Karl Ockert Oral History Interview, June 13, 2017

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay, now we're rolling.

KARL OCKERT: Hi I'm Karl Ockert. I'm director of brewing operations here at the Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon. Today is June 13, 2017.

TEM: And when were you born?

KO: I was born November 20, 1959.

TEM: Where were you born?

KO: I was built in the '50s [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: I was born in Akron, Ohio.

TEM I didn't think I knew that. How long did you live in Ohio?

KO: Probably about a year and a half and then we moved to Washington D.C. My dad was a labor economist. He worked for the rubber workers in Akron. And then he took a job at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C. and worked with George Meany and Lyndon Johnson on the... what do they call that thing? The New Deal. Not the New Deal, but the second part. I forget what they call it now. Back in the '60s, Medicare and all that stuff.

TEM: So that was, was the rubber industry still flourishing in Akron?

KO: Yep. Yeah [nods].

TEM: It was probably, what, in '70s and '80s that it started to...?

KO: Yeah, I don't know we lost track of all that stuff [smiles]. Yeah. Firestone High School is in Akron, Ohio. I know that [laughs].

TEM: Appropriately.

KO: So we lived there for a little while and the new moved out west. My dad decided at one point that he was tired of being an economist and wanted to be a Unitarian minister, so we moved to Berkeley, California, and he went to seminary school there. So I was there in the '60s, early '60s. I was very young, but kind of somewhat aware of what was going on because I had older siblings who were in high school at the time and there's all kinds of interesting things in Berkeley in the '60s as you know.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: Then we moved out to Los Angeles, and then life didn't work out quite so well as a minister. So he decided to change back to being a labor economist so he could get a steadier paycheck, and we moved up to Portland, Oregon, when I 00:02:00was 11.

TEM: So did he actually, I don't know... do you call it practicing, did he practice in Berkeley? Was he actually a minister at that point?

KO: He went to the seminary there, and his first assignment at a church was in Los Angeles. At a First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. And then he was marrying and burying people all the way through. He did the wedding service for myself and my wife, my sisters. So, yeah, he was pretty active. I think a couple nephews and nieces. Kind of handy to have a minister in the family [laughs].

TEM: Probably for lots of reasons.

KO: Yeah, yeah.

TEM: Do you have memories, are they sort of the little kid memories of being in Berkeley?

KO: Yeah, yeah. The campus was fairly close by, Cal was pretty close by. I remember going there and looking for frogs in the streams with my buddies and just kind of being generally aware that there's a lot of stuff happening, you know? But not really understanding it because I was probably, geez, in first 00:03:00grade, kindergarten, first grade kind of thing. So hearing about it, but it had no impact or meaning to me. I just was kind of vaguely aware that stuff was happening.

TEM: How much older, what about brothers and sisters, how much...?

KO: I had a sister that was at Berkeley High School, and another sister who is, she's a few years older than me, but she was kind of in between. She wasn't quite in high school yet.

TEM: It's kind of a magical place.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: I imagine it was more mag-I don't know, differently magical, I guess, in the 1960s.

KO: Yeah. When I visited again, it sort of has a little bit of a feeling of home for some reason. I'm not sure why. But it kind of feels a little bit like home there.

TEM: The campus is such a park, too. You know it has that feeling of--

KO: It is. That's what we liked about it. We'd go there and hunt for minnows and frogs and salamanders and stuff like that as a little kid.

TEM: What are some of your memories of moving down to L.A., then? That's a, sort 00:04:00of a different part of California?

KO: Yeah a big change. Yeah, we lived in L.A. We were in the Los Feliz district. And I just remember a few couple years there. We moved about every two years pretty much as I was growing up until we moved up to Portland, and I think my mom finally put her foot down and said, we're done. I counted 10 different homes by the time I was 11 years old.

TEM: That's a lot.

KO: That's a lot of moving. When we had kids we decided to stay put. We planted our roots in the Portland area there and stayed.

TEM: What part of Portland were you living in when you were little?

KO: Lake Oswego.

TEM: Oh, so you---yeah.

KO: ... south of Portland, yeah. Been in Lake Oswego pretty much since 1972. Still live there. Yep, it's home. Bend is home now, too.

TEM: I was going to say, on times when you're not here.

KO: [Laughs] I have a place in Bend. We really like it here. Bend was always a place when I was growing up to go fishing and backpacking and hiking. It's just 00:05:00this like outdoor paradise here and so... and there's this aroma, the Bend aroma that happens as the weather starts warming up where you get this sage and the juniper has this like potpourri effect. And so just that smell memory for me it really triggers old memories of growing up here in the '70s, you know, come visiting in the '70s.

TEM: That's what I... there's spots on UC Berkeley's campus with the eucalyptus trees that are that same way that like... I feel like I've been here.

KO: [Smiles] yeah, that's right. Yeah.

TEM: Did you go into Portland a lot? I mean Lake Oswego is not that far away from Portland. But did you go into Portland a lot when you were growing up?

KO: Not a lot, really. You know big cities are not really that special to me. I like smaller towns. I would pretty much stick around Lake Oswego. Go down to Bend. Go to the beach. Go up to Mt. Hood. That's kind of where my haunts were. Sometimes we'd all get together and go down to watch the midnight movies there 00:06:00in downtown Portland at the fifth avenue cinema I think it was called. And watch the old concert movies and things like that.

TEM: Portland was a very different city then, too [laughs].

KO: [Smiles] Yeah, it has changed a bit. Yeah.

TEM: So what were you interested in... am I remembering right that your mom home brewed? Is that right?

KO: Yeah. My mom was Czech. She was born in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1920s. Her dad worked on the canal as a security guard. He was from what they call Czechia now. It used to be the Czech Republic. It used to be Czechoslovakia, then it was Czech Republic, and I think it's called Czechia now. Anyway, he was from the Moravian-there's Bohemia and there's Moravia [motions with hands]-and so Moravia is the eastern part of the Czech Republic. And that's where he was from. And he was a bachelor when he moved over there, and he 00:07:00actually moved all over the place. I came to find later on that he and his brother had established the first movie house theater in Shiner, Texas, which Shiner was a sister company to Bridgeport later on, so it was kind of funny to think that I had kinfolk down there in Shiner, Texas. Anyway, he ended up in the Panama Canal Zone and was a security guard there and he grew lonesome and he put in for a mail-order bride, which was my grandmother. And she was also from Moravia and she came over, they got married, he was a bit older than she was. And they both spoke Czech. My mother was born there. She spoke Czech, until she moved. So they moved up to the states and they moved to Martinez, which is just east of the bay area, and the big thing back then was to assimilate. It was to not be different. So she was forbidden to speak Czech after a short while, and 00:08:00they were supposed to learn English.

TEM: So this would have been in the 1920s? Is that right? 19-into the '30s?

KO: '20s, yeah, close to the '30s yeah, probably 1925 was... I'm thinking... I can't remember when she was born. She was born in '25 so it probably would have been 1928, something like that. And this was... prohibition was still in effect. Immigrants all across the country in American could not understand what prohibition was about. They just didn't get it. Because in Europe you drink alcohol. Because you had that with dinner. It's convivial. It's not that big oppressive thing that it was I guess that triggered some of the prohibition feelings here in this country. But my grandfather, he liked wine. He liked to make slivovitz, which is a plum brandy, and he liked beer. So they made them at home. So my mom learned how to make beer, wine, and brandy at home. And consequently when we moved back up to Portland, we moved to Portland in the 00:09:00early 1972, where the intel campus now in Hillsboro is, was full of orchards. So we would go and pick, I would help her pick apples and pears and peaches and cherries and we would go and make wine out of these things. She'd can a bunch of them and the new would make wine out of them. We made some pretty good wines, actually. So growing up, it was, I grew up in a fairly European attitude toward alcohol. I was not allowed to like overconsume at the dinner table, but I could have wine if I wanted to. An allotment of wine if I wanted to. I could have beer. It wasn't that big of a deal. I grew up not thinking that beer and wine consumption is a big deal. I did enjoy making the products, you know? We had a lot of fun. We went to Steinbarts and we'd shop for all the stuff, the Pabst Blue Ribbon extract to make beer with and the hops, and so some very early 00:10:00memories of doing all those when I was probably, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 years old something like that.

TEM: Did you mom, kind of, not reclaim or re-highlight, but did she want to associate with that European ancestry that she had? Like later on? Was that something that switched that she realized, hey this is pretty special?

KO: I don't remember her ever really focusing on it much. I mean, there was a lot, this was back in the Cold War era where there was a lot happening there, and I don't remember it being mentioned a whole lot at home. However, she and my aunt and my grandmother went back to the Czech Republic before the communist thing ended. They got special visas and they were able to go visit. They were able to go visit the village where my grandmother grew up. My mother told me 00:11:00that she heard Czech language and it kind of sounded vaguely familiar, but she could never adjust back to it. But my grandmother instantly reverted back to speaking Czech and couldn't remember any English [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: So they were trying to communicate with her, because she just like completely forsook all of her English completely and just went back to Czech. So she was speaking Czech the whole time and went back and visited the old villages and stuff like that. So I probably have lots of cousins in these villages, and I've been to the Czech Republic a few years ago with my daughters. We took them there. And really enjoyed it, but I didn't get up to the villages where my ancestors, I guess, came from. Another trip perhaps.

TEM: Yes [laughs].

KO: I did drink a lot of good beer [laughs].

TEM: That was the ancestry link.

KO: Yeah, yeah.

TEM: So did you feel like you had a kind of talent early on or a heightened interest in fermenting things?

KO: I have always really liked science, and I've always really liked art and to 00:12:00me brewing is a really cool way of combining the two. I ended up going down to Humboldt State University after I graduated. Actually after I graduated from high school I took a year off and I hitchhiked across the United States with my dog. I ended up in Florida, came back again, and then decided to enroll. I met my... I met a girlfriend who's now my wife for these past 37 years, 38 years, and she took me to Europe, and she's from Northern Ireland. So it was my first real plane trip. I was 19 years old at the time. I remember landing in London, and we made our way through cities buses and what-we had no money, so-city busses and what not, hitchhiking out toward Kent to get to the ferry, the Dover ferry, to get across to Europe and my encountering my first pint of Guinness at a pub and just thinking, "Oh I've heard so much about this I really want to try 00:13:00a pint of Guinness." So I took one sip and I thought, "Hmm. This is really strong." And so it took me three bags of potato chips to get through my first pint of Guinness [laughs]. But I developed a real taste for these beers when I was over there. So when we got back I was home brewing at the place I was living in in Seattle at the time, and Carol was helping me, you know provide... getting the supplies and helping me home brew and stuff like that. It was one of these things where I went off to Humboldt State, she and I both went down there, and I was enrolled in a sort of a Natural Resources that's what really the college really kind of turned it on and home brewing all through my first year of college and enjoying the science. I was taking chemistry, and I was taking biology, and I was taking earth sciences and soil sciences and just really enjoying all of that, and math. I wasn't enjoying math quite so much [smile]. In 00:14:00any event, Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and the first thing he did was he gutted out most of the wildlife and natural resources, the interior department, the department of forestry, the department of agriculture, were really seriously cut back and so myself and a lot of other people had to question what we were doing because it looked like employment was going to be, prospects were going to be pretty bleak. I wanted to get into forestry at the time, but after a lot of soul searching and talking to Carol, and she was working for a place that did employee-employment opportunity screening and helping people figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.

TEM: It was very convenient [laughs].

KO: Yes, it was extremely convenient. So we talked about that. I was home brewing the whole time and really enjoying that a lot. And making some beers that were actually drinkable, so that was nice. And then we just kind of thinking what do you like to do? Well, I really like science and I really like 00:15:00making beer. So we looked around, and there was one program in the U.S. that was going. It was at UC Davis down in Davis, California. I thought, wow, you know what, this would really float my boat. I would really enjoy that.

TEM: Going back to England for a second, did you, since you were in Kent, did you see hops? Did you know at that point...?

KO: I didn't really know, yeah. I knew kind of vaguely that they were there, but I didn't see them. I think the closest I really got to the beer scene was going around Europe and tasting different beers in Germany and Greece and France and Austria and just really enjoying the beer scene quite a bit and just really enjoying the different flavors and then going back to the UK, and my brother who was living out of-who was going to be my brother-in-law-was in the Royal Navy. So we were in Belfast, which was an experience all in and of itself, and he took me pub crawling around Belfast and then around England. And so I got to taste a 00:16:00cask conditioned beer for the first time and all these different beers around the regions. I was in Scotland and tasting Scottish ales and in Ireland drinking Guinness made in Ireland. The different beers there and just kind of understanding more the beer was way beyond Rainer and Blitz. That was a bit of an epiphany.

TEM: Well, so did you, were you thinking about how you could make that at home? Did it feel like oh I wonder how these ingredients...?

KO: Yeah. I was playing with ingredients at home, but I was making kind of light ales at home and I was just making...I was following Fred Eckhart's book, the three D's on lager beers: I was making steamed beer, which is like a real pale lager-y type beer made warm. I was making a little bit of stouts, but I really wasn't very good at that at all. I hadn't tasted a really good one. So to be able to taste something that really tasted good. So when I came back I was 00:17:00really all gung ho on really expanding my horizon. My mom would make beers that were just very lightly hop pale ales, is what we would make at home. And home brewing technology in the '70s was awful. It was awful. We used awful dried yeast. Which are like... they just made the beer was cidery and tart and it just, the equipment wasn't very good. So home-brewed beer was not great. It was good usually for about two weeks and then just started getting worse. It had a very short shelf life to it, so you had to drink furiously. She put corks on these things, because you couldn't get crowns at the time or she couldn't get the right bottles or something. I don't know what it was. But she put corks in and then she would dip a cloth and wax and then put that over the cork and then put a rubber band around it. She'd try to keep the cork from falling out. Inevitably we'd put too much sugar in there and it would re-ferment the bottle and [makes popping noise with mouth] it was time to drink [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs]. There's some popping in the basement.

KO: So home brewing was kind of hit and miss back in those days. It has really improved quite a bit over the years.

TEM: At the home brew shop was there a kind of awareness of ingredients? Like these hops are grown down the road?

KO: Hops? You know hops in the 1970s were not near the varieties that we see now. So hops were very, very scarce. They were old. They were badly, I mean the hops were brown and they smelled cheesy and they'd bring the imported hops they were terrible and they were really expensive. So for a one ounce bag of hops of "East Kant Goldings," who knows what the heck they actually were. They were brown. They smelled like stale cheese. And it would cost you $5. And so it was just add insult to injury that they were so expensive, too. Then there was the American hops were mostly clusters and fuddles and maybe some northern brewers or something. But there really was not. It wasn't nearly as developed at that 00:19:00point. Those varieties even commercially much less available to hobbyists. Then there were just these extracts you could buy. You could buy imported ones or whatever. But they all had kind of this weird sort of flavor to them. They were overcooked, the extract plant, so they had kind of the overcooked flavor to them. Then the yeast, which makes a lot of beer flavor comes from yeast and the fermentation, and we were using these horrible dried yeasts that might as well have put bread yeast into it, and they left the beer tasting very cider-y and tart. Now there's fresh yeast you can get. There's fresh hops you can get. People are much more sophisticated in their home brew equipment. Where I was using a trashcan with a plastic garbage bag as a liner to it, and putting my beer in there, people have got stainless steel equipment and things like that. I still home brew. I have a good friend and neighbor down the street. We still get 00:20:00together and make cider and blackberry wine and home brew. It's fun.

TEM: But very different.

KO: It tastes a lot better now [laughs].

TEM: I imagine you have some different skill set now.

KO: Yeah, I kind of do. I understand a little bit more what's going on. He's a geologist, so he doesn't really get that. He's good on understanding rocks, but not necessarily yeast.

TEM: So go to Davis. What was it like to move, I guess you were in California? What was it like to move closer to where you were at a certain point?

KO: It was great. I just really enjoyed it. After my first year we decided we were going to go and do the brewing program. It was a called a fermentation science degree. It was affiliated with the food science department and the department of enology, viticulture and enology, so wine making distilling, and brewing were kind of under that one roof, but brewing was more shared with food science. It was kind of strange, but the fermentation science was the name of 00:21:00the degree. And so when I realized that's what I wanted to do, I asked what the requirements were to get in. I had to take a lot more chemistry. So I went up through organic chemistry at Humboldt and microbiology and bacteriology. Because brewing is kind of a combination of microbiology, chemistry, engineering, and magic [motions with hands and shrugs]. Those are the four main ingredients of how to be a good brewer. So I took a lot higher math levels and was kind of gearing myself up. Then I was able to get into the school. I had good grades. I was able to get into Davis. We moved there during my junior year, beginning of my junior year. We lived in on-campus student housing. Met a lot of real cool people and had a great time. Carol worked, eventually ended up working for the primate center on campus just helping do logistics and things like that with 00:22:00them. We just I think we both really enjoyed it. I took summer school. My junior year I took summer school. I took physics in summer school. Not necessarily a highly-recommended strategy. And some computer science so that I could graduate on time the following year. And just was in high gear. Just really eating it up. It was great.

TEM: Who else was in the program with you? Who do you remember taking those... did you have to take food science classes too, or was there enough, really--?

KO: I took food science classes. I took viticulture and enology classes. I didn't take distilling. I kind of wished I had. One of my classmates, Calvin Dennison, is the director of wine making for Gallo Wines. Another one, Kirk Norris, went on to Anheuser-Busch and became the vice president of packaging for Anheuser-Busch. I actually worked for him a short stint at the Newark, New Jersey brewery. Another one, John Serbia, became the president of brewing for 00:23:00Anheuser-Busch. The top brewing job. And then I had a lot of them that are just sort of scattered to the winds. A lot of them went to work for Anheuser-Busch. Some of them went to work for other breweries. Some of them just decided this was not for them and then went somewhere else entirely or went to wine making or what not. Those are some of the folks that I went to-and I'm still in contact with Kirk and Cal. Still exchange letters and Christmas cards, so.

TEM: Who were your teachers there? Do you know the...

KO: Oh the primary teacher was a man named Michael Lewis. And Dr. Lewis was from Wales. He graduated from the University of Birmingham in England. And he was in charge of the program I think from the early '60s on through. I think he finally retired in the late '90s and spawned a huge number of brewing students. I mean, 00:24:00most of the brewing students that ran Anheuser-Busch in particular and Coors and Miller and all these breweries and beers that you... some of the breweries don't exist anymore unfortunately, but... breweries... Rainier Brewery, the Blitz brewery came from that program. Dan Carey is another classmate of who is over at New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin. So a lot of craft breweries started up. Dan and I were the two first craft brewers. We called ourselves micro-brewers back in those days. We graduated, he graduated a year before me and then I graduated in 1983. And we were together on the phone constantly because there was no support for microbreweries or craft breweries at all. Nobody made equipment for us. Nobody knew what to do with us as far as supplying raw materials. So we would bounce things off... we still do. In fact, I was just asking about a canning line filler. We still bounce ideas off each other.

But we were kind of our own little resource network. This was before emails, 00:25:00before Facebook, before the internet, before cell phones. Can you imagine trying to talk to people? It was a telephone or it was written snail mail. Those are the ways we could communicate. That was it. I just look back at that and think how the heck did we actually pull that off? Now it's so easy. In the brewing business there's a lot of comradery, a lot of information sharing, so much easier now. We have forms, email forms, things like that. You can post an inquiry. I had an inquiry. I posted an inquiry not too long ago about piping beer down a hill because Deschutes is built on a hill. So if we want to put a can line down below, how will we get beer from the top of the hill to the bottom? So I just asked does anybody know about that. I must have gotten three dozen responses from different brewing engineers around the world, saying, ah, yes, well I've tried that or theoretically this should work. All that kind of stuff. Back in the old days it wasn't that way at all. I kept some of those 00:26:00connections. It was harder to keep connections back then. I lost track of a lot of folks over the years.

TEM: Was there a sense that... so you graduated in '83, which is the kind of kernel, beginning, I don't know how many microbreweries there were... six, seven, eight nine [laughs]...?

KO: Yeah, probably under ten is as high as it gets.

TEM: Was there a sense that something was changing?

KO: You know I think there was an interesting sense that there was something going on, but it was so under developed at that point. Sierra Nevada was making beer in these little stubby brown bottles with really gaudy-looking labels which they haven't really changed a whole lot of over the years. They had about this much sediment at the bottom of the beer [shows about an inch with hand]. It was twice as expensive as a regular Budweiser was, maybe more than that. And it tasted like okay home brew. And remember home brew wasn't very good back then.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: So it was not a really like, wow, this is really a kick ass beer. And their 00:27:00level of expertise was they were brewing in essentially a shed somewhere with reclaimed, re-habited equipment. You know Ken Grossman was a genius at mechanical making-he's like a MacGyver, a brewing MacGyver, so he would come up and figure out how to manipulate these things into something useful, but it wasn't much better than a bathtub and a little hand bottle filling and capping station. We knew there was something going on. I was really entranced, even before I moved there, I saw an article in a paper about a fellow in England that was starting something called the Fox and Firkin Pubs. And they were brewery pubs and that whole concept was, believe it or not, completely new and alien. I had never heard of such a thing as having a brewery that was in the pub that would supply beer right there [motions with hands]. What an incredible concept. So I actually cut that article out and had it on our refrigerator in Arcata for the year that I was studying. That's what I want to do. I think that is the 00:28:00coolest idea. They were illegal. I came to find [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: When I got to Davis, there was a fellow in town who ran a pub and he was trying hard to change the law so they could put a brewery into it. And he didn't make it. By the time I graduated it still was stalled out. I got involved in that with Dick Ponzi, Dick and Nancy Ponzi, I got involved with them after I graduated from Davis up here in Portland. I sent out resumes to people all over the world. I typed each one of them out and sent them out by snail mail because there was no email back then. So I sent resumes everywhere in the world. Down to Tasmania, the Cascade Brewery in Tasmania. Breweries in England, Scotland. Breweries all across the United States, Canada, Mexico. Anywhere I figured that we could possibly get in. That's what I was trying to do. And so I sent also-and 00:29:00that wasn't panning out. There was a recession starting up, and people weren't hiring. Then I started sending out some resumes to some breweries, some wineries here in the northwest and got a couple of responses. One of them from Dick Ponzi at Ponzi vineyards. He invited me to come in and he said the thing that he thought was interesting on the resume was the brewing classes that I had taken because he was thinking about trying to put a little brewery together in Portland. And that's how that all got kicked off.

TEM: And that's after... so you got to Portland after Cartwright was closed?

KO: Cartwright had just closed and Dick had helped, um, forgot what his name is...

TEM: Chuck.

KO: Chuck, yeah.

TEM: Chuck Coury.

KO: Chuck Coury, started... [Nods].

TEM: [Laughs] Chuck!

KO: Yeah. Chuck Coury started brewing. Well, Chuck Coury made beer the way he made wine. He was a wine maker and so his beer was not much better than the average home-brew that was out there. And remember home brew was not very good at that point [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: It was sour and gamey and had hooves and antlers and it didn't go over. These days you might have been able to get away with calling it farmhouse brew. Back then it was just farm. It just didn't taste good. So it failed. But Dick, after seeing all that, thought, wow you know I think it could actually be done right if somebody came in here and actually knew something about how to make beer. So I helped him with 1980... I hired on in July of 1983. I graduated in June '83, hired on July of '83, I helped in the vineyard and the tasting room. And then the crush, which was tremendous fun in the fall of '83. Working a crush at a vineyard is just a, it's a real rush, because grapes just start coming in and they do not let up and it's just round the clock, fast and furious wine making. Great fun. Some of the most fun I've had in this business. And then we were immediately planning that brewery that summer going into crush, and how are we going to do this. Looking around for sites, talking about equipment, talking 00:31:00about how the process works. We scouted around and we found a place in the Pearl District. It wasn't the Pearl District, it was called the Northwest Industrial Triangle [nods and smiles].

TEM: [Laughs] I can see why maybe they renamed it.

KO: I just called it the scary warehouse district back in those days. We found a place to rent in a needle brick building that was a rope factory built in the 1880s. It had cobblestone streets in front of it. And we thought, wow, this is a really cool setting. The landlord was kind of eccentric but interesting guy. Rodger Madden. Really enjoyed getting to know him over the years.

TEM: Did he own other property? Was he like a land owner?

KO: Yeah. He was an old, very established Portland family. His wife was one of the Bighams from Bigham Construction. They built the rail station there in Portland, and they did a lot of other big old buildings in Portland. He was old West Hills. They were both old West Hills families. Interesting people to get to know. They're very well-connected with the whole Portland scene. Then we started 00:32:00the thing up, and the whole idea from starting it was to be able to do a pub at the brewery. I guess that's how I got here. So, we had to be able to change the law, because in Oregon it was illegal. You could have a tasting room, you could give your beer away. You just weren't allowed to charge people. So in 1984 we got together, we started the brewery in fall of '84. We built it going from late, well, from early '84 we built the brewery and got it operating and selling beer by November of 1984.

TEM: Were you selling it yourself? So you could self-distribute?

KO: We had a distributor. [Shakes head]

TEM: You had to have a distributor?

KO: We had to have a distributor. No, that's not true. We could have. We could have sold our own... breweries were able to sell their own beer. Widmers was selling their own beer. Miller brewing company was selling its own beer. So we could have. We decided not to. We decided we just didn't have the energy to be able to do that. The bandwidth to be able to do it. We actually were selling 00:33:00quite well. I was out there, part of my job was to put my salesman hat on and go out there and try to explain to pub owners why they should spend twice as much for a keg of beer they've never heard of before. Absolutely no marketing support whatsoever. You know we had some table tents. We made these little badges. We had a little badge-o-matic and we'd make these little badges with our logo on them [motions with hands and laughs]. So Matt Sage and I would go out there and we would try to sell some beer and we were really the pioneers. Kurt and Rob were doing their thing. You know, when Kurt and Rob were starting up I thought, oh geez, I don't know how Portland's going to actually support two of these things. One is going to be a struggle, two, I think we're both screwed. What it turned out to be was that it gave us credibility to have more than one and then when Portland Brewery started up, yet again, it was... initially we were all a little leery but then it was like, well, actually it helps people understand that this is real. It's not just some silly little thing that's happening. And 00:34:00we got together with people from Portland Brewing, Art Lawrence and Fred Bowman, the Widmers, the McMenamin brothers, their dad who was an attorney who had a lot of good contacts down in Salem. Dick and Nancy had worked on the tasting room law for wineries, so we tried to template that. And we got almost nowhere because the beer and wine wholesalers lobby is extremely powerful. And so their lobbyists said no, and then a lot of people kind of said, whoa [motions with face and hands]. So our bill didn't even make it out of committee. And then we discovered something called the gut and stuff. The gut and stuff is you take a bill that's made it out of committee but it's not going anywhere and you take basically all the language out of that, which was to, I believe, if I remember right, it was to allow alcohol sales in bed and breakfasts.

TEM: Yeah, that's how I remember it too. Which was just weird that that's how it...

KO: It wasn't going anywhere. Yeah. It wasn't going anywhere. It got out of committee and it was just stalled. So you take that bill and you basically manipulate the language. And you basically took all that stuff that people 00:35:00didn't like out of it. You might have used the word bed and breakfast in there somewhere. I don't know just how extensive the gutting out was. But you stuff in the bill that you want to put in there. And it had some legs. Because out of committee where the lobbyists were very powerful influence on the committee, but on the chamber at large was a different story. And it was a very sexy little thing. It was because wines, the wineries were coming up and people were in love with these little wineries. And the breweries were starting to come up and people thought wow this is a cool industry. And we could sell them on the idea that we were using Oregon grown hops. So we were kind of reaching out to the agricultural section. And it had some legs. So the beer and wine people tried to make some caps on different things. That's about as much they could do. But it became law I believe in '84. Brian, the McMenamins, but a brewery into the Hillsdale Pub and we put a pub into the Bridgeport Brewery and we opened a pub 00:36:00in I think it was Spring of '85. So I finally got my dream. The refrigerator dream happened. I had a brewery with a pub. It was just pure magic. It really I think transformed that area of town. Because nobody came there. It was the old scary warehouse district. There were a few artists living there, but there were no galleries or anything. It was cheap rent for some artists. A few. But now people started coming in. and we had festivals. We did...once we got the brew pub license we could do a lot of stuff, but that place was packed every night.

TEM: Who was there? Like who were the people that you...?

KO: Everything from construction workers in the area who may have been in the armed forces in Europe and they wanted to try, they missed those flavors. So they would come in. We had a lot of expat Brits. I made cask condition beers, so we had cask condition beer on tap. Probably the first cask condition beer ever in the states. So we were the only ones making that. And we were making it the 00:37:00way it was supposed to be made. So you know a lot of English, a lot of British people coming in. And then just people who just were curious. There was sort of the good food movement was going on at the top. You know real pasta, fresh pasta, artisan breads, good coffee, teas that were coming in that were more than just Lipton. So people were getting out of the Wonder Bread, Budweiser, Lipton movement and they were going to stuff that had flavor with it.

TEM: Were people talking about agriculture at that point? Was there, again, an awareness of... I think you guys had an awareness of hops as you said, but was that... it's so strange to think of it being separate now.

KO: I think all that was beginning. Yeah. Yeah. No I think that was part of it. There was definitely a part of that whole movement was thinking about where does your food come from and how processed has it become? I grew up in a family that 00:38:00my dad was very big in organic foods so we ate well. Not that we ate well. We ate good, nourishing food. There wasn't always a lot of it, but there was always good nourishing food. We didn't eat a lot of junk. We weren't allowed to eat junk. To me it was all very natural to go in that direction and see what was happening. So it was kind of cool to be a part of that. And then being able to have a pub on site was like that was our biggest marketing tool ever. Because people would come in and they'd actually put a face behind the brewery. And initially when we started that we put a bar in, and there was no separation between the brewery and the bar. And Dick's idea and Nancy's idea was for Matt and I were still the only two brewers there, that if we had a customer we were supposed to drop what we were doing and go over and serve them a beer [motions a tap with hand].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: Just kind of a winery tasting room thing. That lasted for about, I don't know, less than a week. I was like, no. This place is packed. We cannot possibly make beer and do that. So we hired a guy named Stewart Ramsey who was running 00:39:00the Grants Brew pub up in Yakama. He's a Scottish guy. I met him. I said, wow, if you're interested we'd love to have you down in Portland. And so he came in and was our first bar manager in Portland. And thank God he took over. We hired in some great help, and we just had a fantastic crew. It was a huge amount of fun back in those days. We had no idea how much it cost for us to make beer. No one tracked anything. It was an accountant-free zone. We'd just make... all we knew is we would charge as much as the market would allow and everything we made was sold, and we had people standing in line to put our beer on tap. It was a magic kind of situation.

TEM: When was the first time you went to a hop field?

KO: You know it was kind of weird. Because there's a hop grower, Gayle Goshie, who tried to establish a linkage to us early on. She's probably the only hop grower that actually wanted to go and meet with us. And I think I remember going 00:40:00down to visit her at one point. But at that point the hop growers and the brewers were kept apart by our suppliers' dealers. The interface... they would almost throw themselves bodily in between us.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: So we weren't really allowed to make friends with them, and they weren't allowed to make friends with us. It was kind of a strange situation. But I did have a group of hop growers over for a meeting. They had a lunch at our place at one point, and I got to meet a few of them, including Gayle. And I believe I had a chance to go out and see the hop farms. This wasn't for a couple of years after we started the brewing. I knew they were down there. I just didn't know how to interface with... I didn't know who to talk to. And we were so damn busy anyway. We had no time to... I mean we worked 16-hour days everyday. It was exhausting. Thank goodness I was only 23 years old or I never would have been able to survive.

TEM: What kind of styles did you want to make? Was it kind of anything that you guys wanted to try? Was there a sense of what customers would want? Like how did 00:41:00you find out?

KO: We worked with some of the local bar people. Notably, Don Younger, about what he thought people would like and with Fred Eckhart. Fred was a big proponent of hops way early on. If it had been his way, India Pale Ale IPA would have been the lead thing back in the early 1980s instead of back in the early 2000s or late 1990s. But we tried to use the British styles as sort of a template. So Bridgeport Ale was formulated after McEwan's Export Scottish Ale. Sweet and malty not necessarily very bitter. But it had just lovely caramel notes and a very luscious beer. I really liked it. In fact, I like malt beers like that best. So for me it was a great beer to try. And we thought if you came up with something that was very bitter and assertive, the market wasn't really ready for that. The market was not developed. It was not sophisticated. So we 00:42:00did that. We started with that. Then we did a golden ale, which was a little more hop forward but still pretty mild by today's standards. Then we did a stout, which I really liked a lot. It was a dry stout. But stouts are a hard sell. And the dark beers are always a kind of a smaller part of the market. So we did those three. Those were the main ones. And then we did red ales and different kinds of pale ales. And we did a wheat beer. We monkeyed around with a lot of stuff. We made one called Rose City Ale we put rose-hips into. We didn't do a Belgian beers. We didn't do any experimentations with yeast, alternative yeast fermentations that would have given us kind of these tart flavors or bananas and clove flavors that you get in like a Bavarian Hefeweizen. Some of the stuff that's really popular, starting to become very popular now or has become very popular now, we didn't do anything like that. We were just trying to break trail, you know, trying to get people to drink beers that were outside of 00:43:00the realm of Blitz and Olympia that had more flavor profile to them but not so far over the edge that it was going to be a challenge for them to finish a pint.

TEM: How involved were Dick and Nancy at that point in the operations of the brewery? They were still obviously money makers.

KO: Yeah, never in the operations. No, Dick is a mechanical engineer by trade. So he was great in designing the machines and the equipment that we use. JV Northwest is a local tank fabricator, and they're in Canby now, but they used to be in Tualatin and they were friends of Dick's because they would make beer, wine tanks for them. We fabricated a few things. We bought quite a few things that were used. Dick had a barn at the winery that had a bunch a tanks in it. We repurposed some of those old tanks. We had a tank from the C.E. Howard Company that was built in 1943. We used that for fermenters. We had old dairy tanks. 00:44:00Just a lot of cobbled-together stuff. He was really good at helping get all those things up and going. Operationally, he didn't know anything about brewing. He really didn't want to know a whole lot about brewing. He liked wine making. So pretty much left that up to me. Then I assembled a group that we basically ran the place.

TEM: It's so funny to just... I love those early Bridgeport pictures. They're so... I won't say overused, but there are some that definitely you can bring to mind. And I just... those... you guys just welding stuff together and plumbing and...

KO: Yeah. Sitting on the dock [laughs]. I think there's one of the dock with three of us and a couple of kegs on either side that's been used quite a lot. My brother-in-law, my Swedish brother-and-law took a lot of black and white photos that made it look like wow, this is from the turn of the last century, you know. It was, really it was...

TEM: They look hardcore. Y'all look hard core.

KO: Yeah it was. We were working hard. We just played hard too. We had so much 00:45:00fun. And Carol was, my wife, was very instrumental in helping us survive. She'd bring us food. She'd give us advice. She gave me a lot of advice. She still does you know what's going on and how to work things out. You know, it was tough work, but we just had a blast. I had so much energy back then.

TEM: Yeah, well I love those stories that Carol told in her oral history about bringing food down and basically saying...

KO: Feeding us, yeah.

TEM:... like you guys need to eat stuff.

KO: You got to stop and eat, yeah.

TEM: ...And I'd like to see you.

KO: Yeah. You've got to stop and eat. So she would bring down like casseroles, and bread and cheese and meats and we would try to just put big group meals together and just chow down and then back to it again, so.

TEM: How did you... I don't know how involved you were, since you were obviously busy on the brewing side. How did it work to conceive of what a brew pub was, 00:46:00the pub part. What was the kind of vibe that people were going for? What was in your mind? What did that logistically look like?

KO: I think it was just sort of that very super casual, we didn't have table service. You'd go to the bar, you'd order a beer. We had a little... you were required to serve food and we wanted to serve food. The Ponzis...Nancy's a great cook and she wanted to do pizza. So we figured out how to make pizza. Not like instant pizza to crust, but actually make pizza with some wort from the fermented beer that you could get out of the brew house without hops in it yet was just really sweet and we'd use wort and we had a sourdough starter that was fed with wort and that would go in then we'd make these big... well, I didn't, but the other guys would make these big piles of doughs in the morning. So we had fresh dough, and she had a recipe for pizza sauce and how to make pizza and we had this little glorified easy bake oven that would do one pizza at a time. 00:47:00So we would start this thing up and get a couple of pies out there cut up and sell them by the slice. And then as people came into that one front area, the building had so much of its own natural charm. We really didn't have to do much to it. And we bought used furniture from a restaurant supply store. So it had kind of... it just already felt like it'd been there for about fifty years. And it was just so comfortable. Just like a really well-worn shoe or a coat or something that you really like to wear. People would come in and they just instantly felt I think comfortable there. And the oven after we'd be cooking these pies, these pizza pies all night long, the pie would come out and people were like...it was like throwing feed into a truck pond [motions with hands].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: They would just gobble it all up and we furiously making more pizza pies and then we finally got bigger ovens, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But there was this big beams, it was very old Portland, beams that were basically whole tree trunks that'd just been sheered into a rectangle... old growth beams 00:48:00that if there had been a fire at that place, the steel would have burned first before those beams. They were just beautiful pieces of wood and brick. Dick and I had sand blasted all the lead-based paint off the brick, which probably wasn't a good idea, and exposed this beautiful brick. So we had brick and beams and timbers. And then there was a big window. We finally did separate the beer at the brewery from the bar, so a big window out there looking right into the brewery so you could see everything that was going on. In those days microbrewery was a place where you could stand in one spot, turn around 360-degrees and see the entire operation. That was a definition of a microbrewery. It's a little different now.

TEM: Did you start to see early on kind of companion, I don't know, coffee shops or bakeries or that kind of like companion businesses? Artisan companion businesses?

KO: Yeah, things popped up. There was a coffee shop, there was a roaster that 00:49:00opened up. Bridgetown Coffees opened up a few blocks away. All of the artisan breads things started popping up. The area became gentrified pretty quickly. And when we moved in in the industrial northwest industrial triangle, we were told that that would always, always, always be an industrial like manufacturing area in perpetuity, no argument, could never change. And then in the middle of the night sometime there was a vote at city hall and it turned into the Pearl District. And all of a sudden building were coming down and condominiums are going in and the old feed company across the street from us, Wilbur-Ellis Feed Company, which took animal remains and blended them into animal food, it was the most interesting place... blood meal and bone meal and all kinds of interesting stuff blended it back into making more food for more animals... very smelly operation. Anyway, that was replaced by a Safeway. Very ironic. It went from animal feed to people feed. But I mean really gentrified all around. You wouldn't recognize it now. The light rail came through, the street car came 00:50:00through. We were under for about 8 years, I left Bridgeport in 19... yeah, it was 1990, I returned back in 1996, and we were under constant construction there from about '97 or '98 until I left in 2010. All the buildings were raised and then rebuilt the place. It is now the Pearl District. It is no longer the scary warehouse district. It's now the Pearl District.

TEM: It's so different. It happened while I was gone, while I was away from Oregon and come back and you're like... [Laughs].

KO: You know the thing that Carol and I still laugh sort of about, is that we could have bought an entire city block for $500,000. No kidding. It would have had an old derelict warehouse on it. And we talked about that at one point that we could have just found a corner somewhere with a toilet and a sink and made 00:51:00due somehow. It would've taken a lot of vision, but the real estate then was just like nobody wanted to be there. It was ripe for redevelopment.

TEM: Although, ironically, and maybe the reason that you all ended up there, your neighbor, sort of around the corner, was Henry Weinhard's.

KO: Yeah, they were just down the block, yeah.

TEM: Which was still an operation when you started.

KO: Yeah, they were a few streets south of us there. Widmers moved in literally around the corner on Lovejoy. We were on Marshall. Helped the Widmers get going. They had a lot of questions. Kurt was an IRS auditor or something. He was a home brewer, but he didn't really know anything about scaling up for brewery. So I helped him design tanks and you know just kind of helped him get started where I could. At first I was not sure I should, but then it became apparent that, well, they're going to be here, and if they're going to be here, we really want them to make good beer, because if they make beer that isn't good it's not going to help either of us. So we helped each other out as we were getting going, and 00:52:00they were just literally around the corner. And then Portland Brewing started over on Flanders. So it was almost like this Northwest brewing district. Because rent was really cheap and these buildings were in light manufacturing but they were zoned so that we could have people there if we wanted to. And we did, and it was good. Kurt didn't at his location. He moved over across the river and had a the pub, but we sure did.

TEM: So you were there until 1990.

KO: Yeah, 1990 I left. It was August 1990, and Matt Sage and I had both decided we were going to leave. We had notions of starting up a brewery. Looking back on it, it was a crazy time. I think Saddam... we invaded Iraq, the first Iraqi War that month, like the day after I gave notice [laughs]. And it was kind of crazy on the international scene. I had just had twins. My wife and I had twins. They 00:53:00were not even a year old yet. Looking back on it I think it was kind of crazy. But I think the thing about it was that at that point Bridgeport had grown and it had reached its capacity. It couldn't make any more beer. We were way oversold. My job was to take the orders down and deal with distributor, I loaded up trucks. I did brewing. I did everything. I did marketing. I did sales. I did everything. Along with some other people, but I had my hands in all these different things. So I was weekly taking orders and telling these people that I had to cut their order in half and they were not happy about that. So in the beer business, it's a customer-chain [motions with hands]. It's a chain all the way down to the final person that pulls a 6-pack off the shelf. And you can't have empty shelves. You can't have empty taps. You have to supply the beer. And if you don't, you start breaking a trust that happens, and people get upset and 00:54:00the whole thing starts falling apart. So I was going through that. Business was booming. Which was great. People would say, what a great problem to have. Well, yeah, but it's still a big problem, actually. The Ponzis at that point did not want to expand. And I was tired of getting yelled at. I decided, maybe it's time for us... there was a group of us who were looking at leaving and doing our own thing. So we decided to do that, and then that just all sort of, the wheels fell off of that. We weren't prepared for that at all when it came down to it. We knew what to do, we just didn't know how to do it. So I went off and went to work for Anheuser-Busch over in Newark, New Jersey.

TEM: How did you get that job? Was that the Davis connection?

KO: Yeah. Yeah, I called Kirk and asked him, because he was an assistant brew master at that particular plant. I actually talked to the director of brewing, Doug Muhleman, who was also a Davis guy. He was in charge of... I mean, he reported to August Busch. He was the next, he was the guy that got midnight 00:55:00calls from August Busch. So I talked to him on the phone. He suggested I talked to another guy so I could get into their system. Then Kirk gave me a call and said we have an opening here in Newark, New Jersey, which was not really where we wanted to move. We were hoping for Fairfield, California...

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: But that didn't come up. And then I had to sell that idea, I had to interview and then sell that idea to Carol. And we had two little kids. This is...yeah, just the end of 1990. Two little kids. Babies. And so we... maybe it was the end of '91. Anyway, whatever it was. So we packed up and sold our house, sold a beautiful house in Lake Oswego for twice what we bought it for, two and a half times what we bought it for, and then we moved to Newark, bought a house in New Jersey. I worked the craziest shifts I've ever seen. I was a brewing supervisor. So I was a shift supervisor. I had 24 New Jersey teamsters working 00:56:00for me, and I was working the lager cellars, the lager storage cellars, putting the beechwood chips in the tanks. And I was working... I started on swing shift. I worked 7 days on swing shift with 2 days off, and then I would switch to 7 days on day shift with 2 days off, and then 7 days on midnight shift, night shift, and 3 days off. And it was designed to kill us [laughs]. Literally. We had no idea. I remember being in the lager cellars... I had about 3 miles worth of lager cellars to walk every night-good for me, got my steps in...

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: But I remember having to tag these tanks and looking at my watch and it said 3:00 and I was thinking, 3:00 what? Is it a.m. or p.m.? I had no idea. I'd have to go to the end of the hall open the door to the outside and see if it was dark outside or not [laughs]. A very disorienting thing to do.

TEM: But what a totally different operation, too.

KO: Yeah, oh yeah.

TEM: Not only are you in New Jersey as opposed to Portland. You're working in this mega facility with totally different people.

KO: A 9-million-barrel a year plant. So I tell people I got my master's degree at the university of Anheuser-Busch. I learned a lot. I learned a huge amount of stuff that I still put into practice today here at Deschutes. A lot of on product production discipline. How things flow. The engineering and advance stage. Working with automated brew houses. Working with automated systems all around. Trying to get scheduling done so you can move the volume through. Learned a huge amount. Learned a lot about personnel. Dealing with 24 New Jersey teamsters. I mean there were people in my plant, supervisors who had had arms broken, who had tires slashed, window shields broken. A rough place to work. So you had to figure out how to make it work. I was the kid from Oregon, and no one 00:58:00gave me a chance to last. I was only there for about a year and a half, but I was almost a senior supervisor by the time I left because the turnover was horrible there. It was a terrible job. We had hoped that I was going to be transferred. Because they were in the habit of doing that, but at that point there was a transfer freeze going on. So I learned a lot. It was really good experience in a lot of ways, a really horrible experience in others. Ironically, our two daughters live in New Jersey right now. I don't know how that happened. We lived near the Pennsylvania border. A really nice area. It was a pretty area, but I had a 1-hour commute to get into town and one hour back. I spent a lot of time on the road. But I have an understanding of how the process works better than I probably ever did before. I feel like I can speak a lot of languages around the brewery because of that, so that was good. Then I was approached by a guy named Jim Bernau, who owns, who leads, Willamette Valley Vineyards down in 00:59:00Salem, and he wanted to build a brewery, Willamette Valley Brewing Company issued stock and started brewing. We really wanted to get to back to the west coast. We were really a fish out of water. We had no support network over there. I was working these crazy shifts. My wife had two very young twins. And she didn't know anybody, no family, no nothing. So we knew we had to get back to the west coast. So I took that job as brew master and plant manager for that brewery. Built that brewery and...

TEM: How big was that to start with? Was it a...?

KO: It was a little fifty-barrel brew house that I designed with a Davis classmate of mine, Jeff Humes, who was a brewer for Blitz-Weinhard way back. We built a brewery that could do I think 30,000 or 50,000 barrels a year right off the bat. And Jim knew exactly what he was doing as far as he was going to fish where the fish are and wheat beers were doing great and he said no one around 01:00:00here is making a wheat beer, let's go and do that, and we made NorWester Hefeweizen.

And it was a great beer and it just went [snaps fingers] like that. Just really successful right off the bat. We made a Dunkelweizen, a dark wheat beer. We made a beer called special bitter, which was like an ESB. Don't ever put the word bitter into a beer name. It doesn't work. People were not ready for that. They don't associate it that way. I think we made a pale ale, something like that. We made a couple other different beers. We made a porter. It was really quite tasty. I worked there for about a year and a half. And they had some ideas about expanding dramatically. I was a little apprehensive whether that was going to be successful or not. So in the meantime Dusty Trail, who owned Engine House No. 9 pub up in Tacoma, who I'd known for quite a while, approached me about putting a brewery in his pub. Once again, this rekindled this refrigerator article idea of a brewpub.

TEM: I have an article about that! [Laughs]

KO: Yeah. And this is like even closer. So I built the brewery in the engine 01:01:00house and then he bought another place called the Powerhouse in Puyallup. It was an old power station, an old brick power station, kind of a neat old building. We put a brewery and a pub into that. Unfortunately that partnership just didn't go very well, and so in the end it was like this isn't working.

TEM: Were you doing any recipe design for them? Or was it much more on the--

KO: I did all the recipe design for them.

TEM: Oh, okay.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: Yeah. So it wasn't just the installation of the facility, it was start it up.

KO: No. I did the installation. I worked 7 days a week doing that. I finally ended up getting an assistant because I just couldn't do everything in both breweries. Did all the formulations. We had some pretty nice brands and it was taking off, but just personality wise wasn't going to work with Dusty, so we parted company and in the meantime Bridgeport had been acquired by Carlos Alvarez of the Gambrinus Company, and he was extremely well-funded. These are 01:02:00the folks that basically brought Corona to the U.S., and he owned all the distribution rights, the imported distribution rights, from the Mississippi east, which is the big part of where the beer market is. So he was making money hand over fist. Didn't know what to do with it all, so he bought Bridgeport. And it was a great opportunity, because he was extremely well-funded. Unlike the Ponzis who were kind of on a shoestring budget, Carlos was... they just needed places to spend money, so it was my pleasure to give them places to spend money.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: And we completely redid the brewery. Expanded it. Added all kinds of cool new equipment in. So I came back there in 1996.

TEM: How had things changed? So that's such an interesting time in Oregon beer with this kind of rapid expansion.

KO: This was a very interesting time, because as I walked in Carlos had brought 01:03:00an Australian brewer named Phil Sexton to help with the transition and help reorganize it, because it was really pretty badly run prior to them coming in. They had a lot of problems. So Phil, they were looking around for a new... they needed a new product. Blue Herring was their flagship, and it was diving. It was not selling well. They had some quality issues and things like that, and it just wasn't doing well. So he had this idea, he said, well, you know you guys here are in the middle of one of the biggest hop growing areas in the world, why don't we do something, a style that accentuates hops? There's something called India Pale Ale. Should we do that? Nobody was making IPAs. Think of a time when nobody made IPAs? There weren't any. So we, some people made them from time to time as a seasonal specialty, but nobody was offering them up as a steady beer. So we had the idea. I walked in as they were just starting to formulate that. So I helped out with the formulation. It wasn't my idea but I helped out with the 01:04:00formulation and getting it to market. It was just instantly our best-selling beer. For people who told me you're crazy, nobody is going to drink a beer that's 50 BU's, IBU's, bitterness units, it became our number one seller. Almost instantly. John Foyston wrote about it in the Oregonian and helped to get some free press on it. It's a lovely blended hop aroma. When you open the bottle you could smell the hop aroma coming out. And this was so different from anything that was out there. So we owned the IPA market probably for 5 or 6 years before other people started catching on, that, hey, they're onto something there. But at that time everyone was busy chasing Fat Tire amber ale. So everybody was trying to out amber-ale each other, and we were quietly going in this other direction. Prior to that, it was all about Berry Weizen. So raspberry or blackberry wheat beers were all the rage prior to that.

TEM: So that was like--?

KO: Then it went to amber ale and then it went to IPAs.

TEM: It sounds like the wine-cooler era, too. The Berry Weizen wine-cooler... [laughs].

KO: Yeah. Berry Weizen wine cooler, yeah. So NorWester, we started with a Hefeweizen then we quickly did a raspberry Weizen and that was our number one seller. And I can't stand some of that stuff. I mean, it was like we would take a really nice tasting tank of beer and I'd say ruin that one and ruin that one [points to a couple places in the room], then we would pump the syrup and the extracts and all that kind of crap in there and was like, oh, yeah, well, that's what people want. But you know the IPA was really fun. It was the beer landscape was mostly everybody chasing amber ales. It was growing. There were a lot of people getting into it, probably too many people getting into it, and there was a bit of a people getting in for the wrong reason. They thought could... it was a gold rush. And then it just kind of hit a wall, and breweries that had expanded way too fast or way too hard or got into it for the wrong reason, they let their quality go or they couldn't operate efficiently went out of business 01:06:00or they took or got bought out by other places. Jim Bernau got bought out by Vijay Mallya, this guy that was, this Indian guy that owns Kingfisher brands. And he bought the breweries for, you know, 10 cents on the dollar.

TEM: Where was the money coming from? Were these people who had links to... was it private people putting in money? Was it a sort of...?

KO: Yeah, families, private people. Nor'Wester Brewery was publicly funded. It was an IPO, so it was on the stock market. So there was a few of those going on. Not too many of those, but mostly I think it kind of organically grew from people getting into it with their family or they had their own money and they just... in the brewing business, you grow, you reinvest, you grow, you reinvest, and it's just like this cycle that goes on and the owners of these places don' t see nearly as much money as you might think they do because they're constantly reinvesting.

TEM: Reinvesting.

KO: You know we're committing for millions or tens of millions of dollars in projects here, and we're looking, at Deschutes, we're looking at building a new 01:07:00brewery in Virginia, whether that, hopefully that'll come to pass, but it could be a 60, 80-million-dollar project. We're planning on it. And that's a lot of money that has to be borrowed and then put in and then hopefully generate the cash to pay for itself and start generating more money.

TEM: So by the mid-'90s banks were funding. I know early on banks said, what? I don't think so. [Laughs].

KO: Yeah, yeah, yeah [smiles].

TEM: You want to do what? [Laughs].

KO: Friends or bank loans, yeah bank loans were a big part of it as you start growing. You might start with family money or friends or whatever, but then you quickly had to go to banks for some serious money. Yeah.

TEM: But did it feel by the mid-'90s, even though there was this wall that happened, that there was an audience that wasn't going away. At that point did it.... It's so cliché to say, but at that point did it feel like beer-vana? Like did it feel like the special place where beer had become, craft beer, artisanal beer, or micro beer or whatever, that it had become part of the fabric of the identity of Portland, or the Northwest?

KO: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah I think Portlanders were very chauvinistic about drinking Oregon beer. And people like Red Hook and Pyramid had a really hard time, Seattle even, even out of the northwest getting a foothold. Sierra Nevada was having a tough time getting a foothold in Oregon because people were really, it was like it was all about drinking Oregon wines and Oregon beers. And everything was very local. It still kind of is. Oregon's still kind of a tough market for out-of-state brewers to get into. Because people like drinking stuff-now it's almost like super localized where there are bars that won't sell a beer that's not brewed within the city limits. That's how local they want to be. Which is kind of cool in a way. It's a little tough on brewers like us who are you know, not inside the city limits of Portland. But I can understand their concept. I think that's kind of an interesting concept. But in those days things were kind of opening up so that as more breweries started and the credibility 01:09:00came in and people tried these beers and they've been traveling, or in Europe, or they were in the armed services or they just wanted to try beer with flavor, it became more the norm. So I would walk into a bar in 1982, and it might have three taps, you know: Blitz, or Henry's, Blitz, and maybe a Budweiser. Bud Light wasn't even around then. So Budweiser or maybe a Miller Light. Now you walk into a bar and if it doesn't have a dozen or two dozen taps, it's like what is wrong with these people? And they might have one Pabst Blue Ribbon handle or one Bud Light handle or Coors Light handle. Those would be probably the ones you would see. But the rest of them are going to be a bewildering array of craft brew beers. What an incredible change that was. Or you walk into a grocery store beer shelf set and it was all Blitz, Olympia, Rainer, Bud, Miller, all those brands 01:10:00were there, and they might have a thin strip of imported beers. They still have a fairly limited supply of imported beers but it's almost all craft beers and then there's a small section there where you have your Bud and Miller and Coors selections there. It's just changed radically. It's interesting to watch. Right now the big thing is cans. You go to a grocery store now, and we're in 2017, just for reference...

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: Where we used to have...

TEM: As a good father of a historian would say.

KO: Where you would go in and see 22 ounce bottles starting to grow from these little breweries that were custom bottling 22 ounce bottles. That's shrinking down and 6-packs are starting to shrink down and now cans are starting to take up space. So getting started in the craft beer movement at the beginning God, we knew that God meant beer to be drunk out of kegs on draft only. That was the way 01:11:00that God meant beer to be consumed. Bottles, probably not. We'll probably never go to bottles.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: It's always going to be draft. Okay, we'll do bottles. But we will never, ever do cans. You'll never see our beer in cans. Well, now it's cans. So what now? I think next is plastic bottles or who knows? So I got to...

TEM: Hydro Flask.

KO: Hydro Flasks, yeah, something like that.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: Or freeze-dried beer matter that you put in seltzer water or something like that with a shot of ethanol. I don't know.

TEM: If that comes to pass, then that can be your literary right. You said it here. It's yours. It's not ours.

KO: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I predicted it [laughs].

TEM: So over the time you were at Bridgeport then for almost another 15 years. How did you change? How did your job change? How did the questions that you got asked change? You have such a longevity, not just in the industry but at that place, and became so identified with that place.

KO: It was, the beginning times were, we were so naïve. We just had so much energy. It was all about having fun, getting the beer made, getting it out the door, and people would buy whatever we would give them, and somehow we made money and we could pay ourselves. And then when I came back again it was now more of a business. And so we were a mature business that had to figure out what does it cost to make beer? How much should we be selling it for to make the right gross margin that we're actually going to be making money? How do we track sales? How do we look at what our performance is out on the market? We hired salespeople. We hired marketing people. We had people from the Gambrinus Company in Texas on my second tour of duty there that would give us depletions [makes air quotes with hands]. Depletions are the amount of beer that the wholesalers sales to their customer. That's the really important measure. It's not how much 01:13:00beer you ship; it's how much your customers are actually buying. That's an important number. We had no idea even what that was in the early days. So it became so much more sophisticated. I had people in departments-instead of having everybody do everything, now we had packaging people and we had Q.A. people, we had maintenance people, and we had brewing people and warehouse people. So we had departments. We had personnel. We had to have a personnel manual. We had benefits. We had... all this kind of stuff that a real business has. So it kind of really had evolved into that. I had a boss that was interested in what was going on operationally. Gambrinus, my boss, was the director of operations for Gambrinus, so he'd come and visit and find out what was going on. I could bounce things off of him. We had money to spend on projects. So everything had changed, and all of a sudden it was like a real business. Because of my Anheuser-Busch and then my Nor'Wester experience, I was kind of ready for that. For me it was a 01:14:00natural thing. For some people in the brewery it was a difficult thing to kind of get into. They thought it was being corporatized. I think that when the progress train rolls through, you can either get on the train, you can get off the train, or you can try to stand in front of it. Some people got off the train, a couple people tried to stand in front of it. That doesn't usually work. So I got on the train [smiles] and tried to steer it with as much finesse and work with... keeping that craft feel but knowing it had to operate like a business to survive.

TEM: What was the point where you felt like there was this kind of resistance, I guess, to the progress train? That it feels like there's sort of interesting dynamic now where stay small, succeed, succeed, wait you've succeeded too much, that--?

KO: Yeah, then it's not craft brewing [smiles]. I remember hearing that from some of my employees from Bridgeport as we grew...

TEM: When did that start?

KO: Yeah, I think in the '90s as breweries started to sell more and more beer. We thought when we first started in 1983/'84, when we started selling in '84, that if we could sell 2,000 barrels a year, wow, that would be more than 100 barrels a month. Wow, that would be just insanely successful. And Deschutes last year sold 375,000 barrels of beer. So as you get bigger and you start needing to make that amount of beer because you've built your brewery and now you built this brewery that has to... it's got a lot of people, we have 550 people who work for this place and they are depending on this for a paycheck. So now you have to be able to sell that stuff. You got to be efficient and you've got to know what your costs are and all that sort of thing. But there are people who are working in that plant who are enjoying that part of the fact that it's got 01:16:00much more structure and dependability but yet are looking at it going wow, this isn't as fun as it used to be and it's more like a job now. I've got to work this midnight shift now, and I've got to do this and do that and I've got to break things down, where before it was all kind of very casual. And those folks have either had to either start their own brewery and some of them have. You look around Bend, you can hardly swing a cat in Bend without hitting an ex-Deschutes brewer. Paul Arney over at the Ale Apothecary. There's Tony over at Boneyard. They're all over the place in Bend. Larry Sidor over at Crux. In any event, the people that either just couldn't stand getting that big, they would go and try to find someplace that fit better. One of them left to go work at 01:17:0010-barrel just before they got bought out by the biggest brewing group in the world. So I'm not sure how well that worked out for them. But in any event, there was that kind of thing or they would leave the business altogether. They would either start their own, go to work for somebody at a size they wanted, or leave the business. So I've seen all of that.

TEM: Did you see spinoffs in the same way from Bridgeport, that there would be people who would leave Bridgeport and then start breweries?

KO: Yep. Mark Youngquist went to work for a fella out in Boulder, Colorado, started the Walnut Brewery and that turned into Rock Bottom Brew Pub chain. Dave Zuckerman went to work for the same guy, at it was called Boulder Brewing Company, and I think it's called Rockies Brewing Company. I'm not sure. It's changed named a few times but it's a brewery in Boulder that goes way, way, way back, predates Bridgeport. So we had quite a few people that went out into the world. Mark Vickery came out here to Deschutes. Quite a few people that went 01:18:00out, in fact, I used to kid people that I was running a brewing academy [smiles].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: They would learn at Bridgeport and then they would go off into the world and do their own thing, so, that was kind of fun in a way.

TEM: It's fun to see those family trees.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: Or, company trees, the...

KO: Yeah. We kind of have some reunions at like the CBC. We'll get together and kind of talk about old stories and things like that.

TEM: Remember when...

KO: Yeah, remember when...

TEM: So what about your customer base? How did the customer base, how was that evolving and shifting through the time that you left Bridgeport? So you left Bridgeport in 2010?

KO: Right. I went to work for the Master Brewers Association of America, so the MBAA, which is the largest professional brewers group. So it is kind of the... what I did for them was I wrote books. I wrote and edited books. We had a journal that would publish articles. We had yearly conference that we would 01:19:00present papers. We had classes in brewing and packaging, and I put one together for engineering. So it was an educational place and also a forum for people to meet to talk. So I did that for about four years. I got to see across the country when I was doing that, from the east coast to the Midwest and the west coast, what was going on and people entering in. So I saw a lot of changes in the sophistication of people getting into the business. A lot more business people who were business savvy. I saw people coming out of Anheuser-Busch who had left Anheuser-Busch actually during the merger with InBev or just left anyway and were either starting their own breweries or working for other people in breweries and they were leaving, they were elevating the sophistication of many breweries: Stone, Boulevard, Sierra Nevada even. They were going out into the workforce ,and they were taking operations and adding some of this expertise that was kind of lacking in the craft brew world.

A lot of that was happening at the same time. The quality of the beer along those lines was getting better and better and more consistent because actually there was some better production practices going in, much more sophisticated quality assurance and that sort of thing. So it was just, and then the footprint of the beers were expanding. The New Belgium and Sierra Nevada were kind of leading the charge with getting into all these new states and kind of generating that idea that you weren't just a two or three-state pony anymore. Now you're 28 states or 30 states or 50 states. So beer had to be made better. And it was bringing in more people. It was more consistent, more dependable so people were coming in from the markets that were maybe drinking imports that wanted to try something new, so they would do this. So it was expanding the customer base away from the early days where it might have been people who had traveled to Europe or were stationed in Europe or people who just wanted to try something that was tasty into kind of new realms of younger people that wanted to try something 01:21:00that was different and cool. And now what's interesting is that we're almost kind of hitting a cycle where Deschutes is going to be 30 years old in 2018 and we're kind of the beer that your dad drank, you know? People who are 21 now are... you know, we've been brewing beer for a long time, so...

TEM: It is an interesting thought to think...

KO: We have to keep working with that.

TEM: ... yeah, about the... that they were born into a world where...

KO: I just realized, actually, in 1996, I was just thinking about this the other day, someone born in 1996 is 21 this year, and we started brewing IPA 21 years ago. That's how long ago that was. So... time flies.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: [Chuckles] But the whole customer experience has flourished. And if you look 01:22:00beer from an outside, global perspective, when I entered brewing... I mean, beer in America was the laughing stock of the world. The old joke about what's the difference between making love in a canoe and American beer, you're both freaking close to water. And now we are the envy of the beer planet. I mean people come here to... the Japanese come here, the English come here, the Europeans, the Germans, they're brewing IPAs in Czech Republic now. They changed the rules so they can brew IPAs in Germany now. So things that we're doing here are of great interest. What an incredible turn from what it was then. As a visiting American brewer, people would laugh at me and say, what are you? Your beer sucks. I don't know how you could even call that stuff beer. People did literally say that to me when I was in Europe. I would say, no, no, no, we're making this other beer. You know, we're making ales, and we're making porters 01:23:00and stouts. And of course it was all trash as far as they were concerned. But it's totally different. People come here to buy the hops. The hops are totally different now. I've got a lot of great contacts all over the world who come in during hop selection. We get together at hop selection. People from Australia, from Japan, from the UK, from Germany, who come in and we get together and we look at hops and do the hop selections and stuff like that. So it's just an incredible turnaround.

TEM: At what point did you feel like that kind of relationship with the hop growers, the more direct relationship, was possible? When did that happen?

KO: In 2000... what was it? 2008 or '09 Anheuser-Busch merged with a company called InBev. They form the largest brewing conglomerate in the world. And when they did that they went through some really huge cost cuttings, and they decided that they didn't need the amount of hops that they had contracted out. They were 01:24:00going to do some different hop products and things like that. So they didn't need as much hops. And Oregon was highly contracted to Anheuser-Busch. Oregon hop growers were highly contracted on a variety called Willamette, as the biggest variety grown in the state, and I remember Gayle Goshie, I was already starting to think about buying direct. Because we used whole hops. We used unprocessed hops that didn't require a dealer to palletize for us. So we were already using them in our hop vac to make IPAs. So I was already thinking, you know, I don't know why I have to buy from a dealer.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: Why ship them to Yakama and then ship them back down here. I'll just go to the farmer. So I went to talk to Gayle Goshie, and we talked about buying some hops. And she had never sold to a brewer before. She didn't know if she was allowed to. We had to go through a bit of a dance with the dealers so we didn't piss anybody off. But we ended up starting to buy some Cascades from her, and we 01:25:00were her first brewery direct sale and this was in 2008 or '09.

Maybe it was 2008, and then 2009 the merger happened and the hop contracts were cancelled. They just gave them a buck a pound and said here... this is... we're cancelling the contract. And it drove a lot of them to their knees. Some of them got out of the business. Gayle came to visit me and she was... I mean, she was really upset. Very, very upset. And she just said, I don't know if we're going to be able to keep farming. I just don't know. And so, we, there wasn't a whole lot I could do except for buy hops from her, so I did. But I started talking to Larry Sidor was here at Deschutes, to him and he had been in the hop business. And I said, you know Larry I know Deschutes uses a lot of whole hops. This is what I'm going to do. So he said, yeah, you know, that's a good idea. So we started buying whole hops from them. And it kind of opened the doors. I got a canning jar with some hop cones in it and a telephone number on the lid, and I called the number and it was Blake Crosby at Crosby farms. This was his sale 01:26:00sample. He didn't know what to do [chuckles]. So he gave me a canning jar, a pint canning jar with some hops in it and said call me.

TEM: That is awesome [laughs].

KO: No business card or anything. It was just like a sharpie with a phone number and said "Blake." And so I called Blake and I went down to talk to him, and he and his dad they had no idea how to approach a or work a purse. Nobody did. It was just a total... there was one silvery lining in the whole AB merger it was that it allowed, it actually necessitated brewers, and there was a hop shortage going on at the time. So it really kind of opened the door. And so we ended up contracting for, had them plant 15 acres of a variety called centennial. And we just bought the whole 15 acres.

TEM: It's so crazy to me to think in... so that was 8 seasons ago.

KO: Yeah, something like that. Mm-hmm.

TEM: But that nine years ago what a total game-changer that was.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: And not that... like, duration-wise, like...

KO: And what was happening at the same time was IPA was starting to really gain momentum and awareness because we won a big award in England called the Brewing International Award in 2000. We not only won the gold medal, but we won the championship trophy for that area, that kind of beer. And it was the first trophy for an American brewery in 120 years of competition had one. So we were like wow, this is like winning the super Olympics of beer. And we got to go down there and accept the trophy and the gold medal and it was great. But it kind of, I think it kind of perked up a few ears around that this actually was a real style. We won two gold medals back to back at the GABF then we won the trophy and the gold medal at the BIIA and then we were just making some good headway in Portland with it, and it started getting attention. So that IPA thing was starting to generate. And IPAs use a huge amount of hops per barrel. Like if you look at a Budweiser that uses about 6 ounces of hops per barrel; An IPA might 01:28:00use 3 or 4 or 5 pounds of hops per barrel. So we were using a very dis-propriate amount of hops for the size brewery we were. The hop growers were really hurting badly, and it kind of all happened at the same time. All of a sudden people had this demand start shooting up, so they were able to start selling directly to breweries and the whole thing really knit in nicely. All of a sudden there was a huge demand for Oregon, or aromatic hops. For IPAs it helped them recover. Basically, I tell people IPAs saved the American hop business, because they were on the verge of just going under. It was that bad.

TEM: It's interesting to think, too, of the... you know, not to bring everything to OSU, but the same thing...

KO: Yeah, the hop varieties came out of the...

TEM:...with the hop varieties, yeah.

KO: Al Haunold and company they came up with some great new varieties. And you know you can still I think I saw that that the craft brewers consume more than 01:29:0050%, pretty close to 60% of the hops grown in the United States, and the United States grows a third of the world's hops. If you look at that, you would say the United States that craft brewers are consuming like 16%, 17%, 18% of the world's hops. That's huge.

TEM: Given the percentage.

KO: For the fact that we make this much beer [motions about a half inch with hands]. I mean, these many breweries [motions with hand about a half inch] make that much beer [shows about a foot with hands] and this many breweries [shows about a foot with hands] make this much beer [shows about an inch with hand]. That's kind of the way the whole thing works. But we're using a lot of hops, and as long as IPAs are still popular that'll be the case. It's just starting to... you know we're in 2017 things are slowing down a little bit with the growth of IPA, but it's still very strong. So the hop growers are very happy with us. We know everybody now. They are rock stars in the industry. They went from being behind the curtain to being rock stars. All they have to do... a hop grower at CBC, craft brewer's conference, all they need to do is introduce themselves as a crop grower, and they'll have, you know, people will be [makes bowing worship motion with hands] cow towing to them.

TEM: Which is so funny. I've talked to a lot of growers, and some of them feel 01:30:00like they've stepped into that maybe more easily or more comfortably and others...

KO: Some are uncomfortable, yeah.

TEM: ... are like, we're just farmers. Like we've been doing this for a long time, and it's great that you guys are excited.

KO: [Laughs] Yeah. Some of them are just really digging it, and then there's other ones that they really don't want to do that. They want to stay with the suppliers, sell to the big brewers or whatever. They don't really want to... you're right. They want to be on the farm and that's as far as they want to go. But there's quite a few that are actually really enjoying it.

TEM: Yeah, and I think that next generation too, the people who are...

KO: Yeah, the Blake Crosbys, you know there's a few of this generation that were really basically headed off the farm because there was no money in hops. They were basically not even covering the cost of production. So now there's money in it, so a lot of the kids, many of the next generation are coming on.

TEM: And recognition. I think they are rock stars...

KO: Yeah, it's fun, right it's fun [laughs].

TEM: It is exciting [laughs].

KO: It's not just being on a farm, you get off the farm and you can be a rock star, so why not?

TEM: So 2010, or heading towards 2010, what made you decide to leave Bridgeport?

KO: I was not having fun there anymore. It had gotten a little too corporation for me [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: And so it just was time to leave. Sometimes you just know it's time to go. So I didn't think the Gambrinus Company was taking it a good direction. We had to fight too hard to get new products out that we thought would be of interest to our audience. We had new products coming out there of interest maybe if we were a brewery in Texas, but not necessarily one in the Northwest. And it just wasn't a fun place to work anymore.

TEM: Did it feel like your own experimentation was going down? That you could... 01:32:00did you still feel like you could try new things or had you moved to a stage or a place in the company that that wasn't necessarily your role anyway?

KO: Well, we had some nice, I think we called it our Big Bottle series, so we were making 22 ounces of specialty beer. That was about the only creative outlet we had where we were allowed to do what we wanted to do, and it was tolerated by Texas. But they really didn't want us to do anything beyond that. So even though we had some really popular brands, they just came and went. We did have one brand that the marketing person down there and I agreed would be great, and that was a double IPA or an imperial IPA called Hops Czar, and so we got permission to introduce that. We were indulged and got permission to introduce that, and it instantly was selling as much as a regular IPA. Really popular. And I left on that note. So I left them with the beer that was super popular. They were 01:33:00producing it at 75% of their capacity. They were looking around, entertaining the idea of getting in a new brewery. But I just wasn't having fun anymore. I was very active in the MBAA. I like teaching, and I like mentoring people and I like educating and passing forward the things that I've learned. And so MBAA was a good fit for that.

TEM: I imagine too that you were doing more of that at that stage in your career. That probably it seems natural.

KO: Yeah. I was presenting papers. I was already on the technical committee putting the conventions together. I was in charge of that. I was in charge of putting 3 conventions together prior to leaving. And working with lots of people. I love networking and having this just this resource. To me, that's the closest thing to a Star Wars force as there is out there. Use the force. Use your network. I know so many people in this business, and if somebody from Deschutes says, hey, you know, what do you know about that? If I don't know, and 01:34:00I can't figure it out, I either know the person that I can talk to or I'm one degree of separation away. I just think that's a fantastic tool. It's a very powerful tool. It's something I've instilled in my daughters: network.

TEM: They are incredible netwo-I have never seen... maybe, I may have never seen networkers... I remember thinking where did these people learn this? Because this is amazing. They can work a room, like...

KO: They know how to network [laughs]. Yeah. I learned it from my mom. I learned it from my mom. She was always big on getting to know people and she said, you know, you get to know people, and if you do things for people and people will respect you and they will want to help you out too. So maybe that's a Unitarian thing, I don't know. But in any event. I just really enjoyed my time at MBAA. I was working at home and I had a great time with that, but MBAA changed, and as my brother in law says, he works for some community colleges down south, you serve at the pleasure of the board, and the board is constantly changing and their priorities are constantly changing, and it was time for me to leave that 01:35:00one too. So I came here.

TEM: And something you mentioned yesterday was that there was the challengE too of working for a non-profit and managing volunteers that I can imagine that was a very different environment than you had worked in too.

KO: Sure. Yeah, working as a brew master, any job title that has the word "master" in it kind of gives you an idea of what your authority limits are, and so as a brew master I ran the ship. I was the ship captain. And at MBAA I had no authority or leverage over anyone except for enticing them to say hey you know you're really helping out. So the book projects that I've done, they're on the wall.

TEM: I think we should thank them

KO: The Practical Handbook for the Specialty Brewer was my first book project that I did while I was still working at Bridgeport and I had 30 authors on that from just around the industry. And they either wrote or co-wrote chapters in the book. It was the bestselling book title at MBAA when I left. Still very 01:36:00well-selling. And then the MBAA packaging book was a project I took on. It had been sitting on the shelf for 12 years. It was supposed to be rewritten, and I took it on and got it published the spring before I left. And it's the only English language book on beer packaging out there. You can't find another book that's recent. The only other one... this is a second edition, the only other one is the first edition, which has got stuff when they were bottling with sticks and rocks. So it's come a long way.

TEM: Who else is writing about that? Like what other, you said the only English language, is there...?

KO: The Brewing Association, the Brewers Association, has started up a series. So they're starting to catch up with these things, but I don't think they have one on packaging yet, as far as I know. But you know those were great. Those were a lot of fun to do. I not only got to use some of my honors English class stuff that I learned in high school and college and learning, you know, and 01:37:00figuring how to edit and working with my publisher and putting a book project together, which was great experience, but great work with some really wonderful people. Some of the things were a challenge to do. On the packaging book, I ended up having to... I ran a packaging class. We had some really good presenters. I asked the presenters, can I record your presentation. I can't get them to actually write it down. They just never had time to do that. But I could record it, transcribe it, and then edit it down, and that's how I finished that book. I did that with eight chapters in a book. It was mind-boggling. Took a 350-page, 4-hour presentation and turned it into about a 20-page, 25-page chapter.

TEM: That, yeah. That's a lot of work [laughs].

KO: That was a lot of work, that was a lot of work, but it was rewarding [smiles].

TEM: Were you consulting then, too? Had you started your own consulting?

KO: Yeah, I started consulting part time. And then after I left MBAA I was full-time consultant for a while. I was doing pretty well. I got a lot of connections and I had a pretty good client list. People wanting to expand a 01:38:00brewery, build a brewery, or they had problems in their brewery, or a combination thereof. So I was part detective, part engineer, part designer.

TEM: Was that different, then, from that earlier work that you were doing either up in the Tacoma, Puyallup area.

KO: Using a lot of the same tool, yeah. Using a lot of those same tools. And you know the brewing business is on another gold rush right now. So there's a lot of breweries. Here we are in 2017, there's like 5 or 6,000 breweries in the United States. In the Portland area alone I think there's 70, 75. As of [looks at watch] 11:00 this morning there's that many.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: So yeah it's just totally gone crazy. There's another 2 or 3,000 in planning. I hear there's like 2 a day that are opening up in the country. So where this is going, I don't know. But when it gets the point where brew pubs... there'll always be room for brew pubs, because they're basically a restaurant or 01:39:00a bar with a food or a brewery attached to them. But it's breweries that are trying to make beer and distribute. Those are the ones that I think are going to... I don't know what's going to happen. There's just only so much shelf space out there. You go into the store, and you see this bewildering array of bottled beer and canned beer and all this stuff out there right now and craft beers, and it's like. And they legalized pot, so you can be stoned looking at this thing and trying to figure out what it is you want to buy [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs] I hadn't thought of that as a problem.

KO: So, I mean it's...Everything's opening up. Probably if you're stoned you'll be grabbing the beef jerky of the potato chip hanger they have above the 6-packs.

TEM: Something juicy to balance out [laughs].

KO: Stumble off somewhere. But anyway, there's lots happening. It's a very dynamic business right now. And I've been doing this, I've been in brewing now for 34 years this month. I graduated June '83 and we're in 2017, June of 2017, so 34 years I've been doing this and I've seen it go from really no industry at 01:40:00all to this hyperactive industry right now.

TEM: It's interesting to me, and I don't know if you feel this or find it interesting, but you have been associated with so many breweries and they're so well-respected, but have never been the founder or the owner, do you...

KO: Yeah. People ask me about that [laughs].

TEM: Do you feel, though, like it gives you a unique relationship with the rest of the brewers, or... do you people see you as more, not agnostic, but more free floating so that you... I feel like I'm not formulating this question very well, but it seems like you are apart from in many ways.

KO: Yeah. We drew up priorities in our little family a long time ago that the family comes first, and I know what it takes to start a brewery and it's all-consuming. And I didn't want to not watch my kids grow up and be a part of 01:41:00that. And I wanted to keep my family unit intact. And I watched people get divorced or they grew away from each other, and there were some times where you know it would have been very, you know the time was right and I knew what to do. I could have started a brewery at any time. But I just wasn't ready to develop or devote that kind of commitment to it. The job I have right now is very consuming. But I don't run the place. I don't take home the responsibility of making sure everybody gets the paychecks and the taxes and all that stuff are filed correctly. There are parts of the business I just don't deal with. I don't have to, so I don't. If I was an owner, I'd have to deal with all that stuff. It could be argued that I've done most of what an owner does anyway, but over the years... I've kind of, sometimes I've kicked myself and thinking gosh I could have been like some of my colleagues who are very successful, but I've done 01:42:00alright and we enjoy life and our kids have grown up well and you know I have no complaints about it. As far as in the industry I think I am known as a brew master and noT a brewery owner. I'm known as a brew master. I've got I think 500 or 600 people went through the classes I was running at MBAA, thousands of people are reading the books that I've published, and I like being somebody that people can come up to and just recognize as a peer. A peer, I guess maybe that's what you're looking for.

TEM: Yeah, maybe that's, yeah maybe that is the...that you have always been a peer that you are a master, you're a master peer.

KO: Yeah, I'm a peer master. So I've been around for a long time. You know I like helping people and I don't have any kind of, I mean I work for Deschutes and I love working for Deschutes. It's a great company. We are actually owners in Deschutes, there's an employee stock ownership plan. So I guess I am kind of 01:43:00a brewery owner in a way.

TEM: Well, there, now...

KO: I tried being a partner in a brew pub. That didn't work. So I've tried my, kind of cast my line into it a little bit. But I really consider myself a brew master. I don't really consider myself a brewery owner or that kind of thing.

TEM: What was the... how did you end up here? So 2015 you start at...?

KO: Yeah, I left, yeah, I left MBAA 2014 and I did my consulting thing. We took a month off, went to Hawaii for a month to, which was I totally recommend that by the way [smiles and laughs]. Kauai [sighs].

TEM: [Laughs] I just needed to get past the 3-week mark.

KO: Yeah. Yes. Four weeks in Kauai was wonderful. It was a great way to plan how to start a consulting business, which I had always kind of wanted to do. So I got that, it took me about a month and a half to get that all figured out and started collecting clients right away as people found out that I was not, that I was available. So was working that and then I got a call from a recruiter from 01:44:00Deschutes that Deschutes was using about this director of brewery operations job, and I thought you know I don't want to run a brewery. It's too much responsibility. I'm working from home. I'm working part-time. And I'm doing okay, and then I think they called again and I thought, and at that time, it was like well, maybe I need to, I'm still kind of young maybe I do need to get back in the game again. And they're a good company. I know Gary Fish since, I sold Gary Fish Deschutes Brewing equipment back when they were first getting started from Bridgeport so I've known him for a long time. Always liked him. Like the program here. Love Bend. So talked to Carol about it, and we decided to go ahead and give it a try. Came down to interview and they were looking for somebody I think that had good experience and had good, I would say, big brewery experience but didn't have that big brewery mentality.

I kind of have a unique resume. Because I have a degree in brewing. I've had 01:45:00decades of experience in craft brewing, pub brewing, and I've had that exposure to large brewers, and so and I got a rolodex a zillion miles wide. So I know about everybody in the business. I was a pretty good combination for them. And so far it's been a great ride. I anticipate working this until I'm done. I don't see what Larry Sidor did at Crux and starting a brewery at 62 [laughs]. I don't see that at all. But never say never. Who knows, maybe I'll do that little brew pub in Lake Oswego someday on my own, who knows?

TEM: The first time I met Larry he had some horrible plumbing disaster, and I think that day may have been wondering why he started a brewery at his... yeah, 01:46:00like, do I really want to be doing this?

KO: [Laughs] He was double thinking that a little bit. It's a really busy place. You know people thinking about working in a brewery as being some place where you just sit back and drink beer all day. There is a bit of beer drinking involved and there's a lot of fun involved, but it's a very complex organism and things it's a million moving parts out there and everything's got to be functioning in order to make it work right. And there are days when I just kind of bang my head on the table and think why am I doing this? There's too much, I'm... I could be just working part time consulting. But I really like the people and to me right now in the job that I have is much more strategic than it is tactical, so I don't deal with the plumbing issues so much anymore. I help... I'm a safety net here and I give resources to people as they come in. But I have a lot more strategic thinking of where we're going. I look above the weeds and see where it is we're going. And we have a great, talented group here. I think 01:47:00you talked to Veronica Vega. She's just incredible. Very creative person. Very sharp, and she's just one of many that we have here. So a great place to work. So hopefully, fingers crossed, Deschutes will continue to do well and I'll get to be a part of that.

TEM: I note you were, you're not a grandstander type of person, but do you think at this stage in your career or this stage in the craft beer or culture and industry in Oregon, do you think about how incredibly instrumental you were? Are there moments where you're like, you know what that was me? [Laughs].

KO: I had a guy who worked for me at Bridgeport, he started a brew pub, or brewery, small brewery in Montavilla district of Portland and I just was giving a presentation to some brewers and hop growers about 3 weeks ago and sat down and had a beer with them afterwards, and he said you know everything that I do 01:48:00is because of you. And wow, that is [puts fist to chest], and the people at the table said, it's true. You actually blazed the trail for everything. And that just, I mean, my hair is standing up on my arms as I think about it. It was a very stirring moment. I do think about that and I just would say there's a lot of people actually that were out there that blazed the trail, the Widmers, and everybody at Portland brewing and all those folks. I'm just part of it. But to be there was really something. So I do think about that sometimes. To see people to reach for craft beer off the shelf, no matter what brand it is. Just the fact that it's there it's pretty cool.

TEM: I remember, long before I met you or Carol, that one of your daughters said, we were talking about oh what do you parents do? And one of them said, oh yeah, my dad's a brew master. I remember thinking, I didn't really know what 01:49:00that meant, but now in hindsight, it feels like the understatement of... you know like one of those, the hindsight realization of what an understatement is that now I'm like he's "the."

KO: Yes, it's been fun. I have a very close relationship with Thom Shellhammer, Dr. Thom Shellhammer, over at OSU the fermentation sciences department down there. And still with my old professor, Michael Lewis, who retired from the university but then he started up a program, an extension program to train brewers. And I go down and speak every once and a while with him, but it was great to take him out for dinner. I used to be scared to death of that guy. He had the personality of Professor Kingsfield on The Paperchase. He was very dry and very authoritarian. Very British. Mr. Ockert-everyone was their surnames, and he loosened up over time, and I remember taking him out for dinner and thinking oh I owe so much to this guy.

Because I was a home brewer. I was a kind of mediocre to bad home brewer. So now 01:50:00I know something about what's going on in there. So we all owe him a deep debt of gratitude. Just kind of watching all this stuff. And my daughters still utilize me from time to time. One of them is at Princeton University, she's a grad student there, and her supervisor really loves beer. And we make some really good reserve beers here. Our beer is not available in New Jersey right now, as of this time period. It's coming I think soon. In any event, we make these reserve beers. So she says, Dad, you know, I could really use, kind of grease the wheels over here, can you send over some of the Abyss and some of the Dissident or some of the cultivateur whatever we had. So I would send them these specialty bottles. Apparently, never underestimate the power of beer.

TEM: And talent.

KO: It's magical. It's magical.

TEM: It's magical. So what do you feel like brewing has, your career has 01:51:00afforded you to do? When you think back not just on maybe the people that you've worked with but what has been really fun and exciting that you feel like beer has opened the doors for you to be able to do personally?

KO: I've traveled a lot. I've traveled all over, I just got back from a trip with Ingrid, my daughter Ingrid, to Australia and Tasmania. A place I'd never... it was on the risk board, that little island under Australia. I never thought I'd get to Tasmania, but there's a hop field down there, a hop garden down there. So we went to visit that. So a lot of travel. Getting to know people in different parts of the world real well. Going to conferences. Becoming kind of noted for what I do. I never thought I would be anybody and maybe outside of the beer circles, I'm still not. But Beervana plays every once in a while on OPB and 01:52:00people stop me in the store and say I know you. I just saw you on the TV. I was like did you watch the...

TEM: Where's your shirt? Where's your hop shirt?

KO: Yeah, my hop shirt. It doesn't have a Deschutes logo on it so I couldn't wear it.

TEM: We'll photo shop that in.

KO: Yeah, there you go. Photoshop that in. So all those things are pretty exciting. And just you know be able to make a good living at it and doing something I really love. I think that's probably the biggest thing. Because I think, I get up every morning, I literally get up every morning thinking about the fun things I'm going to do. I look at my, you know, I have this thing now [pulls out smartphone] and I do pretty much whatever it tells me to do, I go wherever it tells me to go. But the stuff that I do, the people I deal with... it's just fun. I just really enjoy it. And I'll keep doing it until I don't enjoy it anymore or I fall apart first or my wife takes me and says okay we've had enough.

TEM: It's time.

KO: It's time. You're starting to repeat your stories too many times. It's time to go.

TEM: It seems like you really instilled that into your kids too, that that kind 01:53:00of joy of work. That work is work, but there is...

KO: And find something you like. There's so many things to do, to have to get into a job that you don't enjoy seems to me like the most miserable condition. So if I'm working in a job that I'm just not enjoying anymore, I can't stand doing that. That's not going to work for me. I'm not going to put my nose in the ground and tough it out for another 20 years. I'm going to go and do something I enjoy doing. I've kind of moved around a little bit partly because I wanted some more experience. I left Bridgeport partially the first time because I wanted to work for a big brewery, and I wanted to try to do my own thing. So I wanted something new. I just was kind of done doing what I was doing. I was bored. I did that. Probably not a really advised move to not have a job you're moving into when you've got two small kids and a wife at home. But I decided it was time for a change. Kind of the same thing with the second tour of duty when I 01:54:00left to go. It was time to go. I wasn't enjoying it anymore.

TEM: What did your mom think about you becoming a brewer after you guys had brewed together?

KO: Yeah. I think she was very proud. She actually went to Ponzis, Ponzi had a harvest party and his friends and neighbors would come and pick grapes and stuff so she went to that. One of the crushes. My mom died in 1989, so she was not really able to really understand it.

TEM: See the...

KO: ...as it was going. But I think she was pretty proud. My dad was pretty proud to have a brewer in the family. My dad used to introduce me at restaurants, this is the brew master, there's the brew master. He would always ask for Bridgeport beers, this is my son the brew master, he made those beers. He was very proud of that so that was kind of fun. I don't know if we had any other brewers in my family tree at all. I never heard of any other ones, but except my grandfather used to make beer in the tub, so.

TEM: That can be your, the thing that's still on your bucket list, is to 01:55:00discover. You've done a lot of other things, and just historical research.

KO: Yeah, track down those ancestors. Yeah.

TEM: What did you think that I would ask about in this interview that I didn't ask about? Or...

KO: I don't know the answer to that question. I've done these interviews. I was interviewed for the first time when we opened up Bridgeport in November of 1984. Someone from KGWTV a news reporter came and interviewed me, and then this other guy wanted to interview me and he was from this crazy new startup company called CNN.

TEM: [Laughs].

KO: And he interviewed me, and I was, what, 24 or something like that, and I was tall and blond but I was probably half the body weight that I am right now and so I was stick thin. And just a kid. Just totally green. I learned how to do 01:56:00interviews and I've always enjoyed doing them. I've been on television and radio and newspapers all that stuff all through the years. So I hear that different people want to know about different things. You know, it sounds like you want to know, sort of as we've talked about kind of the workings and the changes in the workings and the changes in the functionality where some other people just want to know about what was the beer scene like or you know what was your favorite beer or something like that, I've heard all kinds of...

TEM: What is your favorite beer?

KO: You know Guinness is still a comfort beer for me. If you look in my refrigerator right now you'll see a couple cans of Guinness, some Bürger lager because I still really love German lagers, some Bavarian, some Weigenstephaner, Bavarian Heffeweizen because I love the banana-clove-y flavors that those beers have got. I got red sharer, red pale ale and I've got some new hop slice summer ale, which is a really nice pale ale, a very lightly hopped pale ale. And I've 01:57:00got some Crux pilsner because Larry was over at dinner the other night and brought me some beer. So I just try to do... I like lots of stuff. And I try not to pin it down to anyone, but I generally like, I'm generally not a big hop, strangely enough, ironically, I'm not a real hop-driven beer fan. I drive Veronica crazy sometimes because I say let's come out with something a little more malt led. Something a little sweeter and have more caramel notes and stuff and she's like, gah, no, it's all about IPAs right now Karl. So she indulges me every once in a while and asks the brewers to make a milder or a brown ale at the pub so I can have something like that. But I think beer flavor is such an interesting kind of comment and where we all started making kind of rip offs of European brands that we liked or English brands that we liked, I think, I stress 01:58:00to my colleagues out in the industry is there are no beer police out there in America anyway. So you can make anything you want. So you can combine. There's really four main flavor groups of beer [holds up hand showing four fingers]: there's malt lead, which is sort of the sweeter flavors; hop led, which is like bitter or aromatic flavors; yeast or fermentation led, these would be like the Belgian beers or the Bavarian Hefeweizens or the sour beers; and then there's flavored beers, where you take any of those threes and you add, you put them in barrels or you add fruit or you add spices or something like that. Those are the four main flavor platforms. So to me it's like an adventure in developing out in any one of those or cross mingling them to see what you can come up with. And we've got an incredibly talented, creative group here. And they never cease to amaze me. We have a thing called experimental beer meeting. It's on Tuesdays. It's later on today at 4:00. And we sit down and we try the beers the pub brewers are coming up with. And they have maybe project beers that they want to just take off on their own or we have beers that we say okay you developed this 01:59:00Baltic porter recipe now we want you to refine it and so they'll start making some refinements of that and we'll taste them. So there's about 8 or 9 of us that get together and taste beers, and it's just fun.

TEM: What's the most surprising beer style craze that has come out? What's the thing that you're like I don't know why people like that?

KO: It's the Berry Weizen. That was awful. That was awful beer. Some of the stuff was just like they would literally put fruit extract, lifesaver fruit extracts into beer, and just tasted like sweet candy awful beer.

TEM: I think that, it must have that wine-cooler craze at the same time.

KO: The Not Your Father's Root Beer thing. That's this alcoholic super sweet cloyingly sweet, just awful stuff. To me it's sort of... there's a soft drink front to it with this alcohol back to it. I don't like stuff like that. I think 02:00:00that's bad for the industry, frankly. It doesn't have anything to do with good flavor or a good beer drinking experience, or a good drinking experience. It's about getting hammered, and I don't think that's a good thing. I grew up being encouraged to enjoy beer and wine and maybe schnapps but not to get hammered. I don't think that's a good way to go.

TEM: What did those first reporters ask you? When you were interviewed in 1984 what did they want to know?

KO: Well, it was all brand new. We were the first brewery, Cartwright had closed, so there wasn't anyone else. So we were the first kind of, I would say serious craft brewer to get going. Chuck was doing his best, but he was a wine maker and he really didn't understand anything about making beer. So I would consider ourselves the first real brewer-led craft brewery, microbrewery at the time. So people were just curious, what are you, what are you guys expecting? 02:01:00How are you expecting to be able to sell this beer? How are you expecting people to be able to drink this something so dark and it was dark brown rich flavored beer when they're used to drinking Henry Weinhard's? How do you expect this to go over and where did you learn this and how are you, where are you getting your ingredients? They were just the beginner's questions of just the real rudimentary questions because it was so new. You know who are your customers going to be? How do you think you're going to be a success? [Laughs] Now things like that are just totally taken for granted. Those questions never come up anymore. Because we're here. We've been here for 30-odd years now.

TEM: Do you think that the industry is mature enough that there is a kind of valuable reflection that's going on? That some of those earliest people are at a point where, I don't know, that it is an indication of how the mature the 02:02:00industry is and it is important now to start thinking of documentation or legacy, asks the archivist [laughs]?

KO: Yes. When they first came they asked me about this project and what to do and all that stuff. And I thought, well, good, because we are losing a lot of people, and you've interviewed a few people who are not with us anymore. You know none of us are getting younger. It doesn't work that way. It's good to catch people who have actually had enough tenure in the business that know what has happened but are still lucid enough to be able to sit here and be interviewed. So I think that's great. And I hope it can continue on because there's a whole other wave of brewers coming in that have got a different perspective on it probably than I've got. So all that's really good. The industry has matured quite a bit. People are looking at it a lot more as a business. I think one of the serious things happening in the industry now is 02:03:00that Anheuser-Busch [and] InBev (ABI) and Miller, Coors are buying breweries. They're buying successful breweries. There are some people who want to get out of the business and they're selling off to these folks. To me it's like watching your kids be sold off to pirates. You know they walk the gang plank onto the pirate ship and they become part of the enemy. And I say enemy because these people are trying to disrupt and threaten the craft brewery movement in a really bad, awful way.

TEM: What is the threat? What do you see the...?

KO: Under the guise of these small, quaint breweries they are hiding their real identity. They're not letting the customers know that this is not Wicked Weed or 10 Barrel or Goose Island or Elysian. It's Anheuser-Busch InBev. They're making these beers at huge plants, dumbing down the recipes and going after the independently owned breweries like Deschutes, like New Belgium, like Sierra 02:04:00Nevada, like any other regional brewery out there. These people design the shelf sets, where the six packs and cases go, and they're positioning these new breweries to disrupt the flow of what customers see. They're pushing other breweries off the shelf sets so they can put these newly acquired brands in. So you take a little tiny brew pub like Golden Road, who no one's ever heard of, and now it's got three shelf spaces all over the west coast. No one's ever heard of this brand. It doesn't deserve to be there. And it's pushed other brands off. So there's some stuff happening that's very concerning, and we'll just have to see where it goes.

TEM: Yeah. Do you worry? Or are you concerned that we will see a consolidation like we saw, I don't know, in the '50s, '60s?

KO: I think it's quite possible that breweries that are of size are going to have to collaborate very closely to be able to survive. Because there's really 02:05:00an assault going on right now. It's sad to see, but you know you have to kind of realize the AB, the ABs, the Miller Coors of the world sort of left this segment alone for a long time. Every once in a while they venture forth and Anheuser-Busch had a product line, they had a Budweiser American ale if you remember that one or not. Or they did a Michelob pale ale. Not successful.

TEM: That's a weird concept to think about Michelob pale ale.

KO: Yeah, not successful. And then they quickly learned that if they put their name on it, it was toxic to the trade. People did not want to see it. So you will never see Anheuser-Busch anywhere on a 10 Barrel label. It's 10 Barrel Brewing Company. And all these other places, what they're doing. It's kind of disrupting the craft industry in a lot of ways. One of the ways is we're a very, there's a lot of comradery in the business. And we get along with, the craft brewers get along with the Budweiser and the Miller brewers to a certain extent. 02:06:00Everybody gets along. The ground rules are you don't ask about anything proprietary. But when it comes to like what do you think of that centrifuge or that bottle filler? People will generally, will say, ah yeah our experience was this and that kind of thing. Now it's like you know we've got breweries that up until that have been comrades in arms and all of a sudden they're controlled by a company that is literally out to disrupt and damage this market sector. And I know this sounds horrible to say, and I feel horrible saying it, but it's like it's new, it's kind of a new thing in the last couple of years.

TEM: I remember the kind of outcry, the reaction to 10 Barrel selling. And I don't know if other communities were like that, but I know that people were burning gear in Bend. That people were really so emotionally attached to this as a local place.

KO: And the idea that it sold out to.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: That's happening like in North Carolina. Wicked Weed was just acquired by Anheuser-Busch, and people all around town are just said, just take this keg and put it out on the street we're not selling your beer anymore. That lasts for a little while, but you can't expect the customers to really realize that. And because Anheuser-Busch are playing it very smart and they're not making it an AB brand, they lose track of that. There's a dozen, there's probably 16 breweries that they've acquired, and I don't even know them all, and I'm in the industry. I can name most of them, but I don't even know them all. So you can't expect Joe consumer, Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, to actually understand what's going on out there. But unfortunately what it's doing is it's kind of like if Wonder Bread Company went out and started buying artisan breads and started turning them into kind of Wonder Bread under the guise of these artisan bread companies and the 02:08:00customer didn't really know and they're being super aggressive on marketing and pushing artisan breads off the shelf so they can put these pseudo-artisan breads in there. It's sort of the only analogy I can think of. Or Folgers goes and buys up a bunch of little coffee companies and starts making Folgers but under these other different labels. Sort of, I mean they keep some of their characteristics but it pushes the other coffee companies out. It's the opposite of the good beer, good food movement where all of that was supposed to be about honesty. This isn't honesty. This is very dishonest.

TEM: It's so funny, though, I think now as opposed to 1950s, 1960s, 1970s when we think back to what you were talking about sharing of information and communication that I feel like it's almost an open secret, that while it feels secretive, it feels deceptive, everyone's talking about it.

KO: Yeah, yeah.

TEM: So it's this kind of weird...

KO: In the industry it's a big buzz. And some of the bloggers, god bless the bloggers are calling it out for what it is. I read some really good blogs 02:09:00recently just saying here's what they'll tell you and this is why it's B.S. and I feel very strongly about it because I was there at the beginning of this and I watched this happen. I nursed this industry. As you said, what do you feel about it? I feel very parental about it.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: I feel like, they say men can't have babies so they start businesses. To me, this craft brewery is something that I've been intimately involved with since I was in my 20s. And I'm well beyond my 20s now, so for 34 years I've kind of lived an breathed this stuff and to watch this be, the subterfuge that's happening and just the intent and the resources that's going into disrupting this segment of the business... I'm paralyzed with fear that I will have watched the birth and the death of craft brewing. I'm hopeful that we can unite. I think 02:10:00your original question what are breweries going to have to do? Breweries are going to have to unite somehow to be able to fight this. And there are things that are happening that are illegal, but we can't get the OLCC, we can't the Department of Justice to recognize them. So we have to unite through our Brewers Association trade group, through associations with ourselves, between ourselves, to represent to the retailers what's actually happening and going on and try to save what we can. But it's going to be an uphill fight.

TEM: What advice would you give brewers? What is the...?

KO: I would say stay local, as local as you can. Dan Carey's a good friend of mine, New Glarus only sells in one state: Wisconsin. They sell 214,000 barrels a year in Wisconsin. Pretty darn good shooting. So they don't have a national sales force. They aren't dealing with all these crazy things. They're able to 02:11:00just stay in one state. I would say just stay local, dig in local. It's kind of what we're all about. I think breweries like Deschutes, and New Belgium, and Sierra Nevada are running into the whole local chauvinistic thing that we used to use to our benefit, and I don't know how that's going to work. Distribution is tough. I think breweries like us who produce really dependable, quality, interesting beers will continue to do well. Same with Sierra Nevada and New Belgium. Breweries who don't are going to have a hard time. They're going to end up having to recede back or they'll end up getting acquired or something. I think you'll probably see some mergers and acquisitions between craft brewers going on. I think that'll happen because it's a way of trying to make things work. It's going to change. Change is hard.

TEM: Yeah. I imagine too the perspective that you have seen this just both 02:12:00personally and industry wide, the we want it local, we want it small, but at the same time in order to have a sort of critical mass and to have a presence not just in Portland, Oregon, not just in Berkeley, California, or whatever, that you have to have kind of middle class breweries Deschutes size.

KO: To be able to pay people family wages, have a career, you have to be able to have a certain mass going for you and in Oregon it's a small state. They're really aren't that many people here. Just only so many stomachs to go around. So you almost have to expand out. Maybe in California it'd be easier. Wisconsin has got just the state of Wisconsin has got a couple of fairly large cities in it. It's bigger than Portland. It's a tough thing to do. I think breweries are always volume driven. The first question a brewer will ask you how many barrels 02:13:00did you do last year? So it's sort of this measurement thing that goes on. So it's also kind of a little bit of a machismo thing of yeah we did 375 last year. 375 barrels? No 375,000 barrels. Oh, holy crap. That's a lot. Wow. So I mean there's a certain amount of that going on too, but I think just as far as being able to build a business that's more stable and has got some roots in it kind of need to look at expanding. I guess. I would say that with the caveat that Dan didn't and he got away with just staying in Wisconsin and his whole thing is we're not leaving Wisconsin. This is it. And he's been able to make it work. So it is possible. To stay very super local, which is, once again, I would advise people is to go super local.

TEM: I love that commercial. The commercial of the... what would you tell consumers?

KO: I think people like to try new things. I would say, you know, drink the 02:14:00beers that you like to drink. Look around. I would... it would be nice if people were able to recognize truly locally owned, independently owned, entities and give their patronage there. I think we'll probably see... I'm on the board of Oregon Brewers Guild we're looking at this. We may have something where we have a logo on there on our six packs or our packaging somehow just identify ourselves an independently-owned Oregon breweries. I think that is the spirit that is going to carry us forward. I think if that dies, if it's tougher and tougher to operate out there, then the consumers are going to lose the choice that they really enjoy right now.

TEM: Have you been on the Brewers Guild before?

KO: Yeah, I was a board member years ago.

TEM: How has it changed?

KO: Some of the faces have changed. I'm kind of the old guy one the board now. When Gary was on it and it was time for him to rotate off I was kind of 02:15:00volun-told that I needed to be on that so I ran, and I like it because it gives me an outlet to do some teaching. I ran some IB presentations. We were actually looking at putting together, we are looking at putting together a packaging workshop that would be open to all breweries to come here to Deschutes and bring some speakers in and do a 2-day workshop on packaging. And then we're doing one on brewing. We're just too darn busy right now. We got it all planned out. We just don't have the time to execute it right now. But I like that part. I give people a historical perspective of what happened so I'm kind of the old crank in the room in a way.

TEM: I have a hard time seeing you as the old crank in the room.

KO: The old sort of nasty guy in the room [laughs].

TEM: Maybe a little bit. I don't think any closer.

KO: You know there's younger guys there, younger people there and I enjoy 02:16:00working with them. I'm fairly well known to most of them walking in so it's not so hard to have some amount of credibility. So it works.

TEM: I think that historical perspective obviously is so important but with this, it feels rapid. I guess 30 years isn't rapid, but with this rapid growth that it could be easy to say well, you don't know what it's like now.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: And I think continuing...

KO: You guys have got it so good.

TEM: Yeah, yeah but also like from the reverse side, the younger people saying well, it's just different now. Things are different now.

KO: Yeah, it is. And I have to kind of keep up with them, and it's hard for me because, well, I'm down in Bend which is isolated somewhat from the big mecca of Portland beer scene, but I do go up there as well, and we have a pub up there, a 02:17:00brew pub up there, so I go up there as well. We do a lot of experimentation but just kind of knowing who's who and what's what and where the market's going and all that stuff, it's hard to keep track of. There's just so many brewers. I can't keep up with how many brewers. There's almost 200 in the state now, probably are by now. Wreckage Brewing company, I have no idea who they are. Some of them I do, and I've gotten to know at the MBAA meetings we have and start looking around at the tubs trying new beers, trying to meet people and shake hands and stuff like that.

TEM: Yeah.

KO: It's hard to do.

TEM: It's a lot. And I think it's just... it changes fast.

KO: It does. Yeah. It's rapid change for sure. How are we doing?

TEM: We're doing good. I was trying to think of how I could ask you a closing thoughts question.

KO: I've got four minutes before I have to go to an engineering meeting.

TEM: Okay. That's your closing thought. Karl's a busy guy.

KO: [Laughs] I just felt this thing buzz [pulls smartphone out of pocket] a 02:18:00little while ago saying you're supposed to be [looks down at phone]...hang on a second. This kind of rules my life right now [scrolls through emails on phone screen] these are the emails I've gotten since we started.

TEM: Now you have like two minutes. That's your closing.

KO: Yeah.

TEM: Well, I'll say thank you.

KO: It's been a pleasure.

TEM: Thank you [laughs].