Fred Bowman Oral History Interview, March 11, 2015

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay. Go ahead.

FRED BOWMAN: My name is Fred Bowman. I was born in August of 1944. We are at my home in, well, it's got a Portland address, but it's actually Cedar Mill.

TEM: How long have you lived here?

FB: About 7 years.

TEM: Were you born in Portland?

FB: No. I was born in San Francisco. I don't really claim to have ever lived in California because I was less than 2 years old when we left there and went to Montana where my father was from. My father was stationed in San Francisco during World War II, and that's where he met my mother. She was there working as a secretary in an Army hospital where I was born. Then we moved to Oregon, I think in about 1950 or '51, somewhere in there.

TEM: Do you remember living in Montana?

FB: My earliest memories are from Montana, but they're sort of sketchy memories, you know. They're little things you wondered why you remember that. But here's this thing that's there somewhere in the memory bank, and why would I remember that as opposed to something that would seem more important. Like, I remember what the color scheme of our house was. It had orange trim on it, and when I took a long road trip some 2 years ago, went all the way around the country, on my way home I came through Montana and found, I think, that house. But it looks different.

TEM: Yeah.

FB: It's right on the edge of a lake, so I'm pretty sure it was the same house.

TEM: Did you go to any grades of school there? Or were you, I'm doing the math in my head.

FB: No. I started school in Empire, Oregon, which is a little town that no longer exists. It's become a part of Coos Bay.

TEM: Were you there for a year?

FB: In Empire?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

FB: I went through the first grade and half of the second grade and then we temporarily moved to Montana where I finished the second half of the second grade. Then we came to Hillsboro and I finished, graduated from high school in Hillsboro.

TEM: How did you feel about moving in those first few years of school? Were you, was it a challenging thing or were you a kid, so you rolled with it?

FB: I was a kid, obviously, and I think I probably had some uncomfortable feelings about leaving friends that I had and things like that. But I used to go back and spend all of my summers with my grandparents in Montana. I did that until high school.

TEM: What were you interested in when you were a little kid?

FB: I was interested in living things. Other kids collected stamps and coins. I 00:03:00collected insects. I haven't changed much about that. I'm volunteering for an organization tonight that helps frogs get across Highway 30. We've been doing that for a month or so now, because they have to migrate down to breeding ponds near the Columbia River and they live in Forest Park, and that's pretty treacherous for a frog to get across Highway 30.

TEM: Yeah. Was that something that you were interested in academically as well when you were in middle school or high school?

FB: Yeah. I was pretty good in biology courses in school and in college. I 00:04:00wasn't a very good student and didn't do very well in the courses that might have allowed me to go into it, a science career, actually. But I think that, and I've said this a lot of times before, there's a biological aspect brewing, of course, and I think that I was interested in brewing partly because I liked beer, partly because of the biological aspect of it, partly because there's a kind of an artsy thing to it. So, it had a lot of appeal to me. The mechanical end of it too did, because I have always been a tinkerer. I fix things and try to invent things sometimes. I'm a car nut. I got interested in that at some point, too. So, it all comes together. There's all of those things are involved 00:05:00in having a brewery. I think that was why it was attractive to me.

TEM: Were you tinkering... I'm thinking about being 16, 17 years old, able to operate your own vehicle on your own. Were you tinkering and messing around with things when you were in high school, too?

FB: Yeah. I bought my first car when I was 16, between my junior year and my senior year of high school, and it was an old English car, an MG. It had a broken transmission. I bought it that way. The first thing I tried to fix on the car was the transmission. It wasn't successful [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: But, anyway, I still... then I ended up with a career, my first career in 00:06:00the automotive industry, too. I worked for the Volkswagen distributor, Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi when they had a distribution here for the entire northwest. I sort of went to work there thinking it was going to be a temporary job, and I was there for 16 years. Then left and started working on the brewery.

TEM: What was it like, backtracking to being in Portland, what year did you graduate high school?

FB: '62.

TEM: So, what was it like being a young adult in Portland in the early '60s, mid '60s? Things that stand out in your memory?

FB: Well, I lived in Hillsboro. Portland was a long-distance phone call from 00:07:00Hillsboro for many of those years. It wasn't very quick to get there, but it was kind of a big thing to go into downtown. It was pretty important when you were in high school in those days to have a car, you know, socially. My mother didn't drive. My parents were divorced when I was 10. My father moved to Salem. My mother had her driver's license in Montana, but she never got an Oregon license, so we didn't have a car in the family. So, dating was sort of complicated [laughs]. I understand that having a car is not so important to kids nowadays because they have cell phones and things like that that gives them some privacy. 00:08:00I don't know how that would make the difference, but I guess it does.

TEM: Yeah, the different thinking about mobility, so where you are, what's the distance between the two cities... 20 miles?

FB: Oh, between Hillsboro and Portland? It's about 15, I think, if I remember correctly. Well, it's probably closer together now because the borders of both have gotten closer together.

TEM: Yeah. So, how often did you go into Portland? Was it once a month?

FB: Well, when I was in high school I went once a week, because I was taking trumpet lessons from the fella who was the first chair trumpet with the Portland 00:09:00symphony, so I had to go in for trumpet lessons every week. I took the bus in, you know, for most of that time.

TEM: That's so... did you entertain a career as a musician as a possibility?

FB: No. I don't remember ever thinking that I might be a professional musician. I had a friend who was truly a musician. In fact, he's the guy that got me started on brewing. There's a picture of him there with Dave Frishberg. There's a picture of him over there, and that little picture of him over there on the left up there is a picture of both of us when we were probably both about 9 years old.

TEM: Oh, cool! So, you had a, I don't know, not a reality check, but the person taking lessons, the person who was on the trajectory for professional musicianship.

FB: I guess, yeah. Jim was not very serious about anything, but he was a natural talent. So, he was a wonderful musician. He was a jazz guy and I wanted, that's what I wanted to do. That's what I wanted to be, but I didn't seem to have it. I got to be a decent trumpet player, but I never considered myself a musician. I mean, I was the first chair in our high school band, and went on to be in 2 college bands and then the Army Reserve band. I haven't played since I got out of the Army Reserve in '72. I think about it, sometimes, but I don't even have a 00:11:00trumpet anymore.

TEM: So, you graduate from high school. What did you think career prospects or what did you want to do at that point? Did you have ideas?

FB: I think I was sort of adrift, honestly. I wasn't ready. I didn't feel like I was ready to choose a career yet. In those days, I think the attitude's different now, but in those days I think you felt like you were supposed to choose a career when you get out of high school and then you start working towards that. If I had it to do all over again, I would have just gotten a degree and, you know, never mind what I was going to use it for. That maybe, well, I shouldn't say maybe, I'm about 100% sure, that I decided not to go to 00:12:00college right away. I had 2 friends and I took off and went to Europe. I think that had an effect on the career that I ultimately ended up with with the brewery because, first of all, when I was living at home my mother, in spite of the fact that my father was a pretty unpleasant person when he had been drinking, which he did a lot, and my mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, but she had a very European attitude towards beverage alcohol. She told me I could have whatever I wanted, but she didn't want me drinking any place but at home. So, I was trying beers and wines and things like that at home, and, of course, when my 2 friends and I took off on this trip, we drove across the country and we boarded, we had booked passage on a German freighter 00:13:00in Norfolk, Virginia, that was taking coal to Dublin. We had beers on the boat, but my first legal drink on land was a pint of Guinness, because we walked away from the dock and, of course, wandered into the first pub we came to in Dublin, and I was staring into a pint of Guinness, and a few days later looking for things to do in Dublin, we went to the Guinness brewery and took a tour of the brewery. So, that was the first brewery I ever experienced, too.

TEM: Not a bad one to start with.

FB: No. No. And Guinness, to this day, is my favorite light beer. People laugh when you say that, but it truly is. It's very low alcohol and about the same calories and alcohol as a Bud Light, you know, except it's got a lot more flavor. Then, of course, we experienced all kinds of beverages during the 8 00:14:00months that I was over there.

TEM: Did you, now, am I remembering that your uncle lived there?

FB: Yes. I had an uncle that was stationed in High Wycombe, in the American Air Force.

TEM: Okay, that's right.

FB: High Wycombe was an interesting place because I was an Air Force Base, but it had no air strip. It was a command center. It was a strategic Air Command base in those days and during World War II, it was the command headquarters of the Eight Air Force, which, and my uncle let us look at the underground command center where the air support for the Normandy Invasion was directed. I ran into something like that again on my more recent journey around the United States 00:15:00when I stopped at the Eighth Air Force Museum in Savannah, and they had an exhibit there about the base in High Wycombe. It hadn't occurred to me that it was the Eight Air Force in World War II that became Strategic Air Command. That was interesting, and it was fun being there with my uncle because unlike a lot of people in the service, he had his whole family over there and he was completely involved. I mean a lot of the Air Force people that I met when I was there never got off the base, really. My uncle, Roy, had British friends and he lived off the base and was completely involved in the local culture, so it was fun being there with him. He ended up with two tourism duties in England in different places. He was in York the following time he went over there, two 00:16:00English godchildren. So, it was really fun.

TEM: So, you didn't obviously, immediately go to your uncle's place. So, what were the travels around Europe like? What were you guys curious about?

FB: Well, we went there pretty early. We did spend most of the week in Dublin when we arrived there. When we arrived it was February. It was pretty chilly. I think we spent about, we found, went to England, found my uncle, spent about a week there, I think, and decided we were traveling light, so we didn't have the right clothing and everything to be in the northern part of Europe at the time, so we decided to go south as quick as possible. So, we took-I left some stuff 00:17:00with him that I brought with me. I left enough money with him to get a plane ticket home. We headed for the continent, and we took the train down to Dover, went across to Calais, and then we went directly to Paris and spent 3 days in Paris. The weather was beautiful there then. But we were headed steadily further south, so we went on the train, second or third-class trains, down to Spain and we spent a month in Spain. One of my friends was fluent in Spanish, and so he decided to stay in Spain, and the other 2 of us went on. We bought bicycles in 00:18:00Spain. They were very cheap. Spain was very cheap in those days. That was my introduction to cuisine, too, because you could have a 5 or 7-course meal in a restaurant with wine for the equivalent of like a dollar and a quarter. That allowed for all sorts of experimentation. We had another contact there who was the uncle of one of our high school classmates who was living in Madrid. He worked at the, I think he worked at the Air Base or something, but he was a civilian, but he also was really immersed in the local culture and history and everything, very interesting guy. He taught us adequate, you know, things you 00:19:00don't do in a restaurant. You don't cut your bread with a knife, you break it. You conversely, always use a knife to peel your orange, and things like that. When you leave the room you go around and say goodbye to everyone.

He was living in an interesting neighborhood. The buildings there were ancient, you know. So many of the buildings in Madrid were from the 15th or 16th century. There were these old wooden staircases. They were very thick wood, but they were worn halfway through. One of the most wonderful memories I have of that area is when, I mean, everything happens late in Spain. I don't know whether it's still that way. I haven't been back to Spain since then, but you don't have dinner until 9:00 or 10:00 at night, and then you go have an after dinner liquor and 00:20:00some coffee and when you come back to your pensión, which is where we were staying, they're always upstairs from a retail operation down below. So, you come back and the outside door is locked. There's a bar, sort of, over it. You don't have a key for it. So, you come back and you stand there in the street and you clap your hands. I have no idea whether this still exists or not, but I thought it was so cool then, because you clap your hands and pretty soon you hear keys jiggling and a man they called the serrano would come down the street and open the gate for you and you'd tip him a paseta.

TEM: So, he had keys to different gates.

FB: Yeah, he had a big ring of keys for all the houses or buildings in the neighborhood. So, that was great. Spain was, and things like that I find so 00:21:00romantic. I remember, like I said, we spent a month in Spain and traveled all around and just loved it. I got my first haircut after leaving home from a barber in Seville [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs]. So, what are some of the things that you took back, whether it was inspirational things that you tasted or culturally things that you wanted to bring back with you or that you see reflected in the work that you did later? What are some of those memories of tastes or processes?

FB: Well, I think food and beverages. My mother was not a very imaginative cook. She fed us well, but it was meat and potatoes, '50s type food. The vegetables were absolutely cooked to death. I think the experience of, and I already mentioned that in Spain because it was so inexpensive for us to experience everything. That was my first experience of food as an adventure, really. I 00:22:00still savor that. When you go someplace to travel, I like to experience the local food. You wouldn't find me at McDonald's. You wouldn't generally find me there here, either.

TEM: Did your second friend stay with you through the rest of the trip?

FB: Not quite. We were together, we left Spain. We bought, I think I mentioned, 00:23:00bought bicycles in Spain. We cycled across the southern part of France, sleeping along the road. We had determined early on that our time was not really limited but we had limited funds, so Arthur Frommer's book in those days was Europe on $50 a day and I think we were doing it on about $5. So, we cycled across France and we'd stay along the road in whatever shelter we could find. We didn't eat in restaurants very much. We'd go by bread and cheese and salami and things like that and always some wine and lived fairly humbly, but really enjoyed all of it. We got to Northern Italy and it was getting pretty mountainous so we put the 00:24:00bikes on a train and sent them to Milan expecting them to be stored in the train station and we'd pick them up on our way north. We ended up going further south than we thought we were going to, I think because we were in Rome. We were hitchhiking by this time. We would put the bikes on the train. We started hitch hiking, which we'd never done before. We felt sort of silly about it. But, it worked out well for us. We had flags on our backpacks and people would pick us up sometimes because they wanted to practice their English.

We had an interesting experience with, I don't know whether this would happen now, but we were in Northern Italy walking along and someone sitting on a 00:25:00porch-most of the people you see traveling the way we were traveling in those days were probably from Germany. This fella says, hey, Tedesco. That was the German... what the Italians called the Germans. I'm not sure what that means, whether it transfers directly or not, or translates. Hey, Tedesco. We said, no, Americano. Hey, Americano [in Italian accent]. It was a completely different attitude, so it was good. But, anyway, so, we were in Rome, and I, being a car geek I went out and bought a British car magazine, Motor Sport. I'm looking 00:26:00through this magazine and we were in an inexpensive room in Rome, and I'm looking at a calendar, and I said, hey, Curt. The Targa Florio is next week. We should go. The Targa Florio-that poster is from the Targa Florio. It's a race that they had beginning in 1908, and went on until '67, I think, around 44 miles of road on the island of Sicily. It was a very important international race, and so I thought, wouldn't it be fun to do that? We packed up everything, got back on the road, and hitchhiked down to the Strait of Messina and took the boat across and we were in Sicily, and we went to Targa Florio.

TEM: And that's the one you went to see, the '63?

FB: Yeah. In fact, that poster came off the-after the race, came off of 00:27:00something at the train station, I think, or near there, and I folded it up. If you look closely, you can see the fold marks in it.

TEM: You did a good job.

FB: I didn't get it framed until about 10 years ago, actually. I have great memories of being there for that, so then we didn't go back directly across. We decided to take a shortcut, so we went to Palermo to Naples, and then we went out to Pompeii. When we were wandering around Pompeii we ran into some guys from California who were traveling in a 1952 Volkswagen van that they bought at a police auction in the Netherlands, and they said why don't you come with us? So, we traveled with them to Switzerland, and... no. No. We were some place in northern Italy and we had a high school classmate and an exchange student from Switzerland. We had another group of people from our high school who were visiting this young woman in Switzerland. My friend Curt decided to go directly 00:28:00and catch up with them. Well, the two guys from California were headed to Monte Carlo for the Formula 1 Race in Monaco. There wasn't any question about where I was going, so I went on to Monaco, and then I caught up with Curt again in Switzerland, and then we'd parted again because he was headed... he had a little more money than I did. He was headed further east. We was going to go to Berlin. 00:29:00Then he was going to go up north to Scandinavia, because he had some Norwegian relatives. If I remember correctly, I left Switzerland with the equivalent of about $6 in my pocket not knowing how much it was going to cost me to get across the English Channel to get back to my uncle's place, but somehow I managed it. No. I think actually what happened was I arrived at his place with the equivalent of $6 and I did have enough money to get the ferry across from, I left from Belgium, Ostend, Belgium, back to Dover. Then I spent another month in England before I came home. I had enrolled at OSU, so I got home in time to start school.

TEM: What was your course of study at OSU?

FB: Well, I went there because I was thinking about going into veterinary 00:30:00medicine. Then I guess I decided that was going to be too difficult. While I was there, I was interested in photography. I took a photo journalism course, and I got really interested in that. I thought maybe I'm going to be a journalist, so the following year I transferred to the University of Oregon. I went there a year and then I transferred to Portland State because I was running low on funds again. I worked during the summer and I could work on weekends, so I went to Portland State for a year, but I never graduated.

TEM: So you were at OSU in '65?

FB: '64.

TEM: '64.

FB: Yeah.

TEM: Then U of O, '65; Portland State '66.

FB: Yeah.

TEM: So, were you living in Portland when you moved back up here to go to school, or did you commute?

FB: When I moved back up here to go to school I went back to my mother's house in Hillsboro.

TEM: So, how had Portland changed in that 4 or 5 years?

FB: I don't remember that it had changed a lot. Maybe it did and I'm not registering it. It's certainly changed a lot since then.

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: You know, when I left to go to Europe, a lot of things I found that I loved over there, like espresso and good wine and cheese, things like that, good bread, you couldn't get that here, and beer. You know, beer with any variety of beer. Now, it's all here.

TEM: Were there imports? Did you?

FB: Yes.

TEM: Readily accessible, or?

FB: Of course, when I came back from Europe I wasn't old enough to buy any.

TEM: Oh, that's right [laughs].

FB: I actually got a Christmas card, I'd signed the guest book at Guinness and they sent me a Christmas card saying they hoped I was having no trouble finding a supply of their product wherever I was, and I kind of grumbled because I wasn't old enough to buy it yet.

TEM: So, what did you do, did you go to the VW processing... that's not what it was called... distribution center immediately after PSU?

FB: Yes. I had a student deferment, and I thought I wanted to take a break from 00:33:00school, but that would have meant probably getting drafted, so I enlisted in the Army Reserve. I got into the band. It was 104th Division Band over in Vancouver. I was supposed to go on active duty in 3 months. Well, the training centers were full of people that were getting ready to go to Vietnam at the time, and so month after month went on and I said, you know, I can't just sit on my hands. I'm going to have to go get a job of some kind. So, I just thought, well, I'll go find a temporary job doing something I like. So, I applied at the zoo and I applied, I can't remember where else, but I applied at the Volkswagen distributer. I got a job there, and it was a very menial job. I was working in 00:34:00the warehouse and kind of cleaning up, dusting shelves, putting things in the incinerator, things like that. They had an incinerator. I was there for, I don't know, 6 months or something like that. Still wasn't on active duty. Now, when you went to get a job in those days, of course, they ask what your military status was because they didn't want to hire somebody and have them get drafted and go off. So, I was able to say that I was in the Reserve. It wasn't entirely dishonest, because there was a possibility that I wasn't going to get called to active duty, because they were giving us training on weekends and summer camp. One year I did that.

So, I got the job and I was working in the warehouse one day and I'm thinking, boy this is kind of a nothing job. Maybe I should see if I can find something else. The HR manager called and wanted to talk to me, and I went up to his office and I'm thinking, oh, so I won't have to quit. They're going to fire me. But they offered me another job working in the warrantee department. I thought, well, this is cool. It was a much more interesting job. I was inspecting parts to see whether they were actually defective or not. So, this appealed to my mechanical abilities, and so it turned out I think what happened was I got offered the job because I was the only one in the warehouse that wouldn't have had to take a cut in pay to do this job. But, anyway, I liked it, and you know I 00:36:00went on, it went on for a year and a half. I was working there, and I went to a Sunday drill in Vancouver one Sunday. There was another guy and I. We were standing there in formation, and the sergeant said, oh, Bowman. You and Sliger, we've got orders for you. You're to report to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, tomorrow for basic training [laughs]. So, I had to call my boss that night, tell him I wasn't going to be at work on Monday. In fact, I wouldn't be back for 6 months. I sold a motorcycle I had to a friend of mine from the airport. I had to move out of a-Jim and I were living in a rented house up in the heights in Portland. I had to move out of my house, move all my stuff back to my mother's, 00:37:00and I was off to El Paso. Riviera Motors was the name of the company that was the Volkswagen distributor. They had a retain operation, too, but they had a wholesale distribution warehouse and that's where I worked. They kept my job for me, gave it back to me when I came back, and they sent me my vacation pay while I was gone, and I ended up working there for 16 years. Then what happened was that the company basically closed down. The factories, it was one of the last independent distributors in the United States. So, I thought, well, I need to 00:38:00find something else to do. I'd gotten involved with and I knew about the one brewery that had started up and stopped and someone sent me, I'd been home brewing by this time.

TEM: That's what I was... that was going to be my... when did you start?

FB: I started home brewing about '79, '80. This was happening with my job and in about '81, '82... '82, I think. By this time, somebody had sent me, and I looked for it, too, somewhere around here I got a copy of The Weekly, which was Seattle's version of Willamette Week, basically. There as an article in it-somebody had sent it to me, because they knew I was interested in beer, about 00:39:003 breweries that had started, two in Washington and 1 in British Columbia, little breweries. This kind of got us thinking. Art Lawrence, who had been a high school classmate as well as Jim, he was, Jim and I had been home brewing and he'd come over once in a while and help us drink our beer. So, I'd been a little bit involved on the fringe of the wine boom, because my then wife was working with a woman whose husband was Cameron Nagel, and Cameron had started a newsletter called The Oregon Wine Review, which ultimately grew into a magazine, which was called The Northwest Palette. We were on a taste panel for Cameron, and so I was getting to taste a lot of wines and things and knew about the, what 00:40:00was going on with the wineries. I looked at this article and thought, gee, I wonder if this is something that's going to happen with beer? The more we talked about it, the more serious it became. Art said, well, we can do this, you know? I said, well, it's not that simple. I need to get some education. You know, we can make beer, like at home, but it has to be more consistent. It's a fairly complicated business, but looked into it more and more, and I said that either I have to get educated. We have to hire somebody that knows what to do, or maybe we can get a consulting agreement or something with somebody that's already doing it. So, one of the breweries that had started up was Yakama Brewing Company started by a guy named Bert Grant. Bert had a long history in the beer 00:41:00business and in the hop business, too. We went up to talk to Bert and got a consulting agreement with it and he had thought it over, and he had a tiny little brewhouse. He was selling most of his beer in Seattle and really didn't have enough production to sell in Portland, but he offered us a license agreement. So, we thought, well, this is kind of cool. We can start off with a small market already. I think we were in the planning stages of the 3 before either Widmer or Ponzi and BridgePort got going, but through some, I guess we were the only ones that didn't have any money, so we had to find a way to finance it. By the time we got that we were the third one to get started. But it actually made it easier, I think, to grow when there were 3 people out doing 00:42:00this, knocking on doors, saying we have locally produced beer rather than just one, because then it was a movement not just [THE laughs] one crazy...

TEM: What about equipment, did you-so, backtracking to homebrewing. Was there like equipment, ingredients, supplies, that kind of thing? Did you feel like it was easy to come by? Or, if you knew where to look was it easy to come by?

FB: Well, homebrewing equipment was easy, because it's not very complicated. We had a homebrew shop in Portland that was quite complete and quite good. There were two of them, actually, in those days, but we ended up with F.H. Steinbart Company, which still exists, a very old company. Something that happened in 1979 made a difference, I think, for everyone, and that is homebrewing became legal. 00:43:00A lot of people don't realize this, but before '79 it wasn't legal. The law wasn't really enforced. You could make wine. I guess, because the religious part of it or something, but making beer at home was illegal. But they didn't enforce the law, but when it actually became legal the materials and the information needed were a lot more available. So, it was a lot easier to make good beer at home, and so I became a good customer of Steinbart's for making beer at home. But that part of it, the homebrewing equipment... well, here's a little book. When we started getting serious about this, this, Bill Owen started a brewery in California, actually, and he's kind of an eccentric fella, but he had this 00:44:00little instruction on how to make an actual brewery out of junk, basically using a cooler to build a mash tun and running copper tubing around in the bottom of it with slits cut in it. So, we started doing that. Made this little pilot brewery and we were making, when we started out we were buying the mash from Steinbart's. Sometimes we were using malt extract so that the actually brewing part of it making, starting with just grain, was not done. So, we started doing that, and now we've really got a brewery. It's a brewery that produces about 1 barrel of beer, you know, per batch. It takes the same amount of time to make 1 00:45:00barrel of beer that it does to make 5,000 barrels of beer, depending on the equipment you have. It would take a day to produce the work. Then 2, 3, 4 weeks of fermentation and you had finished beer. As far as brewing equipment in those days, it was a lot more challenging than it is now because nobody was in the business of manufacturing equipment for small breweries. I can't remember the name of the company... it'll come to me. But anyway, what you were faced with was modifying things that were made for other purposes into brewing equipment, 00:46:00and a lot of it was dairy stuff. You could get stuff from a dairy and the sanitation that occurs in a brewery is the same as in a dairy. A lot of that stuff was usable, was useful, and a lot of it was available for not a lot of money. So, that was where almost everybody started until people actually started to make things.

UNIDENTIFIED: Would you like coffee?

TEM: Sure.

FB: Thanks.

TEM: Thank you. So, stylistically, what were you interested in making?

FB: Well, the beers that I had made at home were all sort of medium-bodied, 00:47:00copper ales and stouts. Those are going to be the first thing that you do in a small brewery anyway, because making logger beer takes more time. So, nobody did that to begin with because you tie up your equipment for longer, and there are some other tricks to it. It's a more difficult beer to make, really, than ale. So, everybody was making ale in the early days. Then we had this agreement with Bert Grant in Yakima, and we liked his beer. Redhook had started about two weeks before Grant's, Redhook in Seattle. So, there were the two of those and Sierra Nevada was around then, too. I had actually gone down and talked to Ken Grossman at Sierra Nevada in 1982 about consulting and he was agreeable to that. We 00:48:00decided on Bert mainly because of geography, because it was not that difficult for me to go up and spend some time in Yakima working in the brewery and getting some experience. Sierra Nevada was using converted dairy equipment at the time, too, and they were in an old metal building outside of Chico.

UNIDENTIFIED: You forgot your scones, honey.

FB: Thanks. I forgot, well...

UNIDENTIFIED: You totally forgot about it.

TEM: Okay. So, the ability to, proximity, being able to go to Yakima was appealing.

FB: Oh, yeah. So, that was our choice as far as instead of going to Sierra Nevada. I actually, as I mentioned, we put together consulting agreement. Bert called afterwards and offered us a licensing agreement because he wasn't able to 00:49:00supply beer to Portland, really. So, we started off with that, started doing 2 of his produces under license.

TEM: What's the difference between... so, he would be your, like you would consult with him about how to set up a brewery and then a licensing agreement would be you make his recipe?

FB: The license agreement was allowing us to produce his beer, yeah. We did that for 3 months before we launched our own brand, which was Portland Ale. We did that concurrent with the opening of our little pub, which was right there were the Rogue Brewery is now, except originally when we went in there we only had half of that building.

TEM: What are the cross streets there?

FB: 14th and Flanders. There was a restaurant on the corner called Bogart's, and 00:50:00we occupied part of the building that had been an architectural sign company, but the entire building in 1929 was the Holly Dairy. Because of that, the building had floor drains in it already, which was amazing. It had, I mean, we thought it was absolutely, I thought it was absolutely ideal at the time because it was about the right size, which was wrong. We outgrew it very quickly, but it had 3 floors over a fairly small footprint. So, it allowed a very traditional layout for a brewery, where you have a lot of things done by gravity. Your materials are stored up on the top floor and you have 3 gravity steps before you get down to the bottom floor and you don't have to rely on pumps and things like that. It's actually better for the product if you don't have to pump and convey 00:51:00it. It had floor grades in it. When I went to visit Sierra Nevada in '82, and Ken was, he hadn't been in operation that long, but he was generous enough to spend most of an afternoon with me, really, which was amazing. I said, what do you look for in a building. Without any hesitation he said, floor drains [TEM laughs]. You got to be able to wash it all down. So, when I found this building, I thought it was great. So, we had the building for about a year and a half paying rent on it until we got our financing together. The pub part of it-when we started this operation, it wasn't legal to have a brew pub in Oregon. The 00:52:00group of us, the Widmers, the Ponzis (BridgePort), the Widmers, and the McMenamins all got together and had a bill drawn up, and we went down to Salem and lobbied for the right to sell our own beer, basically, because it wasn't legal. You could have a tasting room and give away all the beer you wanted, but you couldn't charge for it. That worked okay for Blitz-Weinhard, because that was a small part of their operation. It didn't work very well for us, and basically we said we just wanted the same privilege the wineries had, because the wineries could sell their product on premise, and breweries couldn't.

The other thing we had going for us is by this time they had passed brewpub legislation in Washington. So, you could demonstrate this wasn't going to be the 00:53:00end of the world for anybody. It was going to be the beginning of something, and we were successful in getting it passed, but when we started running the building we didn't know whether it was going to be legal. We knew we had a space for a tasting room there, but it was about 20'x 20'. It was a tiny little pub when we first got opened. I remember that when we had our LCC inspector come by, I knew what the rules were with having a place where you could have minors. You have to have a certain amount of food service. There was a restriction on the size of tables. You couldn't have a bar in the same room. Well, I said we can't 00:54:00really have just the taps out there in the middle. We got to have something, so I had something that looked like that, actually. But it was open underneath. I called it a serving counter. The inspector came and looked at it with a furrowed brow and he said, you know, I just don't think we can have kids in here. It just doesn't meet the requirements. I said, look, I said, we think this thing is going to have a certain amount of attraction to tourists. We don't want people to have to leave their kids out on the sidewalk to come in here. I said, it's too bad you don't have a qualification that says minors-

UNIDENTIFIED: Bye, honey.

FB: Oh.

UNIDENTIFIED: It's not to have met you.

TEM: It's nice to meet you, too.

FB: See you later.

UNIDENTIFIED: Cheese, eggs, and green onions.

FB: Cheese, eggs, and green onions.

UNIDENTIFIED: Yeah.

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: Okay. I think we're having quiche tonight.

UNIDENTIFIED: No, not without those three things we're not [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: She and I were high school classmates. We didn't connect until about 10 years ago, reconnect I should say. We dated when we were both at Oregon State, and then we both transferred to Oregon and didn't see each other again for 16 years or something like that [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: Anyway..

TEM: That's because the world is this big.

FB: That was just an aside. So, I said it's too bad you don't have a qualification that says minors are only allowed in the company of their parents, because that's all I'm asking for. This is not the kind of place that'll appeal to teenagers. We're not going to play their kind of music and you know. He said, 00:56:00well, we don't have that qualification but he says, if you want to put that on the door, he said, I'll okay the whole thing. I must have been extraordinarily lucky in just having an inspector that had enough experience and confidence in his job that he could make that decision. Now they do have that qualification, but they didn't have it then.

TEM: So, were you planning on serving food? Was there a relationship with...

FB: We had a kitchen. I mentioned that the place was 20'x 20'. What we had for a kitchen was about 6' x 6', so you could put together some sandwiches in there, that sort of thing, and that's about what we did.

TEM: So, what was the neighborhood like when you moved in?

FB: Well, this was the Pearl District. Do you know why it was called the Pearl District?

TEM: Hmm-mm.

FB: The fella who called it that, if I remember this correctly, said this is 00:57:00like a bunch of oysters. They're really ugly outside, but they're going to produce something beautiful. It was an area that was a lot of old warehouse buildings. They were no longer practical as warehouses, because warehousing isn't done that way anymore. Warehousing now is pallet racks and you could move around with a forklift and things like that. These were 3 or 4-story buildings, brick, in that neighborhood that had not too attractive exteriors and inside they weren't practical as warehouses, because in order to access the other floors, everything had to go up and down an elevator. So, it was, there were a couple of respectable businesses a block over on Glisan Street. A lot of the 00:58:00buildings were sort of semi-abandoned, and it hadn't really, it was an important warehouse district at one time because there were railroad tracks that came through there and there were freight trains that came through there, and that was the way goods were hauled. But, I think the tracks were abandoned. It was just, you know, kind of not a very nice area. It had a big advantage for us, though, and the reason why Portland Brewing, Widmer, and BridgePort all started in the same neighborhood was the same. There was already a brewery there and it didn't require a conditional use permit, because Blitz-Weinhard was already there. It was the only zone in Portland where you could put a brewery without a conditional use permit, so the zoning was favorable. It worked out in our favor in other ways, too. I already mentioned the advantage of having 3 people, three 00:59:00companies starting up at the same time. It was handy because when one of us would run low on some supply or something, oftentimes we could go down the street and borrow whatever we needed from the other guy. Those were interesting days.

TEM: Did you start to... so, I'm thinking about foot traffic. Was there an equivalent to a brewery tour? Did people know that you could go to a brewery, get a sandwich, walk down the street to another brewery, drink some more? Was there that kind of street culture or beer, not tourism, but visiting?

FB: I think there might have been. I don't remember specifically anything like 01:00:00that, but I mean it wasn't exactly scenic and a pleasant neighborhood to walk in at the time. We were in probably the best location, because we were just a little closer to Burnside, and closer to Blitz-Weinhard, too. Do you remember the humor writer Dave Barry?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

FB: Well, I was a fan of his. They used to print his column in The Oregonian all the time. I went by Powell's down there one day and they had on their marquee Dave Barry was going to be there at some date to talk about his new book. So, I 01:01:00wrote to him. Because he's talked about beer, too. I used to quote him all the time, because he, I still have this column that he did one time and he talked about homebrewing in this column. He said he started homebrewing because he discovered, he said, we were all drinking Barry Manilow beer here, and he discovered the rest of the world was drinking Ray Charles beer [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: So, I wrote to him and said, if you're going to be in Portland and if you'd like to visit a brewery, we're just around the corner from Powell's. Never heard anything. I walked into the pub one day and the guy managing the pub at the time 01:02:00said Dave Barry called. I said, really? He said, yeah. He's going to be here in time. He said he doesn't have time to come over for beer because he's on a book tour from hell, but if I'd like to bring some beer over to Powell's he'd like to taste it. So, anyway, so I-we didn't do bottling at the time. So, I took a soda, 2-liter soda bottle and filled it with draft beer and walked over. I'm standing in line with a group of people waiting to get in to hear him speak. He comes in and someone in the audience says, Dave, do you know we're right across the street from a large brewery? He said, no. He said, but I know there's a small brewery in the neighborhood. Is Fred here? [Laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: So, I went up and, you know, he was-not all humor writers are as entertaining as speakers, but he is. He was quite entertaining. So, anyway.

TEM: So, what about relations to that larger brewery? What was it... did you talk with the brewers that were..?

FB: Oh yeah. Yeah. No, I knew several people over there, and they were quite helpful. I mean, they didn't see us a competition or anything like that. They kind of liked what we were doing. I remember the guy who was quality control at Blitz-Weinhard was part of a tour. We had a, I think it was a Master Brewers Association meeting and people were touring the breweries in the neighborhood, and this QC guy from Blitz, I think we were at Widmer's and he raises his hand 01:04:00and he says, smart aleck, he says, the guy, whoever it was at Widmer's calls on him and he says, why does all the beers from these small breweries taste the same? He was being facetious, because we were all talking about, in those days, all the big breweries were all making the same beer, basically, you know? In fact, when the Olympia Brewery was still in operation I knew a guy that worked there. In fact, he's got a small brewery in Bend now that's very nice. His name's Larry Sidor. He's a great guy, but anyway, he was the assistant brew 01:05:00master at Olympia when I met him the first time. When they were brewing, somebody would say at Olympia would say, what are we brewing today? If the answer was hop (h-o-p), you knew it was Hamm's or Pabst. It's the same beer, until it got the label put on.

TEM: What about, so you mentioned master brewers. What was the...so the 3 companies, the 3 of you, what was the relationship to larger professional organizations? Did you feel like there was a space for you? Did you feel like it was a resource?

FB: Well, I remember that, because our relationship with Bert Grant, and he'd been in the beer business for a long time, he invited me to a master brewing meeting the first time. I think because of it I probably have the lowest 01:06:00membership number of anybody that's in the northwest that's in the business now, because the organization was all from Blitz-Weinhard, Portland, Rainier in Seattle. General Brewing, which was over in Vancouver. Olympia. I'm probably forgetting somebody, but anyway, it was all large breweries. So, I walk into this meeting and I think Carl from BridgePort was probably there at the same time, too. I think these guys were looking at us like we were some kind of insect, because you know, is this a joke? And they're all gone. We have the largest membership of any region of the Master Brewer's Association in the 01:07:00country now in the northwest.

TEM: Does that include any of California? Or, is it Washington, Oregon?

FB: No. California's different. Yeah, just Washington to Oregon, I think probably Idaho and Montana... yeah, Idaho and Montana are included, too.

TEM: Yeah.

FB: Yeah. But there's not a large brewery left in the northwest.

TEM: How was that, I'm thinking the function of professional organizations and where you all felt like you got support in, say, the first five years. Where did you draw, I mean, knowledge is one thing but also just the we're not weird?

FB: [Laughs] We're not weird.

TEM: Or, we are acceptable?

FB: Yeah.

TEM: Where did you draw that support?

FB: In the first 5 years, is that what you said?

TEM: Arbitrary number.

FB: Or two years? Yeah. Well, there wasn't a brewer's guild for a few years. There wasn't anything, and we really didn't probably fit that well with the Master Brewer's Association, which, the full name is The Master Brewers Association of the Americas, because it includes the entire hemisphere. It's Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and South America. So, it's a big organization, but there really weren't, I mean, there had been small breweries. In 1900, there were like 16 small breweries around Portland. They were all 01:09:00small, basically, but they had been gone for so many years that nothing in the equipment, nothing in the industry at the time was aimed toward what was being called microbreweries at the time, and they were micro, but they all grew. There are some microbreweries now still. New ones have come up, especially in the last 4 years or so. There's a new bloom of them in Portland. But, in those days it was so radically different from the breweries that existed, because all of the breweries that existed at the time were very large compared to what we were doing. So, it was, we didn't have a whole lot in common. But there was enthusiasm with the big guys with what we were doing. We had friends, like I 01:10:00said, at Blitz-Weinhard. You could contact somebody over there, and they'd help you with things, suggestions, etc. I think the fellow I mentioned I mentioned earlier with QC over there helped us out sometimes when we were talking about quality efforts. We at Portland Brewing Company were really, really lucky because the first guy that I hired was a microbiologist and he was a graduate of UC Davis and had, he had worked at Sierra Nevada for a summer when he was there. He was very competent. He got things really cleaned up for us really fast, so we didn't have any quality problems at all.

TEM: What was his name?

FB: His name is Frank Commanday, and I talked to him just yesterday on the phone.

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: He lives in California now, and he's involved with kombucha now. So, he's involved in making that down there.

TEM: What about the, when did the Oregon Brewers Guild start?

FB: I was afraid you were going to ask that.

TEM: I was afraid you weren't going to know [laughs].

FB: [Laughs] Uh...I'm only guessing, but that information is available easily, like everything else.

TEM: Oh, I'll Google it.

FB: Yeah, I'm going to say it must have been in the early '90s?

TEM: Yeah, so, a good, I mean a decent, you know a decade after you'd gone through those early, early growing pains for sure.

FB: Yeah. And it started with someone coming by, someone called a meeting and we were offered a State grant because, and I can't remember now what the purpose of it was, but someone came by and said this is what the wineries are doing. It's good for the State. You should have an organization. We can put together a little, sort of a seed money grant for the guild to get started. That's the way I remember it. We thought, well, that sounds like a good idea. It certainly has been a good idea.

TEM: Did you all immediately volunteer for offices, then? Was there a general, statewide enthusiasm? Thinking about professional organizations, it's not 01:13:00always, sometimes it's the few.

FB: Yeah. Well, there weren't that many of us in the room to begin with, but I think we, I think I was some kind of an officer when we started, or at least I was on the board. But, yeah.

TEM: Yeah. So, stepping back to my arbitrary 5-year, what were operations like the first 5 years?

FB: It was hard work.

TEM: Yeah.

FB: And long hours. Then eventually... of course, when we started it wasn't like there was competition, other than competition for tap handles sometimes, because 01:14:00we were all draft. Nobody was doing bottles until Full Sail started... Full Sail was the first one to bottle. We kind of thought they were crazy at the time, but they weren't, because we all had to do it. That's one of the things I think that allowed it to grow as fast as it did here, because it's a much lower barrier to entering the market if you don't have to bottle. Oregon has a large draft market, so there was enough of a market that we could survive by doing just draft beer, and then later on we had to bottle as we got, in order to make the, you know, let it grow further. But there's still a lot of small breweries now 01:15:00that don't bottle or bottle in a very limited way and don't have their own bottling line. They use a mobile bottler. That option wasn't really available to us at the time.

TEM: What about the relationship with Bert Grant? How did that geographic distance work? How did licensing work? How long did you continue to brew for him?

FB: Well, we did, like I said, we did Portland Ale. That ended up being our best seller. At one point, he decided he wanted to discontinue the relationship. My 01:16:00partner got a little bit crossways with Bert. So, he wanted to take it back, and he was building another brewery, building a larger brewery, so he didn't need us to produce his product for him anymore. So, he wanted it back. That was fine. By that time we were ready to go on our own.

TEM: What year was that?

FB: That must have been around '90, '92, somewhere in there.

TEM: You guys were still on 14th and Flanders then?

FB: In '92 we moved to the, we didn't move, but we added the large brewery on 01:17:0029th and Industrial... 31st and Industrial.

TEM: Okay, but kept some serving facilities? Or did you... was there still a Portland Brewing presence in the Pearl?

FB: In the original location?

TEM: Yeah.

FB: There was for a few years, in fact we expended it because that restaurant that was on the corner moved out. So, we increased the size of our pub there, which became a restaurant and became a management problem. If we could have owned that building, I think we could have, we probably would have kept it. But, we didn't own the building. The neighborhood was becoming gentrified. The rent was going up, as you can expect. So, we decided to let it go. That would have been about '92 also.

TEM: Style-wise, so moving into the nineties, style-wise, what did you consider? What did you see around you? Kind of snapshot in the early nineties what was it like in brewing culture in Portland?

FB: Well, it was maturing, I should say. I can't remember the date that, I mean Widmers must have moved at about that time into their new location. So, they moved from, they were at 14th and Lovejoy in a building that had been a mattress factory and now is a Key Bank. So, they moved out of that across the river to 01:19:00where they are now. BridgePort was the only one that was smart or lucky enough to start in a location where they could continue to grow. So, they're still there. I can't remember exactly, I don't remember the chronology of when both of this expansions were, or relocations took place. It was probably around the same time. Then Widmer continue to expand where they were, I mean, where they moved to. So did BridgePort. Who else stared? Of course, the McMenamins started at the beginning, too, so they continued to add locations, because their business 01:20:00model's a little bit different. Full Sail, I mentioned, came along I think in '98?

TEM: '87.

FB: You just read that, didn't you?

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: Because they were in the paper this morning?

TEM: Oh, no. A card catalogue in my head. No, I remember because the Oregon Trail opened that same year, too.

FB: Oh.

TEM: Those are the two that stick in my head.

FB: Did I say Full Sail?

TEM: Mm-hmm.

FB: They didn't start in '85.

TEM: '87.

FB: '87. Yeah. Yeah. So, they started in '87, and Deschutes must not have been 01:21:00too far after that. Well, all those dates are available.

TEM: Yeah. So, were you and Art still partners at the point that you moved to the bigger location?

FB: Yes.

TEM: How long did you guys stay in partnership together?

FB: I wouldn't say that we were partners at that point. I would say that we were part of a much larger organization.

TEM: So, administratively it gets more complicated.

FB: Yes.

TEM: You expand, adding different people, more space.

FB: Right.

TEM: More levels. So, how long did you stay within the same organization? What was the-what year did that separate?

FB: I can't remember when Art left. It was maybe '97 or '98... '96. I don't know. I'd have to look.

TEM: What about, I'm thinking of the pressures to expand. Did you feel pressures to have a larger organization or different funding models other than...?

FB: Yes, because we were an odd size. We were too small to be successful where we are, I think. At some point, our little brewery, the little brewery that could there on 14th and Flanders, we were producing beer about 20 hours a day, 7 01:23:00days a week. It was, you couldn't keep going that way for very long. But we let it get that big because we were planning to find another location and build a bigger brewery. We looked at several places around the city, but ended up there at 31st and Industrial in a building that was partly warehouse, had been a location of a restaurant. It was all in a pretty decrepit condition at the time, but seemed like a good location. We actually mistakenly acquired the building next door to us on Flanders, and thought we were going to expand into that. We 01:24:00did. We put some fermentation in it, which allowed us to grow as big as we, or to increase our production as much as we did from the little brewery on Flanders, because we didn't have enough fermentation, so we added some rather large fermentation vessels in that building next door. Then we hired an engineer to tell us how we should expand into that building, and he looked at it, built a model, thought about it for a while, came back and told us we shouldn't, which was, to his everlasting credit, was really good advice. Because as he said, 01:25:00build something this large there and how are you going to get materials in and beer out considering what's happening to this neighborhood? It would have been ridiculous.

TEM: How did your role change? So, again, the early '80s into that kind of mid '90s. Did you feel like your role in the company had changed dramatically?

FB: Yeah, quite a bit. I was still on the board of directors. I was never, or never had been a professional brewer. I served as that when we got started. Eventually we needed somebody with more credentials than what I had. I got trained to do quality control for a while and do the lab work. I kept having to more or less invent other jobs for myself as we hired professional brewers. I 01:26:00did a lot of sales work. I did HR work for a while. That was fun. Some marketing stuff, you know? All kinds of various things.

TEM: So, when did you know it was time for you to move on to the next professional stage of your life?

FB: When Pyramid acquired the company, I was, I became a consultant with Pyramid. I just figured that was probably going to be a temporary situation, but I did it for a year and a half and then somebody offered me another job and I took it, which ended up being a mistake, too. I mean, a job with another 01:27:00company. But it was an interesting experience.

TEM: Would you feel comfortable saying what that other company is?

FB: Well, it was called Sb Northwest and it was a company that imported beer and also had beer contracted for private labels, for chain stores.

TEM: Oh. Okay.

FB: So, I was instrumental in arranging some contracts in other parts of the country for them to have the beer produced in other places. They had a relationship with Portland Brewing, too, because Portland Brewing was producing some of their beer.

TEM: So, you were there for... what year did you leave Portland Brewing? What year was it acquired?

FB: '93.

TEM: Okay.

FB: No. That's not right. 2003.

TEM: Okay. I was remembering it in the 2000s. So, then what did you do next?

FB: Well, I had started doing some consulting work and continued to do that and expanded that little bit. So, pretty much where I am now.

TEM: Do you work with startup breweries? Do you go into established breweries? What's the.

FB: Yes.

TEM: Yes.

FB: The startup business I've done quite a bit of that, and that's always temporary work, because they get to a point where they don't need you anymore, which is fine. I've also had a very long relationship with Long Puck doing their government work, their federal label approvals and things like that. I've done 01:29:00some work for Rogue, project work. I have a new client now who is building a major brew pub in Tempe, Arizona. My ex son-in-law got me involved with this fellow, and that looks like it's going to be a good relationship. It has been so far.

TEM: I think I made the assumption that it was in Oregon, but you probably...

FB: Mostly it has been.

TEM: Yeah.

FB: Yeah, but it could be anyplace. Nothing has come of it, but I got fairly involved with a guy who wanted to build a brewery in Chile a couple of years ago. That sounded like it was going to be really interesting. It was a town in... I don't remember the name of it now, but there's a city in Chile that has 01:30:00a very German history, and it's very Germanic in the buildings and everything. I've seen pictures of it. So, he thought it'd be a good idea to put a brewery there. It does sound like a good idea. Then it ran to the point where he was raising funds to do this and there was an election coming up in Chile and his investors decided they should put things on hold until the election was over, and I haven't heard from him since then. I checked in with him once, and he thanked me for getting in touch. He said he wanted to keep in touch, but I don't know. It doesn't look like anything's going to happen at this point. If I do that, I'll work with the guy who became our brew master at Portland Brewing Company. He's a very experienced fellow and he's living in Japan now and working 01:31:00in China. He manages 5 Pabst breweries, which are joint ventures in China and he loves Japan, hates China. So, he lives in Japan and commutes to China. I've worked with him on another project, and would probably involve him anything like that that I would take on, too. I'm going to visit him, I think, in May. I haven't been to Japan before. I thought it'd be interesting.

TEM: And you can commute to China. Pop over.

FB: I don't think I'll do that.

TEM: [Laughs] So, when you were thinking about doing this oral history, what were the things that you wanted to share or thought that I would ask that I haven't asked?

FB: I can't think of anything. I don't know if I thought about it. I was just going to let it rip.

TEM: Let it go? [Laughs].

FB: Yeah [laughs].

TEM: Well, what about reflections? What are the things that you feel the most pride about or the things that you feel really good about your impact on the industry?

FB: You know, it's very interesting because to me, because I didn't ever think of myself as a pioneer, really, but I'm given that honor, it seems, no matter where I am. That feels good. I don't know whether I deserve it or not, because 01:33:00the guys that came before us were the true pioneers and somebody had to... I don't know whether we would have thought of doing it if the two guys in Washington and the one in British Columbia and Ken in California hadn't. Then Fritz Maytag at Anchor Steam, which is another situation altogether, because he took over a brewery that had been existing for a long time and made something out of it that it wasn't before-if it hadn't been for those whether we would have had the courage start, I don't know. But maybe so, because the other 3 or 4 guys did. It's fun at this point, I guess, just having been able to hang around 01:34:00long enough to enjoy this, you know? There are obviously things, if I were to have the opportunity to do it over again I would have done it differently, or I'd like to think I would have done it differently. I wish I had more confidence in myself when we were getting going. I think things might have been different, but all in all, you know I look back and there are people who started at the same time or even after that have been rewarded a lot more financially. I didn't ever make a lot of money at it, but I had no complaints. I mean, I never made a 01:35:00lot of money. The amount of money I got from the brewery when it was sold was pittance, really, by the time... our stock wasn't worth very much and my stock was all founder's stock, so it was entirely taxable. But, it was a lot of experience that I'm still benefiting from. I'm still able to do this consulting work. Never made a lot of money, but I look back and think, you know, it really doesn't matter. I've been able to do almost everything I ever wanted to do that I had the talent for, you know? I wasn't able to become a jazz trumpet player, but...

TEM: Or an entomologist.

FB: Or an entomologist, which I probably could have done. That was funny. We had a, I don't know whether I told you this before, we had a marketing vice president that got hired there and I think he was one of the more damaging things that came along with the brewery, but we were producing honey beer. Someone of the people we had doing advertising had produced a poster, and they'd just taken it out of a book.

TEM: You lost your little guy.

FB: Oh, thanks.

TEM: There it goes.

FB: They'd taken a poster out of a book that showed a drawing of a honey bee, and it happened to be a queen and there was something protruding from the 01:37:00abdomen of this bee, and they had labeled all of these parts of this animal, and at the top of this poster said, anatomy of a beer maker, because we were doing this honey beer. Anatomy of a beer maker. This protrusion from the abdomen was labeled, ovipositor, and then in parenthesis his brilliant artist had written "stinger to you." I picked this up and walked over and laid it on Gene's desk and said, Gene, it would take either an etymologist or an entomologist would 01:38:00know that this is not correct.

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: [Laughs] He said, ah. Nobody'd know but you.

TEM: [Laughs].

FB: That kind of bugged me.

TEM: Nice.

FB: [Laughs].

TEM: [Laughs]. Well, thank you for talking.

FB: Thank you for listening.

TEM: I'm going to turn this off.

FB: Want some more coffee?