Jeff Edgerton Oral History Interview, November 18, 2015

Tiah Edmunson-Morton: We are doing an interview today with Jeff Edgerton at BridgePort Brewing in Portland, and the date is November 18th, 2015. Is your official title Brewmaster?

Jeff Edgerton: Brewmaster. I tell people Brewmaster Operations Manager.

TE: Okay. Let's start with your birthday.

JE: My birthday?

TE: Yeah, when were you born?

JE: 5/22/63.

TE: And were you born in Canby?

JE: I was born in Silverton Oregon.

TE: Oh, okay.

JE: Yep, Silverton Hospital, so

TE: So really in the middle of hop country.

JE: Yeah, right in the middle of hop country, actually. It's kind of funny, yeah. But I grew up in Canby. My family was living in Canby at the time but my mother had a doctor that was based out of Silverton, old country type of thing, and she got to know him early on. And then he was actually my doctor until I was about forty years old, same doctor. He's a general practitioner kind of guy. So 00:01:00yeah, then finally it was just getting to the point it's like "I'm driving to Silverton from Tigard every time I want to go see you, this is getting ridiculous, you know." And he's like seventy-five years old at the time, you know, so it's like it's getting to be much, yeah.

TE: Were your family, were they farmers? Were they involved in agriculture?

JE: Nope, actually my father was a machinist, he was a- he worked for a company that's called Willamette Industries. Made the [00:01:25 saw chain?] for the timber industry, the forest industry. My mother was a homemaker and then she ended up working in a dress shop for about fifteen years.

TE: In Canby?

JE: Mhmm.

TE: And did they stay in Canby?

JE: They did until my dad retired and then they moved around a little bit and they ended up back in Canby, lived in a retirement village there. My father passed away in 2013 and my mother's living in Wilsonville now. So yeah, definitely- they're from the Dakotas originally, both of them are from the Dakotas originally but they came out this way with their families, followed their families during the Dust Bowl I think, and came out and settled in this 00:02:00area and have always been here.

TE: Brothers and sisters?

JE: Two older sisters. I have one older sister living in Wilsonville, one of them living in Tualatin.

TE: What was it like to grow up in Canby?

JE: Small town life, you know. It's a- well as a town it's kind of isolated from Portland, although it's more of a bedroom community. There's not that much industry there. There is some farm kids, I grew up with a lot of farm kids, but I also- my father was a commuter, he commuted to Portland every day. A lot of people were commuting. It was kind of maybe at that time, when I was a kid, maybe three, four thousand people. I think it's grown to about fifteen thousand people now. But very little to do there as kids, so there's a lot of trouble to be gotten into as a high school kid. You know, there's a lot of things that maybe kids shouldn't do as far as that goes, but I mean no theater, no roller skating rink, no nothing when I was a kid, so it was like you kind of made your own fun to some extent.

TE: Is it still like that? Do you feel like it's- or is it more connected with 00:03:00Portland now?

JE: I think it's more connected. It's grown some. Like I said, they've gotten a theater, they've gotten some more entertainment for the kids, and I think kids maybe are more focused these days with a lot of things for them to do. At that time no, you know, computers were pretty new at that time, they were pretty a new thing, so nobody had computers. I remember getting our first VCR at the house, you know, it was a big deal, that kind of thing. So I mean it's technology has grown so much since then. I mean it's like riding your bike was what you did, riding your bike going fishing, going hunting. It's like I told people now, it's insane to think of now, but when I was in high school I would go to- I would drive my car to school every day, and normally I would want to maybe in the afternoons in the fall go hunting with my friends. Well I got a shotgun and a box of shells in the back, in the trunk of my car. Never thought about it, never really thought about it at all because we would be going from school to go hunting, but nowadays you'd get arrested for that kind of thing, but back then, probably against the rules in a sense but it's like still, it 00:04:00wasn't thought of too much back then. Different time kind of, in that respect.

TE: Did you like growing up there?

JE: Loved it, yeah. I loved the town; I still have a lot of great friends there. It's a nice little town, very low crime, just a kind of salt of the earth kind of people, a lot of blue collar, you know, not a lot of pretense there.

TE: What'd you like to do? So hunting, what were the things that you did that you remember liking to do when you were growing up?

JE: I loved cars, I was big into cars. Well I mean as a little kid I loved looking at cars and car models and doing all that kind of stuff. Basically you'd spend a lot of time riding your bicycle and just being outside, you know. I'd wear out tires on my bicycle like you wouldn't believe. My son's bicycle, I don't think he's ever wore out a set of tires, and it's still parked in our garage. They just don't do it as much anymore. And thing was, it was the kind of town where you grew up and where you leave the house in the morning on a summer morning and you might not get back till three in afternoon, and your mother 00:05:00doesn't worry about you, then. Now you would probably, but not then.

TE: Were you interested in science growing up?

JE: I was interested in science and it was something that came up, especially going through high school. I mean that was when it really hit home, because I was able to take some pretty advanced classes in high school. Maybe not as advanced as some of the high schools now, but we did an advanced biology class where you actually did surgery on a rat. We actually- rats have a tendency to develop tumors and so we did a surgery on a rat and removed a tumor and put the rat back together, and it lived. It was pretty amazing really. It was just kind of a cool thing. It really got me into thinking about it. And school was actually, to me, it was great fun. I liked it. I enjoyed it a lot more; a lot of my friends weren't too interested to go to school. They had other things they wanted to do, but I loved it.

TE: So when you started thinking about college, did you ever think about any 00:06:00place besides OSU?

JE: Not really, you know, because I started out I wanted to continue working, so I actually spent not quite two years going to Clackamas Community College as well, and at Clackamas Community College, where I really kind of got more into the science things, you have to take some math classes and some other things, get out of the way, that I knew I was going to be going to university but was able to do that. But I also took, you know, basic biology and chemistry and physics and the stuff that I really wasn't taken- I hadn't taken- in high school, and it really kind of got me rolling, as far as my love of science, I guess, as far as that goes. And so I spent some time talking to some of my teachers at the community college and they said "yeah, you want science in Oregon, go to Oregon State." Not a rich family, so I wasn't going to MIT; I was going to Oregon State. But I mean great school, I mean [00:06:58 unintelligible].

TE: So did you enter as a microbiology major? Was that what you intended to do?

JE: Yeah, I think I did have that as my original major when I went to Oregon State. I mean I think I was like general studies when I was at Clackamas Community College, but I think when I entered I, you know, I looked at the different curriculum and said what am I interested in? And I really did like the micro aspect of it; I liked using microscopes and growing cultures and things like that, so it's like yeah, microbiology was basically the direction that I headed from day one. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it.

TE: That's what I was going to ask.

JE: Yeah, I know that's the next question. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, you know, and there's a couple directions you can go with a microbiology degree; there was like three directions. You can go into research and basically be poor the rest of your life. And I mean you're certainly able to be around the universities and all that kind of stuff, but it's like eh, you know, and I thought like I need to figure out some way that I can actually make a decent living to raise my family with this degree, so food, which is the direction I took initially, and I found out that food is a very, very tough 00:08:00industry to make a living in as well, at least from my perspective being a lab guy, a lab rat at the time. And so at the same time Blitz-Weinhard was the brewery in Oregon, so we're talking about early eighties. And so BridgePort was just getting started; in 1984 is when they started. But I never really knew that much about craft brewers, but I did know about Blitz-Weinhard because my dad was a Blitz drinking, grew up at regional breweries kind of thing. So Blitz-Weinhard was where I started my résumé. I though well, where can I possibly make a good living, or a reasonable living with a microbiology degree? It's like well, growing yeast and bacteria in a brewery would be a great place to do that. So I started sending my résumé out. I sent about six résumés to Blitz-Weinhard over a period of two years and finally got an interview, and when I got there I found out that basically the reason I hadn't been interviewed was because they had just plain no turnover personnel. There was just like nobody that had left for years. And then some guy got caught fudging data or something like that and 00:09:00he ended up getting fired and so they needed somebody to replace him, so they hired me, brought me in as an entry level lab technician.

TE: Was there a link between microbiology-food science and the brewing industry? Like macro brewing industry at that point, between OSU and the companies?

JE: I never even thought about it, and at that time there was no brewing program, of course. So I mean I had classes through the food science department, had classes in Nash Hall through the Microbiology Department over there and spent a lot of time with Bill Sandine, Dr. Bill Sandine that worked there, William Sandine. Incredible, really smart guy, did the Dairy Microbiology and