John Foyston Oral History Interview, March 28, 2014

PETER KOPP: Today is March 28, 2014. This is Peter Kopp from New Mexico State University. I'm here with Tim Hills of McMenamins and Tiah Edmundson-Morton of Oregon State University and we're here to interview John Foysten who's worn many hats but one of his most important hats is he's the current blogger for the beer here blog for the Oregonian. What we're going to do to start, just so we know it's you, is can you say your name and spell you're whole name for us?

JOHN FOYSTEN: John Foysten, J-o-h-n F-o-y-s-t-e-n.

PK: And can you tell us your date of birth?

JF: July 9, 1950.

PK: Brilliant. Okay, so tell us where you were born, tell us your background where you hail from.

JF: A very small town up in Eastern British Columbia called Invermere. We moved to Vancouver and then my dad who was a mechanical engineer in the lumber 00:01:00business we moved down to Portland in 1956, basically.

PK: Okay.

JF: Pretty much a Portland boy.

PK: Okay, so do you have siblings?

JF: I do. One of each-a brother who's 2 years younger and a sister who's 4 years younger.

PK: Were they all born...?

JF: They were born in Vancouver.

PK: Okay. And you said your father was a...?

JF: A mechanical engineer and he worked for Pope and Talbot. He was chief engineer at Pope and Talbot and then at a metal fab shop here in Portland.

PK: Okay, and your mom?

JF: She was a housewife for the first bit and after the old man died in '67 she became like a sales rep at Rhodes, the old department store. She used to demonstrate cosmetics and all that great kind of stuff. And she was a model when 00:02:00she was in her 20s. so she was good at that.

PK: So, do you have memories from B.C., from growing up?

JF: Not really. We did once live in I think maybe for just a few months we lived in a place so remote up on the tip of Vancouver Island, called Port Alice, that the way in and out was either by boat or airplane. We flew up there in this old thing called an Amphibian, called a Seabee, which I was a total nut about airplanes ever since I was a kid because the old man flew for the Royal Canadian Airforce in World War II, so I'd always... even know I can bore my wife by 00:03:00telling her I know what kind of airplane that is. She's always impressed [laughs].

PK: So you were interested growing up in airplanes. Like I said, you have so many different interests in life, tell us about growing up in Portland and what you did and what your interests were, because obviously they were beer as a 6-year-old moving to Portland.

JF: Right, the beers at that time were the occasional sip from Dad's can of Oli, which I always thought said "pale expert" instead of "pale export" [laughs]. I was trying to imagine who those pale experts were. But I was really intense reader. I was kind of the nerdy kid in high school and it wasn't until really when I started going to college that I started playing guitar and got in a 00:04:00couple of bands after I got lucky in the draft lottery and decided I wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. It's always hard to remember now what that was like, but it insured good grades or at least passing grades.

PK: Where'd you got to school in Portland?

JF: I went to Sunset High School and then down to U of O.

PK: Okay. So you went to, let's see.

JF: I'm going to have to get up and get a glass of water, let me get it.

PK: That's okay. We can stop it for a second. [Break in recording].

JF: There it goes.

PK: So, what other interests? You went to Sunset High School. Did you play sports?

JF: No. I was totally on the other side of playing sports. I just did not. But as I say I was a reader and I was also in civil air patrol for years which is 00:05:00kind of like boy scouts but airplanes. We would do things like there were weekly readings and then summer camp where you went and stayed on an air force base for a couple of weeks. I eventually was part of the air cadet exchange program and got sent to Austria for a month where I did learn to drink beer, surprisingly enough.

PK: How old were you then?

JF: 18.

TIM HILLS: A good place to learn.

JF: Yeah. It was except the downside was when I came back to Oregon I couldn't face American beers for several years.

PK: So maybe this...

JF: It was a mixed blessing. Yeah. Then we were at University of Oregon and there were just, you know the things that freshman will drink. There was this 00:06:00new kind of spiced apple wine called Zapple, which we thought was lovely and I do remember actually buying probably the only bottle I've ever bought or seen of lime vodka. You can imagine, oh my god. But beer was not in the picture.

PK: Did you travel when you were a kid to see other parts of the world, or...?

JF: A little bit. I mean, we just took family vacations and Austria was really the biggest trip that I'd taken. Then after the draft lottery thing, which the very first draft lottery I got #266. You know if you may remember if you got 80 or above, you likely weren't going to go to Vietnam. That meant I could drop out 00:07:00and move back to Madison-Wisconsin with my buddy who was playing in a band. That was my traveling.

TH: It sounds, obviously the Vietnam War was an important part of your memory right now but an important part of your experience during the '60s. Did you understand what was going on there during a teenager or you know even before the draft. When did you realize this was an important part of your own history?

JF: It was just the, please God I don't want to say zeitgeist. It was just there. It was such a huge part. We saw it on TV every night. Your parents you know the old man thought well, you should probably go. It was just one of those 00:08:00things that was there and there wasn't really any way around it. It was the air you breathed, kind of. That was, yeah, everybody talked about it. I remember the day of the lottery you came back to your dorm room and you could call up one of the frat houses and the frat houses were tracking what number was which and you gave them your date of birth and then you got the up or down.

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: So, you were in at the U of O starting in...?

JF: '68 to '71 probably.

TEM: What was it like to be on that campus during that time?

JF: Lots going on and I did a couple of things in the resistance. I originally went down, I was first in ROTC and on the drill team, because I was actually 00:09:00good at that stuff and then a couple of experiences made me realize that I didn't want to be on the drill team and I kind of wanted to grow my hair long. That was hard to explain, too, but I was kind of an instant hippie, you know?

TH: Did you have dual citizenship or did you?

JF: I didn't and I always think back to that because in 1963 we all got naturalized and I didn't realize there was even the option, but in '07 Canada kind of opened it up if you were born there you were a Canadian again. I'm proudly Canadian again.

PK: So, U of O was obviously a crucial moment for many reasons.

JF: Yes, it did. It was, yeah because the old man had been gone for a couple years and he was an engineer and he was never, he was a loving father but he was a strict father, he was kind of an Old Testament father, so it was an opportunity to see things and experiment with drugs and all that great stuff.

PK: Did you have a close family when your dad passed, or?

JF: Yeah, it stayed pretty close. Then when Mom remarried she remarried this great, great doctor who had had two families before us so there was a blended family of a dozen kids ranging from, I was the oldest, all the way down to 00:11:00somebody almost 16 years younger. That was pretty amazing. Lot of dishes to do at family dinners.

TH: But it sounds like you got along. That's amazing.

JF: Yeah, it really was.

PK: Well, here's an important question. So what kind of music were you listening to? Because you said you joined a band at that time. what kind of stuff were you listening to?

JF: You know, Cream and British Blues and Almond Brothers and Mott the Hoople, as you would.

TH: Did you play?

JF: Yeah.

TH: That's what I thought.

JF: Yeah, played guitar.

TH: In a band at that time?

JF: Yep. Played in bands probably until the mid '70s. just sometime at varying levels of professionalism. None were ever...

TH: That type of music though?

JF: Uh-huh. A lot of the kind of southern, you know the blues-ie influence stuff anyway.

PK: Were you writing music too?

JF: Sporadically and not very well [laughs].

PK: You're honest. Well, what else were you into? Because we know you're an artist. Did you have a plan or were things confusing or...?

JF: A plan, no, no.

PK: Where was your mind in the late '60s?

JF: [Laughs]. Let's see. What did I go to college for? I wish... I look back now and I wish I would've, I really enjoyed art history. I wish I would've you know taken painting classes there. I took a couple art classes. I was thinking, well, I'll go to school for journalism. Then I got a bunch of the boring stuff out of the way and never really did get to the journalism classes before I left, so 00:13:00plan-wise that was about it. Then when I was in Wisconsin my great friend was into motor bikes and we would always, that was, oh yeah, yeah, I want a motorcycle, I want a motorcycle. So I finally bought, in 1973 I bought a little Ducati, a little Italian 250 that, well, actually it was in a box. So I had to put it together. That was fine with me because I wanted to learn but at that time I had no skill or tools or any of that, and just gradually figured that out until by 1980 I started, I took a class at PCC, which was a good class and then 00:14:00I started working at a motorcycle shop out on Barbara Boulevard that did Ducatis and Moto Guzzis and vespas and Kawasakis. Of course being the new guy I didn't get to do the Ducatis because they had a couple really good mechanics there but I learned.

PK: You learned. Did you grow up working with your hands?

JF: Not so much. You know it was funny, I mean I built models. I built plastic models but I also built basalm wood, stick and paper airplanes that kind of stuff. I enjoyed that but I was never much of a craftsman.

PK: Did you tinker with things?

JF: A little bit of tinkering but I just was not, that part of my brain was not really engaged yet. It was funny with the old man being an engineer but he 00:15:00didn't do much of that at home either. It wasn't like we, we didn't work on our cars. There was none of that, even though you could have easily done in those days.

PK: What about writing then?

JF: Wrote a little bit, but I wrote...actually when I was in freshman year I wrote something like a World War II story about pilots and got chosen for the literary magazine that year and someone accused me of plagiarism.

PK: Really?

JF: Yeah, which is not anything I had consciously done. I had been reading lots of stuff and I'm sure there was stuff that slopped over but I certainly didn't sit down, I didn't need to plagiarize. Any good writer, you don't need to. I mean what the hell? That kind of, yeah, that kind of stopped the writing.

PK: Wow. That's intense.

JF: Yeah. It seemed so unfair, you know, that someone would accuse you of that. It might've been the guy that almost got chosen for the magazine that year.

TH: Oh you didn't even know where it came from?

JF: I can't remember. I blanked. That was no fun. And then I never really got into writing again except when we had the shop we started a friend of mine, Dick Winningstad, Norm Winningstad's son, we started a shop in '82 over in Tigard. It was called Eurosport. He had the money and I was a manager and the mechanic and all this stuff and that was, in those pre-internet days it was worth drumming up 00:17:00mail-order business because Ducati fans were not well-served and so I ended up like writing for owners' club magazines and doing illustrating and writing maybe a 70-page catalogue. All sorts of stuff like that. All pre-computer.

TEM: Who was that sent to?

JF: As we would build up, and guys would call us and order parts and then we built up a mailing list of a couple hundred people and sent that out and they'd tell their friends. It was an interesting... it went, I don't know that it went viral but it became sort of infectious I guess.

PK: So, you picked up the skills pretty quickly if you're the manager and working on Ducatis.

JF: Yeah. I didn't pick up much on the way of business skills but certainly mechanical stuff and writing. I did what I had to. I've generally been a pretty quick study.

PK: I want to go back in time a little bit because you keep referring to Wisconsin. When did you move to Wisconsin and why?

JF: It would've been '71, would've been after I dropped out of U of O and my friend at U of O played guitar and we were starting a band and he was moving back because his family was moving back there. I said, what the hell, one of those kid things. A good time to do it.

PK: So how long were you...?

JF: About 5 years and I ended up working as a dishwasher. Would play in the band and then I got a gig with his old man was the director of the primate research 00:19:00center in Madison and I got a gig as an animal caretaker. So I fed and cleaned up after 1,000 reses monkeys for 3 years. It was an interesting life.

PK: In the past when we've talked you've said I've done a lot of different things. I didn't know about the monkey part.

JF: [Laughs]. Yeah, the monkeys were... we were committed to keeping the monkeys healthy and happy. We didn't have to do a lot of the stuff that gets protested because our part was the breeding colony and you wanted to raise the babies. Yeah things like TB testing where you had every 3 months or 4 months you had to, 00:20:00you know, because TB would go through a population like that like wildfire. You had to get every monkey out in a little metal cage and all the females, because the males you had to use like a squeeze cage because they would try to kill you. the females you had to give them a shot right in the eyelid which would just bubble up and then you had to shave them because you know the researchers coming around had to see how their color changed. It'd be like August in Madison and you'd be in this hallway full of monkeys in metal boxes jumping around and there'd be mounds of hair and of course all the other things that monkeys would 00:21:00produce and my God I mean it was a lot like hell. But the beer was better in Wisconsin back then. whenever they did any kind of even there was, I mean everywhere you went in Wisconsin when there was a kegger first off there would be the stock pot full of beer and brats and then the ice chest full of beer.

TH: At that time period though, Madison must have been a real hot bed of activity.

JF: Yep. It was. It was. It was just like Eugene. It was really jumpin'. A great little town.

PK: The other missing part so far is beer.

JF: Yeah, and beer really didn't enter the picture you know the state beer of Eurosport was Rainier pounders, you know we'd invite people back and if your 00:22:00bike was being worked on you could come back in the shop and have a beer. It was that old-fashioned motorcycle shop but it was almost always Rainier pounders. In fact, the name for my beer column, we had a poster from Blitz which was, and I've been trying to find it again. I can't. it looks almost like a Russian you know like workers' poster. He's kind of standing there and there's jets flying overhead, and it says, "The beer here: Blitz." [Laughs].

PK: Oh that's cool.

JF: I'd love to find it but I haven't found it yet. Then I remember about, God really, I missed Cartwright and...

TH: Were you not back in Portland then?

JF: I was here but just missed it.

TH: It doesn't sound like that would've been a bad thing, necessarily.

JF: No, no. but I think you know one of the early brushes would be at a club where they were serving Hefeweizen. And we were thinking, wow, this is really. Imagine this.

PK: Was it Widmer?

JF: Yeah. Uh-huh. Before then I'd had, you know when I was younger we'd had Anchor Steam and Guinness.

PK: So, during the '70s or whatever when you're of age, I guess, you were drinking Olympia and Rainier?

JF: Olympia and you know basically what was on sale?

PK: What else was there? Lucky?

JF: Lucky.

TEM: Budweiser.

PK: Budweiser. Coors.

JF: Yeah. Yeah.

PK: Did you get into the Coors thing?

TH: No, Coors didn't come until '85. They came in on the brew pub bill. That was the deal.

PK: But I thought people were bringing it in earlier.

JF: They were.

TH: Well, but not in the stores. You couldn't.

PK: But you'd drive to Colorado and come back with the Coors. Did you do that stuff?

JF: Mm-hm. Helped form my abiding love of Coors today. That's really the one beer I won't drink is, you know when we're on motorcycle trips you sometimes end up in a town where it is. Budweiser, that's fine. I'll have a Bud. But Coors, nah.

TH: Did you consciously remember the beer from Austria from way back when and that better flavor?

JF: Only in the sense as a comparison to what...

TH: Yeah. There was something better.

JF: Right. American beers just tasted thin and sour after Austria. But boy they were, Austrian beers they were pretty wonderful.

PK: Is there ever a beer, because they say sense of smell is important in terms of memory and history, do you ever have a beer and like remember, does it take you back there? Do you remember some of those flavors?

JF: Sometimes, yeah. Definitely sometimes I mean I'll have occasionally even the smell of like a factory beer, you know a Pabst or an Olly, all of a sudden snaps me right back to you know when you were stealing a sip from the old man. Just the exact, and it's not always like that, but sometimes, yeah. There are certainly other better examples.

PK: What else? Anything else leading up to the big writing stuff?

TEM: Well, I'm just curious-was it really expensive? I mean could you buy imported beer when you were here? Was it overpriced?

JF: You could. It wasn't widely available. It was, I'm trying to think of specialty, the idea of a bottle shop really didn't exist and yeah, and it wasn't something we pursued. I just, my beer connoisseurship was late in coming.

PK: Okay, so we're going to go back to your shop. 1982.

JF: Mm-hmm, '82 to about '90.

PK: What else is going on? When did you get married?

JF: Not until, actually it was '93.

PK: Okay.

JF: Yeah, and that's part of the Oregonian story because she was an editor at the Oregonian.

PK: I didn't know that.

JF: In the late '80s the shop got to be, you know, it was not a great economic time in Oregon and you know it was one of those, it just got to be tougher and tougher and I'd been writing more and I had a customer I used to work on his Ducati and he happened to be the editor for AandE and he knew that I wrote and he knew that I played in bands and did I wanted to review concerts I think for 00:27:00the princely sum of $75. The catch was what you did is you went and saw enough of the concert and got enough of the tunes and you went back and you filed something by 10:30 at night. It turns out not everybody could do that. And I could. So I did that for several years and looked to get a full-time gig as a correspondent because all the time at the Oregonian if you were a freelancer you were told generally yeah you can write but you'll never get hired on staff because the Oregonian was at that time nobody, nobody quit. It was good money and guaranteed employment. There was an employment guarantee back then. so I hired on as a correspondent out in Washington County, one of the bureaus. That 00:28:00was, I ended up putting in many, many miles to Tualatin and Sherwood, which were my towns. But it was good training. It really did teach you to be a, it was the journalism school I missed because the editors out there were very good despite the fact that Karen, whom I married later, kept telling Jerry Boone that I was never going to work out and they should just get rid of me. but Boone wanted me because I was a motor head, so it was pretty good.

PK: When did you start freelancing for the Oregonian, what year?

JF: I started in September of '87 I started freelancing and then probably in December of '88 I started working as a correspondent. Then in '93 they hired me 00:29:00on full-time temporary downtown and kept saying, you know, I mean don't get your hopes up you're not going to get hired and then in '95 they hired me on staff.

PK: So, more on the job. Figure it out?

JF: Yeah. Right. I was working for AandE when I was downtown and I was just kind of like a utility infielder because we had guys that were big experts and everything and I was a pretty good journalist.

PK: What was it like working for the O during that period. You said nobody left but was there...?

JF: It was amazing. It just was, I mean it was like the, it was the A-team. There was no comparison between, I mean it was the best gig in the state. It was 00:30:00also like the highest paying paper on the coast. I mean, more than the L.A. Times and all that.

PK: Okay.

JF: It was really, it was really amazing. And then when Sandy Rowe came, which is about the time I got hired on staff she started bumping up the newsroom even more and it became this kind of imperial newsroom, but it was still 600, 700 people. I mean you just can't imagine what it was like. It was a golden era. When we had Fred Stickel as a publisher. He was the one who instituted the job guarantee if you remember the strikes of the early '60s and that's the way they kept the newspaper guild out. They said we won't fire anybody but don't join the union.

TEM: So were you all working in the same building?

JF: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we were up, the head newsroom took 2 or 3 floors. Now it's like the corner of one floor.

TH: Did you ever overlap with Wendeborn?

JF: When I was freelancing he was not, I think he had just been fired. But he was a friend of Paul's who was my rabbi. So I knew him that way.

PK: You said you closed your shop in...?

JF: About '90.

PK: Oh okay. So, did you just figure the writing, even though you weren't on full-time you were going to pursue the writing?

JF: Yeah, that's what I was going to do.

PK: Okay.

JF: Yeah.

PK: And then was there a big, I mean we didn't ask this yet, but was there a big 00:32:00biking culture in the '80s and '70s when you got going working on bikes in Portland?

JF: Yeah, I mean there was an underground, really. I think there's more of one now. Yeah it was kind of an underground. We had probably 50, you know hard core of 50 guys who were into Italian bikes. It was not quite like these days.

PK: So you're riding and your writing. It's not a bad life.

JF: Yeah. It was good.

TH: I thought of a question going back a little bit where were the taverns? Where were your places that you wanted to meet up with folks?

JF: Actually one of the problems with the shop was it was one of the best 00:33:00taverns I knew so a lot of times people would come to you. That was a great thing about 5:00 it was someone would invariably bring in a 12-pack. You'd just sit and...

TH: No reason to go anywhere else.

JF: No, no. though I did, some of the taverns, you know I mean Buffalo Gap, Goose Hollow has always been great. The band used to play out at this place called The Buffalo Nickel out by Tualatin. I'm trying to remember the, oh, of course Produce Row.

TH: Did you go there?

JF: Yeah. I wasn't a regular but certainly remember it. We used to play at just 00:34:00up the street from the Barley Mill at a place called Ken's Afterglow. I can't remember what that became.

TH: What a great name.

JF: Yeah, exactly. Could be a better name than a tavern. The Horse Brass, we started going there pretty soon. But also there were just so many, God there were so many great old taverns, you know that are just, yeah. We've lost a bunch of those.

PK: What was the name of your band that you were playing with?

JF: Well, let's see. There was Nasty Habits was the kind of rolling stone-y band. But that was probably the biggest one [laughs].

PK: What other beers do you remember from that early period in the mid-'80s 00:35:00besides Hefeweizen?

JF: It was really, it still was such a small sub-culture. You'd see Portland Ale occasionally. Occasionally you'd see something from Bridgeport but it was just very, you know, and I didn't really go to the pubs that were doing except for Horse Brass and I still think you know they are probably the most important of the early pubs. But it really wasn't until the mid '90s and until I started writing about it that I got into it.

PK: This is the sense I have, I don't know if you have the same sense, but I get a feeling when Hefeweizen was on tap and you could get it, it was like gold, right? it just, I can imagine going from the bland big boys to...

JF: Right. Well, it was actually, I remember the first time I had it I thought it was, we were kind of laughing about boy this is a big beer. How daunting it was. I'm sure that was because of the cloudiness and all that. It was very funny, which of course brings up the Dublin Pub too because that was one of the places that actually we played there and that was certainly the home of Hefeweizen.

TEM: So, were you continuing to play music then this whole time?

JF: Yeah but on a very not, you know, sporadic.

PK: Do you, either from your memory from that time or now, did the Oregonian even cover any of this stuff? The craft brewing movement in the mid-'80s, late '80s?

JF: Fred was doing some stuff but again there was no such thing as a beer column. Then Mike Francis was doing some of the business of beer about the time you know I started, he and I both would do things, you know kind of we'd write about different sides of the same subject. What I really started was in '95 when they did a redesign of AandE and everybody was sitting around in meetings as they do agonizing over how to make this more, how do I make this about Portland. 00:38:00I said, well, you write about beer. They were kind of baffled: I suppose you could do that. Is that really a big deal?

TH: Is there much to talk about?

JF: Right. Would you have enough to write about? Exactly. I assured them I could probably do that. So that was the start of it.

PK: I remember that redesigned AandE.

TH: I do too. That was soon after we got here.

JF: That was the start of the weekly column.

PK: So had you been covering music up to that point or other things?

JF: All sorts of things.

PK: All sorts of things.

JF: Yeah, music and art and a little bit of theater. And I had my, actually my favorite column was this thing called out there which I did for a few years.

TH: Oh yeah. That was great.

JF: Yeah, just pursued the strange Portland life, which was great fun but a lot 00:39:00of work, but fun.

PK: That's a great column. I didn't even know you did that. So, tell us the story of how you met your wife.

JF: At the Washington County Bureau. She was, you know we eventually became friends after she stopped trying to get me fired. Those guys were really good teachers because they would teach you to, if you're going to write a lead, the lead's the most important thing. Don't write a question lead because if you write a question lead someone's going to say who cares? Don't write a long lead, 33 words. Eventually I got pretty proud of that and I sent in a story one day about the 9-1-1 was looking for a new building and it was something like the 00:40:00committee looking for a new headquarters for 9-1-1 and found the name on the door says Toyota but to the committee looking for a new headquarters the building's a Cadillac. I was pretty damn proud of that. I happened to mention to it, I said did you like that? She said, yeah it was okay but we can't use brand names. So I changed it to the building says Toyota but to the committee it's a big car. Of course I immediately exploded and she started laughing.

PK: Well, I think the big question is then tell us about the beginning of the beer writing. You pitch the idea. They said okay.

JF: Right.

TH: Did you know Fred by that point?

JF: No I met everybody from then on. I had no inroads in the beer community at 00:41:00all. I remember my first story was going down to Portland brewing and learning from Fred Bowman how to properly pour a Bavarian Weisen and then next week I was talking to Karl Ockert about this weird hoppy new beer. I was talking to Don Younger about this pub he'd had for all of 12 years probably by then. It was just great. soon enough talked to Fred and did a feature on him and it was yeah. That's my favorite part is meeting all these people.

PK: That's just so cool. You're at the heart of it. By that point you know there's a pretty big contingent by the mid-'90s.

JF: Yeah. It was starting to, it was definitely starting to heat up and that was to the extent that we had our first mid'90s slump when people weren't all of a sudden realize it wasn't going to grow at 20% a year all of the time. Star Brewing moved out and Nor'Wester crashed and burned.

TH: That's right.

JF: And the Indians wanted to buy Full Sail.

TH: I forgot about that.

JF: Yeah because Jerome wanted his money out and he left, so. It was actually pretty turbulent time.

PK: How did you meet these guys. What kind of research did you do or did you 00:43:00just starting to people or hang out in the pub or...?

JF: Just started talking to them, yeah. Call them up and you know I want to, and that's of course the thing that I love about the business is it's just the most open, the easiest to get to know people and it's always been great. I was always interested and remain interested in beer as culture and I've never, you know I've never thought of myself as an amazing judge of beer. I like beer and I like good beer but I'm not a beer snob by any means.

TEM: Have you ever brewed?

JF: Nope. Nope.

PK: Never tried?

JF: Nope. And the answer is I've got about 200 friends who are really good 00:44:00brewers. Though I did do a beer label once. The same friend I started the motorcycle shop with in the '70s decided he would brew some beer and the brew house consisted of a plastic garbage can and the beer was, it was a vivid beer. It was the sort of beer that had lots of sugar but the beer label showed an old BSA motorcycle with a bottle underneath and a funnel in it and the drain bowl it was open and it was draining in to the bottle. That was old Beser beer.

PK: That's cool. How's everybody doing? Do we need to take a break or?

TH: I'm fine.

TEM: I'm fine but I'm not talking.

JF: Yeah. I'm okay.

TH: I've heard, especially in the earlier days but I'm wondering by the time you became familiar with all these folks how you perceived it or saw it. I know Mike and Brian talk about in the early days, '70s, '80s especially when everyone starts brewing in the mid-'80s it was a real collegial bunch. They all got together to make sure the brew pub bill got passed and if someone needed kegs they could go over to the other brewery and get them. How would you describe the scene by the mid'-90s?

JF: I think it was largely the same. I think some of the big business stuff was starting to intrude. Again, I go back to Nor'Wester and their dreams of empire, 00:46:00you know a brewery back east you know, the guy, Tony Adams, at Portland Brewing, who I thought was a suit. He was the guy who wanted to build the pink palace. I think that left Portland Brewing overextended for years, kind of weakened them and that's why they went away. I think there was some of that going on. But yeah generally the brewers were, there still weren't that many suits, you know. it was mostly guys wearing rubber boots. More boots than suits, I guess.

PK: Did they talk about their ingredients? It's about that time I think I 00:47:00remember Karl and other folks telling me it took about 10, 15 years before the brewers and the hop growers for example really started to connect.

JF: That's relatively recent, I think. I don't remember, I mean hops were still a commodity until the early you know 2000's, it seems to me. I don't remember the first, when I first wrote about fresh hop beers I'm sure it was Karl and the hop harvest. That was not really on the radar. A lot of the, you know a lot of the link up with agriculture just generally which we take for granted now I 00:48:00don't think was there.

PK: I was talking with Jack Joyce a few months ago. He said that too, it's kind of been a recent thing. Now everybody's latched onto it. Of course they have a farm at Rogue and all this stuff.

JF: Yeah. Rogue has really taken that and run.

PK: Well, I have more questions about that, but I want to focus on the mid'90s real quick.

TEM: I have one.

PK: Yeah, go.

TEM: Was there a time, maybe it happened in the mid '90s where you recognized your own place as a documentarian? Was there a point where you switched from journalist to wow I'm actually recording something that's not going to phase away?

JF: Not really. No, I mean it was always, you're always kind of a working journalist. I just felt lucky, basically to be writing what I was writing but 00:49:00there was never any, you know certainly as a journalist you quickly learn that you write on sand. I never had much of an idea that way.

PK: Did you get a sense of how the audience responded to your writing, to this new...?

JF: Yeah, I mean I did run into people who pretty continually and you know when we would print something about an event you know people would they'd get a big bump in attendance. That was always nice. Like I say, it was going back to working for the A-team. That was good.

PK: Were you inspired to read Fred's book just to know what they knew?

JF: Right. Yeah, I read Fred's stuff. I read a little bit of the home brewing 00:50:00thing. It's not like I was... you know I was hugely into research. Again, I trusted my own, what I was looking for was again to talk more about the culture than the beer, though the beer was obviously why we were all there.

TH: What about more of the events? The Brewfest and some of the fun...?

JF: Boy it used to be easy [laughs]. Now it's like... yeah, I'm trying to remember the first, because there was still a lot of carryover. I went to blues festivals for just years and years.

TH: For the paper?

JF: Yeah. Covering that. The first OBF must have been I'm sure it was early '90s 00:51:00and that was a revelation just seeing what that event was like. I don't remember, you know I don't remember the first one. I don't remember hearing any buzz back in '88 when that was starting, so yeah it was funny how kind of contained that scene was.

TH: Was it always held on the waterfront?

JF: Yeah. They took that over from the blues festival, because it started out as a version of the blues festival and then the blues festival got the July 4 weekend.

PK: What other moments do you remember early on, for example you said Fred Bowman showed you how to properly pour a beer?

JF: Right, right.

PK: What other kind of moments stick out in your mind as...?

JF: Oh, probably just you know having my first beer with Fred Eckhardt and just listening to the stories. I mean, what an amazing guy. You know, Don Younger, those were difficult interviews because you simply had to keep up with him and especially that was tough because he started at 11:00 in the morning but what a great guy and he was, we became very good friends. He always called me John Boy and we would usually sit right at his corner seat at Horse Brass right on the corner near the cash register. Meeting the people really was the, has always 00:53:00been the fun part of it. Karl Ockert was really a prince of a guy. The Widmer brothers. Boy I don't, there's so few people that you wouldn't want to have a beer with.

PK: Isn't that remarkable?

JF: It is.

TH: My sense is it's really kind of an organic movement that happened here, and I wonder if you can compare it to other cities' beer culture, you know?

JF: You know I think not being familiar with, I know Denver a little bit and I know Seattle a little bit, San Diego, they all seem, they don't seem to have 00:54:00that organic sense. I mean, they don't have that, and I don't know if that's a Portland thing. It started here early, I think because of the pub culture, on a day like today it's a great day for being a pub.

TH: Mike and Brian always talk about before the beer movement there was the wine movement and it was just these local guys trying to figure out what to do. They had some expertise but mostly it was on-the-job training.

JF: Exactly.

TH: Then they talk about the good food movement. There are all these local people willing to try something better.

JF: The bakeries and the chocolatiers and all that. Yeah.

TH: I'm just not familiar with other cities that well, about their craft beer movement going on there.

JF: Yeah. I think Portland is really a special place that way. I think also you 00:55:00know we've always been the, recently it's become the big, very hip and all that, but we've always kind of been the fly-over city on the coast. Bands would invariably come from San Francisco to Seattle. Maybe we just figured out ways to amuse ourselves [laughs]. It's always been that kind of I don't care how you do it in California attitude.

PK: I think you're right about the idea of organic movement here.

JF: Mm-hmm.

PK: It sounds like it.

JF: Absolutely.

PK: When did you get a sense that things were getting bigger?

JF: You know, I knew, really I felt like I came into it a little late because by that time you know the Widmers had, let's see, Bridgeport had sold to Gambrinus. Widmers had sold their share to AB. There was enough stuff going on where it was really obvious there was stuff you couldn't write about every week. You had too much stuff to write about. That was, I mean right from the start. Of course that's only now right [laughs]. You just kind of give up and you know figure out the high spots. No, it was always, it was jumpin' right from when I started.

PK: What were some of the other breweries opening by the late '90s and 2000s. because I think some of the brewers see themselves as second generation, right?

JF: Right. Yeah, because I always think of the second wave as you know the, what the Deschutes, Full Sail, Rogue, Saxer, by that time and where do the Widmers fit in? Then we started seeing like '94 was Lucky Lab, you know, and that's like really a significant place because it's like what you guys are doing on a smaller scale, just the brew pub as...

TH: As a place to gather.

JF: Right. exactly. So, Lucky Lab and places like that. Lompoc, you know. Those were some of the really solid, Laurel Wood. I mean, what's Laurelwood right? I 00:57:00guess Laurelwood's just 13 years so it's not really, but then you know, yeah, there were, you know I think they were all smaller breweries because I think Deschutes and Widmer had obviously taken the large one.

TH: When they all started bottling too, that changed...

JF: Yeah, '95. Again, that's when I started. I'm going to take a break here. Where do we? [break in recording]. There it goes.

PK: As someone that was observing the culture, I think an interesting part of beer culture, particularly craft beer culture, that Tiah and I have talked about is it's kind of a male-centered culture. But also, I think that a nice part of 00:58:00Portland Brewing, at least I think, was that everybody was drinking good beer or discovering good beer together. Can you talk about that a little bit, the gendered part of the story?

JF: I think that's the case too. Also, it's interesting because we've had Lisa Morrison has been a big part of the beer community and she's been consciously inclusive and now we're seeing more of that happening with groups like Laura and Ginger down in Ashland who's doing women enjoying beer. I think it's always been kind of pretty open here. You know it's nice because it escapes the kind of frat boy side of beer. What's the movie like Beer Festival or something, which we've 00:59:00luckily, I guess maybe you wouldn't want to go to the OBF on Saturday night but I never have yet.

TEM: So I'm curious the gender side but also the family side, that the brew pub as a place where it wasn't a tavern where you just went to get alcohol but that it was a restaurant and a place where you could bring your families.

JF: That's all to McMenamins' credit. That was really the, they did so much in that. You have to remember before, I don't know when the law changed, there were enough weird Oregon laws. In the early '70s you couldn't have live music in the tavern. You had to have something called a cabaret license.

PK: I didn't know that.

JF: Yeah. You could only have, if you didn't have a cabaret license you could have a piano player. You couldn't order a pitcher by yourself, even a small 01:00:00pitcher. If you look at old taverns they generally have these stick-on decals on the windows that will block a window off to 4 or 5 feet high, they were generally green of some kind it was so kids couldn't look in a tavern and be shocked that people drinking beer. They were just very, very weird kind of rules and McMenamins is the... they went so far to take it to the other side. So, all credit to them. you know the brew pub really was not a huge, not a huge deal at the first. I mean, you guys had the first brew pubs and the Bridgeport pub. That 01:01:00was always kind of a family hangout too. Then, as I was saying, Lucky Lab when you could bring the kids and the dogs. It's such a great Portland institution. I just love a good brew pub.

TH: It's interesting, Mike was inspired by going to Europe and seeing the pubs and the cafes and the piazzas where the whole family would come together and that's really what he wanted to bring back here.

JF: Yeah, and how successfully? That's really...

TH: Why did it take that long for it to...?

JF: I think it was just the, you know, like I say we grew up with places like 01:02:00the Lariat Tavern out in Beaverton where maybe it didn't have any windows at all?

TH: Or they were broken out or something.

JF: Certainly had no families.

TEM: I think it's hard to talk about drinking establishments and culture without again that divide between the brew pub and frat boy culture. As a writer, how have you worked with that?

JF: Just by, you know, kind of... I've been lucky just because the craft beer culture here, there's so rarely been you know the frat boy element. You know I mean the beers were more expensive, they were stronger and luckily the yahoos 01:03:00really wanted a, they wanted a light beer, you know? it just has never been much of an issue, which is good.

PK: When did you start blogging?

JF: About 8 years ago was '06 or '07. The Oregonian was finally realizing that maybe the internet wasn't going to go away as they so wished and it became incumbent upon us to blog and yeah it was an adjustment for me but I really like it now. I have no idea how, talk about writing on sand, I mean writing on 01:04:00photons is even worse. I have no idea, though people tell me they read it, so. But I love the immediacy, though I think keeps you from, it tends to select against long-form reporting. I'll notice that I often you know will do 5 graphs and 3 pictures and Bob's your uncle, that works. But it's alright. They don't need, maybe you can still get the feel of a place and the idea of you can get across just fine.

PK: So you took to it pretty quickly?

JF: Pretty quickly, yeah. I'm still, I'm no Jeff Alworth, but who is? He's a 01:05:00serious lad.

TH: More generally, do you think the web itself, the internet, had an impact on the beer culture and beer writing?

JF: I think so. I think it's you know I think it's spread things. it's really influenced, I mean, all the... people tweeting about what kind of beer they're having. You know being an old guy I also think it trivializes, you know you see a lot of bloggers. You go to an event now, like a press event, it would've been a press event back when and you see people like, you know, where do these people, who do these people write for? Are they here for the free beer only? Of course I was there for the free beer, but I was playing for the A Team, dammit. 01:06:00Like all things it cuts both ways. It has vastly improved, or vastly extended the reach of beer culture.

TH: Yeah, I was just thinking you know the beer people can find each other all over the world just immediately.

JF: Exactly.

TEM: So, what about community? it seems that there is a lot, and I don't want to say a lot now, like it wasn't before, but there are a lot of opportunities for people to come together, not just culturally, as in beer culture, but also 01:07:00community wise. It's tourism and events, so continuing this thought of the online environment, what about social media? Separating out blogs from social media, what about social media? How have you seen that change either the culture or the community?

JF: Certainly I get, a lot of the stuff I write about now is based on invites on Facebook and not what we think of as a press release or anything like that. That's certainly a huge, huge thing. I think there are, again, I think it's just really, really opened things up. I also think the concomitant thing is that it's given us all attention deficit too. Everybody wants the latest, greatest, newest beer and when I sit down with my pint of max amber I always feel a little bit guilty but I like max amber. But you kind of feel like as a beer writer you're supposed to be trying to latest and I don't always.

PK: Well, there's too much to choose from.

JF: Too much to choose from, yeah.

PK: And there's seasonals.

JF: Yeah and sometimes I don't want a smoked cucumber Saison.

TH: Sometimes.

TEM: Has to be the right weather.

JF: Right.

TH: I was just, you made me think... do you have standards that you always will go back to beer wise?

JF: Oh yeah. I mean...

TH: Max Amber, that's a good one.

JF: Max Ambers and Sierra Nevada pale. Those are... Anchor Steam, I love Anchor Steam. Widmer Alt, maybe now that they've got 24 taps at the...

TH: Guest House.

JF: Well, formerly known as the Guest House.

TH: What is it now?

JF: Widmer Brothers Pub.

TH: Oh.

JF: Because they're just reopening after their first remodel. They're reopening 01:09:00tomorrow but they'll have their grand reopening party Thursday.

TH: I didn't know that.

JF: Yeah there are, I certainly do have favorites.

PK: Besides it just getting bigger and bigger and bigger in Portland and other places what other trends, cultural trends, and the internet obviously, what other trends have you seen in your time writing from the mid '90s onward?

JF: I think the fragmentation is part of what we're seeing. I think what Tiah and OSU are doing is really needed because I think we're losing the history, I mean we're losing it every day-and what Tim does. That's the one thing we really don't have. You know you think well, we've been doing this for a generation now. 01:10:00Craft beer's really a generation old in Oregon which means the youngsters never knew anything different.

TH: Yeah, that's true.

JF: You know they never did have to drink Mickey's Big Mouths, which I recommend to them as penance.

TH: Mickey's Big Mouths, can you still get that?

JF: I don't know.

TH: I don't know if they'd want to.

JF: Yeah, right? You probably can't.

TH: Probably illegal.

JF: It's like the scotch ad-the goods things in life stay that way. You know there's so much, fragmentation is one way to think of it but I mean the flowering. The beer styles that five years ago none of us had tasted a Berliner Weisse and we're probably one step away from a Berliner Weisse festival, but 01:11:00it's Cezanne's obviously. There's going to be 40 or 50 up at Saraveza tomorrow. It's just amazing.

PK: Sour beer?

JF: Yeah, sour beer. Oh my God. Those guys have just, Cascade, they've just opened a whole new... you know and who would've thought? I was really amazed when I heard they were doing that, because I knew that obviously Ron and Preston were good at blending but boy to make a whole place? I think Art was a little, I think he had to think twice before he opened the checkbook but to his credit he did. That's the thing, it just seems like anything it's going to work. when 01:12:00Breakside, Breakside opening in the first place in looking for the blank spot in the map on Dekum and three years later opening a production brewer in Milwaukee? You know Alameda opening a big production brewery. It just seems like, I don't know. it's amazing.

PK: Do you think there's going to be, even in Portland, a glut at some point?

JF: You know everybody asks that. I don't have any good answers. I've seen it happen once but at that time I mean the fact that when you go into a bar in Portland and like 20 people can tell you how and why IPA got its name. that never happened before. It's just a crazy, it's just really part of the DNA here.

TH: Do you see, do you envision certain things blowing up in the next, I mean in a good way, certain components of the beer culture might explode in one area or go in a different direction.

JF: You know, my crystal ball is foggy. I see more styles. I mean... but I don't see a very clear direction. I think it's just going to keep getting more. Yep.

TH: It's going all ways.

PK: One of the questions I was going to ask you earlier has to do with just the local food and local Ag movement. How have you seen that play out in the last 15 years or so? Because you know if you go to Bridgeport's website they take you to 01:14:00their facilities and then they pan out to the Willamette Valley and Rogue has their own hop farm now and they're growing barley there too.

JF: Yeah. They're even malting now. It's just, the whole thing has been, it's just an amazing, not explosion but that kind of idea. You know? It's just, it's all part of what we're seeing.

PK: And you think that's going to continue? Do you think other brewers are going to latch on to the idea of local agricultural production too?

JF: Yeah. I think so. I think that's going to be more and more important knowing where your ingredients came from, and I don't know that organic is going to, you know if the new regulations now, what? Even the hops have to be organic, right? That's going to make it more difficult because I think, there's not a lot of 01:15:00Willamette Valley growers who can grow organic or Yakama. So that would be a tradeoff. If my hops had to be air freighted in from New Zealand I think that would off-set a lot of the organic-ness. I don't think people see really the, beer already seems pretty organic to me. I never saw the huge drive behind it. Now that Laurel Wood has moved away from organic beers, really Hop Works is the main proponent.

PK: That's hard. I remember I visited Gale Goschie the first acre she harvested of organic Willamettes. I was just wondering how things would work out and I 01:16:00still don't know if I have an answer. Do you talk with the hop growers now, too?

JF: Occasionally. Yeah I know Gale and I've talked with Pat who's doing organics but I haven't talked with them much. How was her harvest?

PK: I think it was good. It was the first trial. You've talked with her a lot more recently than I have Tiah, so?

TEM: We didn't talk about the success of organic harvest, though.

PK: But I think it's still in their profile.

TEM: I would say, they're doing it, so I think it feels like something that's sustainable to them, from what I understood from her.

JF: That's good.

TH: I thought of a question. Do you think, back when we were talking earlier, you were talking earlier in the late '90s when kind of the established breweries 01:17:00by that point, Widmer and Bridgeport were hooking up with national beer corporations basically. Do you think that's important or that's a necessity for breweries in Portland that want to get bigger or can they just do it themselves, then?

JF: I think the distribution is a little more open. Back in '95 AB had the hearts and minds program, where their distributers had to, if they were going to distribute craft beer it better be Widmer, or Goose Island, or one of the beers like that, Red Hook, because they were not going to open it up to, you know. Of 01:18:00course now Maletis is one of the big craft distributers. I think it's probably easier that way. It's still a bewildering part of the business to me.

PK: Do the original Oregon brewers lament that transformation?

JF: They don't talk about it, but I know, I think that's why Karl eventually left Bridgeport. I think it was just, I think at times it was corporate and I still find that in dealing with them. it's not like you can pick up the phone and talk to Kurt or Rob, you know? It's a different thing, or Mike or Brian. Mike doesn't answer the phone.

PK: Tiah do you have other questions?

TEM: I probably have lots of questions.

PK: How are we? Are we close to 5:00?

TEM: Yeah, it's about 10 till.

PK: We have a few minutes. What else? Now that we talked about a little bit about festivals and such. I know that you've been involved in art, you know, doing a lot of that stuff. Can you talk a little bit more about that culture of the festivals?

JF: Yeah. I think it's really interesting because the last few years that's been one of the things is a real proliferation of festivals. I think some of the, you know festivals getting bigger, getting more entrenched. But also, new festivals. You know basically kids who are the Portland Fruit Beer festival. This weekend's 01:20:00Farmhouse and Wild Ale Festival, Cezanne Festivals. These are all new things and I think there's a... you wonder how many weekends are going to be open because like the White Owl Social Festival doing a Logger Festival in July and people are staking their claim. It used to be that February would be the traditional month for brewers to not drink because it was the shortest month, of course, there really wasn't much impetuous to drink. Now, I mean, you're going to miss some festivals if you don't. I suppose you could go and not drink.

PK: They're overwhelming, then? or still exciting for you?

JF: Well, in some senses, I mean there's more of a feeling that you know like 01:21:00peripheral vision, feeling like things are going on just outside of your line of vision. At one time I would've said yeah I'm pretty much on top of the Oregon beer scene, now I wouldn't presume to say that. But, it's maybe even more exciting. You know, because the old-line breweries and brewers are doing great stuff too and the newcomers are, I mean everybody keeps working and really keeps the level going great, way up high. But you do sometimes feel like you're missing, you know? And you don't know what you're missing but you're missing it.

PK: Like you said, you also get a sense that some of the folks are missing the deeper history or deeper heritage of beer?

JF: Right. I find myself finding sounding suspiciously like an old guy sometimes when I talk to people. I find them, yeah, they'll listen, but I try not to hold forth.

TH: That makes me wonder too, you know, I'm sure everyone's writing about beer but I wonder what do you read?

JF: Frankly, I read very little of it. I'll read Allworth's sometimes, Beervana, because he's really good. But I've always, I'll read style books to read up on a 01:23:00certain beer. That's just my own kind of thing as a writer, is I've always trusted my instincts to get things. they haven't failed me yet.

PK: If you were running this oral history project through OSU who would you interview? Who would you want to sit down for a couple or few hours and have on record?

JF: Well, you definitely want Fred Eckhart. Fred Bowman. Rob and Curt and Karl. I'd probably talk to Gary Geist at Lucky Lab. Those guys, you know it's kind of a founding fathers those would be. Those are all good people and I'll 01:24:00undoubtable think of more, so...

PK: Any final thoughts or something for the record? We're going to keep bothering you, you know? but something for the record now?

JF: What's a guy have to do to get a beer around here? [Laughs].

TEM: Nice.

TH: What's the question we didn't ask that we should have?

JF: You guys got it, I thought pretty good. I didn't feel like there was anything like I needed to say. But I know that question because that's a good reporter's question, so you can't fool me [laughs].

PK: On that note, I think we should get John a beer.

TEM: That's right.

PK: Thanks John.

TEM: Thank you.

JF: Thank you.