to all of Cascadia.”
It is a cool beer and a fun project. I hope to be seeing more of Douglas in the coming months and years—especially here south of the Columbia River.