Beth Hartwell Oral History Interview, June 26, 2019

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay. So today is June 26, 2019 and we are in the Valley Library with Beth Hartwell, and you co-owned and co-operated the Hart Brewing Company in Kalama, Washington, in the 1980s. We will talk about that, that work, certainly, but I do want to begin just with you telling me where you were born and biographical sketch of how you got to there.

BETH HARTWELL: Well, even that's always a long story. I grew up in San Diego. When I was 10 my grandparents all moved off and my mom's parents moved to Elkton, Oregon, there in Douglas County on the road to Reedsport. We spent our summers up here, so it was a small school and I wanted to be here and not in a big city, and finally made that possible when I came up to school in Oregon State. I was here for 3 years and got my degree, because I transferred from 00:01:00community college. I finished up here and then the road took us a few places. Eventually, in Seattle, I had the chance to be a cook on a dive ship, diving for second treasure [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: I know, it was kind of crazy. I gave up my job at Weyerhaeuser, which I was done with anyway and then we moved up to Seattle where the boat was and parked in the ship canal. We lived there for six months. The engines never turned over and so we knew we just needed to find something else to do. The house in Kalama had been rented for two years, because that's how long we thought we'd be gone and so we ended up buying a neighborhood grocery in the Green Lake area of Seattle and had that for about a year and a half, grew it up and sold it. Ran 00:02:00back to Kalama. I was like well I don't really do chicken fried steak. What can we do here that can sell into major cities and still be able to live in a rural community? We already knew before we left Seattle, the store gave us the whole, it allowed us to see the change from industrial beer to imported beers and we also, a lot of our wine merchants became friends and we ended up meeting a lot of restaurant tours and it was pretty clear that small breweries were coming. It really was only about a year, it was almost a year from the time we sold, a year and a half, from the time we sold and left Seattle to renting the building for 00:03:00the brewery.

TEM: At that point there was Ballard in Seattle.

BH: Yeah, they were in Ballard and they were called Redhook.

TEM: Oh, right, right, right. Yes.

BH: So, it was Redhook and it was Grants. They were the first two and then Hales, Hales Ale out there. We were the fourth in Washington and we were just months ahead of the Portland breweries. We poured a little earlier, but when we were in Seattle we knew, because of regular customers, employees and the owner of Murphe's, they were the first taphouse in Seattle, and then in Portland, well, it was just a little harder to break in. We always thought of Portland as 00:04:00our city, because it always has been, and it always felt funny, because there's such a loyalty in Oregon and we're like well we're only 30 miles out and this is where we buy everything and we did all our purchasing together with the Oregon breweries for our malt and our hops and all that. We did join orders. The Steinbarts were phenomenal. They served as our drop-off point, so we were there every week and that kind of thing. TEM: We were talking before the interview about your love of cooking and certainly I extrapolate to say your love of food generally, was that something that was part of your upbringing? Like food and drink and appreciation-was that part of the fabric of your childhood?

BH: Absolutely. I was cooking at 10, and my sister and I, my younger sister by 00:05:00barely, well a year and a half, we had these matching aprons and we hired ourselves out to all my parents' friends' parties. Of course, it was the early '60s, so the biggest thing was emptying the ash trays. There were no dishwashers, washing all the dishes, keeping the buffet table filled and so it just started that way. My parents did a lot of entertaining, so we grew up preparing for that. I always have. I say I had really good grandmothers. Both of my grandmothers just kept our hands busy. They were both excellent cooks. We'd sew, we knit, we garden, and they are still the things that bring me joy. My cooking has changed. The years we were in Seattle were phenomenal in that way. 00:06:00Meeting restaurant tours and I had a kitchen in our little store, and so I did a lot of cooking and was just inspired by all the changes in food and wine in those early '80s time, and I've done all kinds of-after we sold the brewery I had a food brokerage company, so it was to get a lot of hand-crafted food and stuff into the Seattle Market from Portland and from Seattle to Portland and that kind of thing. Over the last years of my life, starting in 2000, I've really found a lot more of my energy going toward feeding the hungry. I headed up a family kitchen in Bend, which is the Hot Plated Meal Program and continue 00:07:00working. I continue to cook a lot for a lot of people, but it's almost all non-profit work.

TEM: Was that something that, that more general access to food, something that was part of those early natural foods/healthier living that was happening in the late '60s, I mean, well, yeah certainly into the '70s and '80s, was that part of the conversation? This social service element?

BH: That's changed. I remember my sister worked for one of the first health food stores in San Diego and she had me over and she cooked this incredibly bland meal of all these healthy things and it's been so fun to actually make it delicious, you know, to find the ways. It continues to grow, especially now with so many food intolerances. How can I create a meal for everyone who's here that 00:08:00we don't have to put signs on the dishes and everyone can just eat everything that's here. And I'm curious girl. It's that that has always, well it kind of, I'm third generation entrepreneur, too. My parents had their own businesses, as did 3 out of my 4 grandparents. There's always been just that what is there to do and how can we do it? Mom speaks to me now, when we started the brewery, she said, you just knew you could. You just did it! That was it. My degree's in business and so it was all the paperwork, putting it together, creating marking and the branding and it was so fun. But the pallet was developed too. Tom had 00:09:00grown up on a farm in Yamhill County. His mom was an excellent cook. Everything had to rise to that level [laughs]. It was great. He was a hands-on engineer. His degree from here at Oregon State was in forest engineering. He just liked the tinker toy end more than the blueprints. He liked putting things together. So he fabricated all our equipment. There wasn't really anything in the market when we started. Standard Dairy in Longview was going out of business and we saw their ad and so went up and bought these-like even for a mash ton, it was a 100-gallon, round dairy tank.

He cut two stainless steel plates, one with a straight edge and one round so that he could lift them out and zit, zit, zit, drill the holes in the bottom of that to create a mash ton that we had on the upper level of the building. It was 00:10:00a little loft area and then it just gravity-fed down into the boiler, which he had somebody build out of copper who had never done anything like that.

TEM: I do hear some stories that there was this, the wonderful DIY nature, the need, but that sometimes people who could weld something else couldn't necessarily weld equipment that was needing to be cleaned, or needing to withstand-

BH: Right, well and stainless is different too. Stainless welding is different. It was bad. There were no pressurized tanks. We had a room that was cold and so all our fermenters were opened basically because they weren't sealed. They had tops but it was, you couldn't have had any other yeast in the house because it 00:11:00was there and we really, there were certain times of the year, especially when the fruit flies were heavy, that we were just watching for infection at every turn. We let a lot of beer go. It was hard because there was a huge demand as we were growing. We tripled in volume every year. There was that whole buying and selling of equipment. We ended up having a really close relationship to the city treatment plant because at one point they realized they were having trouble and they couldn't figure it out, and one day they started to think about us. We hadn't given it a thought when we just let the beer go down the drain. So then they showed up at the door and we found ourselves working together with them. if 00:12:00we knew we had to let it go we'd let them know and they'd give us a time and then that would be the case, but we didn't have labs. No one had labs in their breweries. Full Sail and Hood River, we did some consulted with them at the end as we did with Wasatch and Park City... and here I go with names... Dave-

TEM: Lodsten?

BH: Yes, Dave Lodsten and his wife had just finished with her degree in biology and so she was wondering what to do with her life and what the fit would be, and as she became involved and saw the brewing industry she's like I could probably keep and propagate yeast. That ended up being her business until, and she still has her business in Odell, which was right across the street from the business I 00:13:00retired from. It succeeded, and it's only-and I think that that's what happened that as we came in and created-I mean JV Northwest was the first fabricator that would talk to us and consider doing it, and it made them. They have just made so much equipment since.

TEM: Yeah, and really scaled too as the businesses have scaled they have scaled.

BH: Right, and who is willing to and who's in a position to know how to scale and willing to take some of those early risks. That's always it.

TEM: I mean I'm sure even now.

BH: Yeah. Because do we invest? Do we keep throwing money at this? We had to keep expanding but it wasn't like we could pay ourselves. It just made a lot more sense to keep reinvesting into capital. I remember John, he was one of our 00:14:00employees, and once in a while he'd give a tour and he'd be in the back room and he'd say see that tank that's Beth's Porsche.

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: [Laughs]. But, yeah, for those years it was always just reinvesting but it was important to us to own it outright ourselves and not have investors and we had to take, to bottle, we had to take a loan out and we worked with small business administration. We got a small business loan, which was a lot hoop-jumping but we were able to do it and again with the expansion we were able to pay it off in a year. That's how we were able to start brewing. Some of the big pocket breweries, like Redhook, who was in Seattle and had all the investors in a big city, they were able to get the German bottle line romp, romp, romp that just worked. We ended up buying an Italian champagne filler for a fraction of the cost. Like the Fiat versus a Mercedes, as you'd say.

When it came, when it arrived, the manual was in Italian and that's all we knew. 00:15:00Here it was and there's the manual, so we had no manual. It took us a while to get with the carbonization and all of that, but it held 13 bottles and it went around and then it came out and we created-and this is where Tom and his tinker toy fabricating... because we had the little line that went and had the capper on it and then the bottling and the labeler, because we just had labels made locally because you couldn't buy the minimum quantities. It was just because we were so small, the inability to find equipment. But even those things, you know the printing costs and to buy six-pack holders-we couldn't afford to have printed six-pack holders, but with this bottle line you had to do every other 00:16:00one because it took two runs to fill it. I always did the bottle line because no one else really had the patience for that. It was an odd number, so you could do every other one. But I had a baby on my back.

So I had the baby on the back and would be there, you know, some days they'd be really long days: 12, 13-hour days. We'd take a break to sit for a minute and get a bite, but that was it. It wasn't this big stand at one end and feed the bottles and pull them out. For six packs, when we started out we started with, we had these cardboard printed that had six holes here so we did a wrap. We took a board and drilled six holes. We'd lay the cardboard down and we'd turn six bottles upside down. We'd pull the flap up, hot glue, pull the other flap up, pull it out and then it would go into the box. Until we sold enough that we 00:17:00could reach the cost of a minimum order for printed six-packs so you could drop them into. It was just ingenuity all the way down the line and working with the other breweries. It was great. There were a lot of promotional things we did just to get beer in people's mouths, because even that was so unusual. People had only had industrial beer for so long. If people said I don't like beer, I'm like then you do want to come over here because it's different. We'd drive up-because Rob Widmer did a lot of carpooling through those years up to Seattle for different meetings, and Tom's sister did childcare. That was great. I could take Sterling with me, drop him off at his aunt's house and then I could go do 00:18:00the sales and do all the pieces that I needed to do in Seattle. I was usually in Seattle once a week and Portland twice a week, chasing parts or getting ingredients and that kind of thing.

TEM: So, Seattle is, is it 2 hours?

BH: From Kalama, yeah. Especially a lot of the hours that I drove. Sometimes I'd be getting up really early. We'd get up at-Tom would start brewing, because he did two brews in a day. He would start brewing at 4:00 in the morning and then by 9:00 at breakfast, that's when we'd show up. If I had errands to run I'd be leaving in the afternoon and if I had tastings and that kind of thing I'd leave in the afternoon and drive to Seattle, do the tastings and then be on the road by midnight and home by 3:00, so I'd be there for Sterling and Tom would be getting up and headed down to the brewery. That was just the rhythm of our life 00:19:00at that time. I found the calendar of Sterling's first year of life and I just gave it to his wife. Just going through it, it was as busy as I remember [laughs]. I was like I really was. Especially being Kalama between Seattle and Portland, a lot of people were driving in the business were driving back and forth. We had a big turn-of-the-century house with all these bedrooms, so it seemed like in addition to all that the brewery required it would be changing sheets on Saturday morning and Sunday morning for people that came and went and so it was... it was a full and rich and busy life. In your thirties you don't, you just have that energy and you know you can do it all or at least I came from a family that did.

TEM: That assumed that.

BH: Yeah, that we were just going to do it all.

TEM: Did you and Tom meet here?

BH: Yes, we did. Yeah, we did. It wasn't in classes or anything. It was just through friends we met. In fact, we met on a double date. I was with someone else and he was with a friend of his. He was with this woman that I happened to know. It was funny because she, after the end of that date, she recommended there was a guy in one of our business classes that I might want to spend more time with [laughs]. So, we met there and when he graduated he got a job pretty quickly with Weyerhaeuser in Longview and when I graduated the following year, Proctor and Gamble had come to campus and it was a kind of a coup. Because I was 00:21:00in student senate. I worked at Dixon. Dixon was brand new. I did martial arts. And through different extracurricular activities they had my name so I went through their intensive interview process and license stuff and they ended up hiring me. I moved to San Francisco when I graduated and I realized that it really didn't suit me. I missed Oregon for one thing, and the other was-and this is where gender really comes in-their way of selling just wasn't something that fit me. I would sit with a manager outside the store and he'd say, so what are we going to sell when we walk in the door. And I'm like I don't know. We haven't even seen it. We don't know what their needs are. And he's like, no we're going 00:22:00to sell an end display and it's going to look like this and it's going to go here. I realized pretty shortly that I'd really made a mistake. I was more I think flattered that they wanted me when they were just kind of life who of all the business students want to interview with at the time. I hadn't been honest with myself. I really found that I wasn't sure that sales was something that suited me and that wasn't true. It's just that I have a completely different way of selling.

TEM: Well, it's a huge company, too. I imagine that going from a family of entrepreneurs and what we know the trajectory of your life to be that-

BH: Right, that it has been in small business.

TEM: Yeah, that that's not a small-

BH: I ended up moving to Longview. I hadn't really wanted to. I was like, oh 00:23:00yeah Tommy's a nice guy but I don't know that I want to live at Longview. At that point, I did. I moved up to Longview and I took several months because the employer was Weyerhaeuser and I just kept thinking there had to be somebody else and after 5 months I was like, no I guess I need to put my resume into Weyerhaeuser. I had an interview in like 3 days and I was hired within a week. They were really trying to get women in the workplace because it was called for.

TEM: What year was this? This would have been-?

BH: Let's see. I graduated from here in '77. It was there in December of '77. I went to work for them in '78, and then I worked for them for quite some time. they moved me a lot because they didn't know where to put me. I worked in the 00:24:00log yard. I worked in the old planer. I worked in time and motion. I worked in plywood. At one point I was called into the office by the mill sup[ervisor], and he just said I just want you to know we're going to be shutting down swing shift of quality control so we won't have a job for you. I said, well, excuse me here because I understood that I was hired as a management trainee with the company and that each of these steps I'm taking is to teach me about the operation so that at some point I can be in management here. He just said, well, no, there's no woman going to be in management in my mill. I said, well, my mom always told me I'm not allowed to tattle, but I'm going to stop at personnel on the way out the door.

Four days later I was working in a paper mill. Again, it was hard because I 00:25:00hadn't done anything in that mill. I didn't know any of the operations. I was in shipping and as it turned out I'd only been there a few weeks when they went out on strike. So I did the job for 5 months. I drove the forklift and loaded the trucks and loaded the railcars so when it was over then the team knew they couldn't pull anything over on me, that I didn't understand. I worked there for a while. Again, it was just like okay I've done this so what's the next thing. My boss, who'd had my position before for 25 years, he's just like, well Beth they could take 25 years before there's something else for you. that's when I had the opportunity to join the diving expedition so off I went and-

TEM: To find buried treasure!

BH: Yeah, to find buried treasure!

TEM: I'm going to find sunken treasure [laughs].

BH: So, anyway, then on we went to our little market in Seattle and then on to the brewery. So that was our first business. We were 26.

TEM: Did you find, so management there was certainly some gender stuff going on there. Did you find, though, within the plant community, was your gender an issue?

BH: Oh yeah.

TEM: Was it always there?

BH: It was always there, absolutely always there. Because I kind of proven that to my team-so, my degree is in business but also here you know it's a Bachelor of Science degree, but it was behavioral science. Social, like anthro[pology], which I think have been just fantastic in the way I've been able to work for others, in management and in sales to really meet needs and drill down to what the conversation really is. I know you're crying because of the cream cheese, somebody ate your cream cheese in the refrigerator, but I think there's 00:27:00something else here so let's sit and talk about this, you know. Anyways, I had a great relationship with all the guys on the team but it was more my peers who-and validly so, because 3 of them were wanting the position that I got in 4 days, which was not fair either. It was just the way things were at that time. but even in the brewing industry it was hard. I was up against it so many times. Again, being the only active woman in the industry at the time. There were times when, there was one time when a photo was being taken of everyone and I was asked to step out of the picture, out of the photograph because I was a wife of 00:28:00a brewer. I wasn't seen as an owner.

TEM: That's not that picture, is it? Where there's Fred Eckhardt's in the picture and I'll show it to you later. There's this kind of famous picture of-I know Tom is in it. I know Fred Bowman is in it.

BH: Was Art in it? Because they'd asked Art to step out too, but he'd stepped back in.

TEM: Of course he did.

BH: Yeah, yeah. It was, I will want to see it because I'm sure that's the one.

TEM: It's in a pub.

BH: Well, I'll have to see it. It was just those kinds of things. Again, all the tastings, it was all the brewers but it was great. I loved doing our tastings. Tom had made me this little tap box that had 3 taps and I could hook up the pop 00:29:00cans to them and so it was kind of elevated and I'd have it on the table and I'd always bring a big bouquet of flowers from the yard and I'd always set up a little display of different malts and hops and the whole time just, come over here. But it was funny because most of the other guys were there they were off in the corner talking stories, so I felt like I was just more aware of our audience I guess.

TEM: Was that different, and so when you ran the grocery store what was that like? Again this, you co-ran the grocery store-

BH: Right, right.

TEM: Was there more, I want to say, not equality from peers, but was there, did 00:30:00you feel like there was more equal treatment of the two of you as co-owners as opposed to-

BH: In the grocery store. Absolutely.

TEM: Interesting.

BH: Again, I think, because in the grocery store, you know it just started out it was just a neighborhood grocery and we completely remade it.

TEM: Did you buy, was it a grocery store when you bought it?

BH: It was a grocery store when we bought it. It was failing. The family who owned it kind of lived behind the counter. They had their TV and their playpen and all that stuff and I remember walking in and I could have walked out hungry. The potatoes were all growing down the aisle and it was pretty icky. People came in to buy candy bars and cigarettes and everything else on the shelf was ancient. So it was remaking that. We started off kind of getting some deli items but again it was just blah. So I called Northwest Natural Gas, I think that's 00:31:00who it was, because I saw here that you actually provide stoves, so we bought a stove by the month. It was like $15 a month added to our power bill. So we got the stove and then we had a big refrigerator case. So I had food to go and then on the front just bakery shelves. I was busy with that. And then Tom did, again he just kept the equipment running and he did most of the grocery ordering. We had standard grocery items, but then we were able to really add and expand into that whole concept, you know wedges of cheese-we'd just get big wedges and scale them. That was all pretty new at the time. This was '81, '82 and Starbucks had 7 employees. All they did was roast coffee for restaurants. They had one salesperson, one that did machine repair. They got grocers in the back. We 00:32:00started serving espresso and there were like 5 people in 5 businesses that had espresso to go. Even that at that point we felt like we were pioneering this whole new thing. Like I was saying in the beer we just carried a lot more imported beers than most places did.

TEM: Did you do or have to do beer tastings at the grocery store? Did people come in and buy imports that they knew that they'd had imports or were they more curious?

BH: They were more curious. We couldn't have poured.

TEM: Okay.

BH: We couldn't have poured at that point.

TEM: I just think about-

BH: I'm trying to think of how the laws have changed and that kind of thing.

TEM: Our co-op will do like Thursday pour tastings to get people to try 00:33:00different things, so I wasn't sure if that was-

BH: But this was in Washington.

TEM: Yeah.

BH: And no, there wasn't really. Like I said at the time it was Murphy's which was kind of in the Rohini district area, they were like the first tap house. They had multiple taps. Most restaurants at that time only had two or three taps of Coors, Rainier, Henry's or whatever. That kind of expanded. Those were all pretty much imported beers that they were starting to do. I think another piece that I haven't mentioned is one of the reasons that craft brewing really happened here in the Northwest is because people were used to buying draft beer. We didn't have to go right into bottles. We could find used kegs. It was just deciding what style of used keg were we going to buy so that all our tap equipment would be the same. But that gave us in the Northwest such a huge 00:34:00advantage, that we could sell our draft.

TEM: I hadn't thought of that.

BH: Uh-huh. We all started out on draft.

TEM: That's pretty-and that I know that the bottling lines are expensive but also it's just a different, it's a whole different distribution-

BH: Yeah, a whole different market.

TEM: A whole different quality, I mean everything is different.

BH: Because we started out just doing our selling into taverns and restaurants and then two years later once that was kind of stable and we were meeting that then we could get the loans or whatever to get our bottling equipment. It took a lot of filtration when we started doing our wheat beers and that kind of thing and then moving into grocery, because we didn't start out in grocery.

We had that ability to do it. But then the thing that's different about how it 00:35:00is now and how it was then is that I think we all had some kind of wouldn't it be great to just have a local brew pub. But because the business was growing and the whole industry was really growing in that way we didn't really have an option to not keep meeting the market. We had to keep expanding, and so we all-as you look around, Hale is the one who's really kind of been able to stay with that more community-based brewery but we were all pushed into that, having to keep it up. That's really what wore Tom out. We had to quit because he's a perfectionist and there was no ability to control. There was no ability to really control like there is now. We just didn't have the equipment, the ability to propagate yeast and be able-I mean, now people have more than one kind of 00:36:00yeast in the house, you know? Which was just impossible at the time. Again, it just required that continual growth because demand was there. By then you're so into what you owe and the one advantage to this market compared to other kinds of businesses is that because it's regulated by liquor control commissions, be it ATF, Washington, Oregon, any of that, our customers all had to pay within 30 days. So we never had to wait on debt. We always had our deposits in a timely manner.

TEM: So that was predictable.

BH: Yeah, so that was predictable. That was another big advantage as we were needing to expand and continue to expand is we were able to yeah, just kind of keep it moving and that we didn't have time to live a life, so we didn't really 00:37:00need, you know-our house payment was $500 a month and you know we still, believe it or not, kept a small garden.

TEM: What was the conversation like when you and Tom decided to, what was the let's not run a grocery store, let's go open a brewery conversation? How did that-?

BH: Oh, well, it was the same kind of impatience, about a year and a half with the grocery store that we had to just get out of it. We just weren't made for life in the city. It was great, but-you know, it's a great place to be in your 20s and in your late 20s, but we really wanted to get back to the rural life. The value of the store had escalated so much in the time we owned it that we were able to sell it for a lot more than we bought this little divey place for. 00:38:00Again, it was even the neighborhood was changing. The little Latona Tavern across the street, which you knew what time of day it was by what cars were parked in front, and there were people who would park in front of the store and leave their kids in the car and buy candy and we'd kind of, we knew that we'd kind of keep an eye on that. And then that change and Latona Tavern it grew into a beautiful tap house of its own. So the neighborhood was changing and so we were able to sell it and then at the time, yeah so we had that little nest egg of what we'd grown, we'd grown from buying and selling, so we had our money to invest in a brewery. We knew we were going to do something else. We couldn't imagine working for somebody at that point. Here we are 29 [laughs].

TEM: Well, you'd already worked for Proctor and Gamble, so you know.

BH: Yeah, right. And Weyerhaeuser.

TEM: And Weyerhaeuser.

BH: That was the end of corporate life at that point and so, yeah, so we did have a nest egg and then we come back to that chicken fried steak. You know what are we going to do? How can we live here in our beautiful home in this wonderful little town and make money by selling into the markets.

TEM: How did you choose Kalama?

BH: Well, we had the house there when we worked for Weyerhaeuser.

TEM: Oh, okay. Okay.

BH: So when we worked for Weyerhaeuser, at the time Weyerhaeuser went on strike and I was salaried so I worked through the strike. They also pulled Tom out of the woods.

They pulled a lot of salaried people from Weyerhaeuser all over, from Tacoma, engineers from Tacoma who were cutting cores and the basement of paper mills. I 00:40:00mean everybody just kind of came in. So in those five months that we worked, it was the same thing: 12-hour shifts; no days off for five months. They brought in cater wagons and they fed us lunch every day and they paid us really well, because it was like time and a half most of our hours, so much overtime, that we were able then, we got a little kickstart right then. College debt wasn't what it was now. We had already been able to pay that off in the first year and a half. That allowed us to be able to buy a house, so we chose Kalama. We found this wonderful little turn-of-the-century home. Bought it from the original owners who'd owned the sawmill in Kalama at the time they built it. That was where we were. So when we went off to join the ship we just rented the house for 00:41:002 years. We stored all of our furnishings and stuff in the attic of the liquor store. The woman in the liquor store had become a good friend and we were like what are we going to do with all our stuff? And she was like, oh, she took us upstairs, if you can carry it up these stairs you can have it all here. That's just small town. And Kalama is a lovely, lovely community. it really is. It's been fun to see McMenamins build their place there. I think the first time they came was the day they drove up to see us. They just did a road trip. Mike and Brian hopped in the car, came up, walked in the door early, early, so Tom brought them home for breakfast and that's how we met. At that time they were just, they just had 4 tap houses.

TEM: As you were talking about Murphy's, I think that's how people talk about 00:42:00produce row in that same kind of way or I think even thinking about your grocery store that that being an early place for people to buy stuff that was not from here.

BH: Right. Even the store I was saying, Starbucks had that many employees. But Nancy's Dairy had just started. Kettle Chips had just started, these other brands that were so different from what had been, the industrial options. A lot of that was happening in those years. You mentioned it earlier in the '70s. that's I guess some of the awareness, but there really weren't as many commercial options for food, prepared foods and those kinds of things.

TEM: I have done some interviews for Oregon Tilth, which is an organic certifier, and I was talking to someone who had started one of the early organic 00:43:00farms in Oregon a few weeks ago and he really characterized that life choice, that this is the way we want to orient ourselves. Did you feel like that? That there was this sense of these people doing these-I don't want to call it artisanal, but as you said earlier, that you saw yourself as craft brewers.

BH: Absolutely.

TEM: That it was not the-that micro was a label that was put on, that there was this, the way that you talk about it, this orientation I guess that seems to align with what I've heard from people who were doing organic farming or were starting companies like Kettle or starting companies like Nancy's, that they've certainly grown and changed.

BH: Right, again you don't always have a choice if you want to stay in the 00:44:00market, but without question. When we knew we could make beer with four ingredients instead of all the head stabilizers and foamers and that industrial brews were fermenting in a day, and that's why we all started with ale yeast, because it was a two-week process and a true logger should take months. Yeah, so it was without question bringing back that quality of-you know I use the word grass roots in so many ways, but I see it just in the way that we go back to the simpler ways of doing and making things and I have. I've supported organic.

I remember going to the grocery store and suddenly the organic options were just so-they just didn't age as well. people didn't understand. It was even with 00:45:00ours, when I first went out to find out who, line up our distributors. I really did not want some [unclear] breaker. I wanted the wine merchants. I really wanted people to understand that these beers were really significantly different and that was it, but we ended up in a wine house and they got a refrigerated trailer they put in the parking lot for our beer, but they still didn't understand that it had to turn. I ended up having to go up and bring full kegs back so I could exchange them around. Again it was just that whole concept of well, doesn't it just last like a Twinkie? Doesn't it just last forever? And 00:46:00it's like no you really need to turn it and it needs to turn, but that didn't take that long. That happened in the first 6-8 months before we hit those concepts.

TEM: How did you decide which building to start in? I read in Eckhardt's notes that it was a grocery store.

BH: [Laughs] It's because there was nothing else that suited.

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: Even that, every day we would walk up and down the street and would this work? Because there were a lot of empty storefronts and finally I actually think we'd gotten binoculars or something to look farther in the window to the room and Tom could see that there was concrete back there, because there was just wood floors where we could see it. We ended up calling the guy and he was great. We just started immediately doing a lot of-we pulled out a lot of the wood 00:47:00floor. We pulled out a lot of the loft area so that we could have the height, and the second floor, the gravity feed: we ripped out a lot of the wood floor and over time just added more concrete and more concrete floors. We were able to expand. The room in the back was fine. We'd probably been in business 3 years, I think, and the landlord came in one day and he's just kind of like, he says, well you've kind of reduced the square footage of this building. He was just giving us a bad time you know about how we'd reduced the square footage. And he goes, I think it's about time that you own this building. He said we're not going to worry about a down payment, you've been paying your rent regularly so we'll just call that your down payment, and we'll kick up your rent by this much and you'll have it paid off in 2 years. Generous, but also, I mean he'd had it 00:48:00empty for enough years to know that he'd do alright to just pass it on. So that's how we ended up buying the building. It went with it. After the sale, it really had gotten too small and needed to expand. There was a site down the Kalama waterfront that it had been a yacht sales, so it had really big glass windows looking out at the river and tall for the masts and boats that were in there. They ended up running that and Tom stayed on for, he was going to stay on for just a few months but they weren't hiring anybody. In typical Beth fashion, they weren't doing things in the time that they needed to. I actually ran an ad in the Oregonian. Placed an ad. I didn't say anything about it being a brewery, just a production facility. What was needed and I ran the ad. Then I reviewed 00:49:00all the resumes and then had three interviews outside the brewery, because I didn't really have a role. Then I narrowed it to three, went up to Seattle and met with the partners and said Tom needs to get out and so I've done some interviewing and these are the three that I recommend. They hired somebody that month and he was able to stop.

TEM: He was working-

BH: Well, when they did this a lot of times when you sell, you might have to sign a non-compete and sometimes there's an overlap of training. It was just, it had been this overlap of training, a commitment to participate for whatever it was, for three months, or whatever it was-amazing that I don't remember 35 years later.

But anyway, we sold for a reason. We sold for a reason. Yeah, he was very 00:50:00unhappy and he has issues with temper and so it was just time. We sold and then it's like, so we've sold but he's still there and I need to get him out of here.

TEM: Oh, okay. Had you already moved then to the site down by the water?

BH: He was helping them rebuild into that as part of it.

TEM: Oh, I get it. Okay.

BH: It was part of the overlap in training, he was helping them do it. But we really assumed that there would be someone else who was going to be taking his place that would be training into that role and it wasn't happening.

TEM: Okay.

BH: It was just the same kind of thing.

TEM: I was thinking that he was running the sail boat. That's where I got confused. I was like why did the-?

BH: Sorry, well, and he was. He was down at that new site.

TEM: Okay.

BH: Trying to get it built up when he was really done with the whole expanding 00:51:00again and whole expanding again kind of thing.

TEM: Was that at the point where you two split?

BH: No, we were together for-let's see, we sold in '89 and we separated in '94.

TEM: Oh, okay.

BH: We had bought the farm when we still had the brewery, and about the time we were ready to sell we moved out there. We had had it. A friend of ours had heard of Guernseys and made cheese, and so we had a place to take all our spent grain. So our spent grain went out to the farm and fed his Guernseys and he made cheese, and so just like, not really like Fritz Maytag, but like Fritz Maytag. We also were in, I'd also sell some cheese along the way, getting some locations to carry the cheese and always in the market. Then we moved out there, had 00:52:00Vance, and Vance was 4 when we separated. It was more than the brewery. It was, I kept thinking selling the store and selling the brewery were going to solve the unhappiness, but that didn't prove out to be true.

TEM: As is often the case. You, before the tape turned on the beer, the timing of your children's birth is significant, both of them, for the time of the brewery. The picture that we were showing, we were looking at earlier, has your very young first son that Fred Eckhardt took with the two of you and all of the kegs. So what was it like to have a baby when the brewery opened? Like literally.

BH: Yeah, literally. We took out the lease on the building on April 1st. he was born on the 23rd and then there was like the 6 months. That was the advantage-six months of waiting to get our licensing, which also is the amount of time it took to really get the fabrication on the tanks in place, the concrete poured and all that. So he grew up there. He grew up in the brewery. He's really-Sterling's really wonderful. He really connects with people and I remember he was about 3, we're walking downtown, and we'd just said hi to somebody and he looks at me and goes, who was that? I'm like, well, I don't know. And he's like you don't know? He thought we knew everyone in the world, because we did a lot of tourists, people would stop by and we'd say hi. Everywhere we went he thought we just knew the world. He did. He grew up there. 00:54:00He took his maps. Sometimes it was like where is he? There'd be a cardboard piece on top of a stack of kegs and he'd be just curled up there sleeping. He was on my back when things were, like the bottle line was running or anything like that. He wasn't off and away. He had his little toy jeep, you know, that he'd push with his feet. He'd give the kid tours. Again, he traveled with me. He lived in the car. There were the embedding of raisins and goldfish crackers that would always fall from his little seat. I was, like I said, far in Portland a couple of days a week, Seattle, and sometimes I'd take him to Seattle and sometimes I'd just be doing tastings. We never turned down anything. We just said, anybody wants us to come to a tasting, we're doing it.

Sometimes we'd make special table tents just for events and it was, we didn't 00:55:00make money on our t-shirts. There was no, I still am just blown away that you pay for samples in a winery. You never used to. You could just do tastings.

TEM: How did you decide as a couple what your roles were? Was it-

BH: Oh, there was no decision. We just totally have different skills. His skill set was really in the fabrication and the brewing and the perfection. The thing I say, as much as I have a developed pallet, I believe like there's perfect pitch. There's perfect pitch and then there's like that photographic memory or whatever, I believe there is a perfect pallet. Tom could remember from batch to 00:56:00batch exactly the difference. I can remember things were wonderful, and I can remember how I pulled it together. To really have that refined piece is really his skill. It was really his skill. It wasn't a mistake. I mean, I don't mean that-it was so simple to divide it. He really did the production. I did the other side. He came for a few of the first tastings and Q & As and they'd ask a question and the answer would just drone on and be so technical that people wouldn't remember what they'd asked. It became clear that the layman descriptions were what worked best for-you know, whether it was at a Lion's Club lunch where they're all spit wad throwing or you know or a large assembly. I did 00:57:00all the tastings and all that.

TEM: Were there other couples who were so both integrally involved? Obviously there were people who were married, and that if it's a family business there certainly it's not just one person's business. Were there other couples who had that same kind of-?

BH: Not really. Not really. Eventually there kind of were. So Thomas Kemper, was the Thomas couple and the Kemper couple. They were as close as it came. Marie Kemper, oh gosh she was so cute. We'd see her, sometimes she'd come to some 00:58:00group tastings and then I can't remember-I don't think I met her but once. So Thomas ended up buying out Kemper, even though they kept it, and then she ended up starting root beer. So Thomas Kemper did a root beer, and she had done that. But it wasn't in the initial stages of brewing. It was later. I didn't really know her. Then the others were other partnerships, like Portland Brewing. They were partners. At Bridgeport it was owned by the Ponzis and Carl was an employee. We'd see Carol there a lot but she didn't have a role in the business.

TEM: Except making food.

BH: Oh. Okay.

TEM: I interviewed her and she talked about making food. That just always sticks in my head that she made the food and brought the lasagna trays down for the 00:59:00people to eat.

BH: Oh. She had a different-

TEM: She had a different, an important but probably non-paid role.

BH: Right, and just like the Widmers was robbing Kurt and so Rob had more like my role and like I said we carpooled a lot. I was really thrilled to see they became the Widmer Brothers and he stepped into a more equal role and title over time. I really was the first woman brewery owner since prohibition and it was hard to convince people. It was more than the photograph. We had been with-Raden Winery was our distributer in Seattle, and they eventually-[looks over shoulder].

TEM: Oh, no I'm just looking, I was looking at the-I don't have the recorder close enough to me that I can do it surreptitiously.

BH: Oh okay [laughs]. That's okay.

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: Anyway, Raden was our distributor in Seattle and then one day we just get the notice they're going out of business and their business is all going to Sid Eland and Sid's going to represent their line but we all were to meet with, go to Sid Eland and make an appointment. I went up and I met with Sid, Jr., and he's like where's Tom? I'm like, well, he's at the brewery. Somebody's got to brew the beer. You know? He's there 12 hours a day. He's just like, well, then when he comes up here the next time we'll talk. I'm like, no, this is your opportunity to take on our brand. He says I'm not prepared to do that without Tom here. I said okay. You know back to the phone booth, since it was before cell phones [laughs]. I called who I consider a good mentor of mine, was a wine 01:01:00salesman at the time, and he's like give Western a call. So I called Western Beverage right then. They made room for me. I went right over that day and it was just, I felt highly respected with Western and worked with them for years and spent a lot of time going out. They had quite a few women on their sales force that sold beer and wine and it just felt like a real equitable place.

TEM: Well, and I imagine, too, that-you know, I've heard that there was the uphill battle to get funding from banks. There was the uphill battle, we were talking about the paperwork of the-

BH: Licensing.

TEM: Yeah, the licensing didn't know how to license you. I imagine that kind of general hoop jumping then compounded with gender hoop-jumping was probably 01:02:00pretty exhausting at times.

BH: What I feel like I, I mean I've been in that position since I was 18. All the work I've ever done, my first real job that wasn't like working for somebody in the neighborhood or catering a party or babysitting was work in a grocery store and that's when they were all box boys. I was one of the first girls who boxed groceries and they'd say oh you're not allowed to pick up more than 25 pounds. It was just like you're hustling three times as fast. I had spent my life that way and there probably-I think at this point it's frustrating because we didn't accomplish it. We still haven't entirely accomplished it, but I think we have raised new generations. My sons are not like our fathers and the same for women. We did what we could, but we were still trapped by language. There 01:03:00wasn't such a thing as, oh, again phrases, pop culture phrases-I mean, guys could say whatever they wanted to you. Guys, they'd just say whatever. Here I am at 18 and they'd like be saying stuff to me that was totally inappropriate and I'd just like oh you couldn't handle it. You know? it was just the way of having to always push back and to challenge it and to do it and so now I just laugh because it's like here I am, I just retired a month and a half ago. I feel like I'm finally kind of left the whole patriarchy behind. I don't have to convince anyone that my opinion is as knowledgeable and worthy as that guy over there 01:04:00who'd show up once in a while. You know, it's just like okay I feel like I don't have to do the battle anymore and it's changed how that looks. It's just how that looks. So there's a lot of hope in that too.

TEM: Yeah. It's exhausting though.

BH: Yeah.

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: It is. It was fun, I just did this last year McMenamins at women's brewers through Oregon Historical Society as part of the museum thing and so they invited me and I'm just like, there's a lot I could speak to as far as history goes and even how we brewed at the time, but it doesn't relate at all to how brewing is done now with the equipment and everything.

But it was so exciting to sit with these women brewers and hear their stories and what they've accomplished and the creative aspects that they've been able to 01:05:00carry on and so, you know, it is, it's like we were opening windows and now it's doors and now walls are coming down.

TEM: Well, the way that I-the click that I had was, I'm trying to think if it was from McMenamins. It seems like the type of thing I would have read a blogpost on their history article, but the way that I clicked with you was that Mellie Pullman was at-

BH: She was the first brewer. She was the first woman brewer-

TEM: Yeah.

BH: She was at Wasatch. We knew them through, okay, so in Seattle when we had Young Pine, Fratelli's Ice Cream was just starting. They became good friends of ours. They called on our store and then we catered their stuff and we became really good friends. When we got to the point where we knew it was time to sell, 01:06:00again, the way it was with Fred Eckhardt, who was sure Sterling would go on to be the next brewer at Pyramid and because the breweries were all so small and it was personal. I mean, the brewers all showed up for their tastings. We didn't have, I mean, the employees we could afford needed to be in production. Oh, God, okay-

TEM: Mellie [laughs].

BH: Thank you. Anyway, so, when we got ready to sell, we just wanted to be really quiet about it. We went to them, because they were a pretty big company at that time.

TEM: Wasatch.

BH: No, in Seattle.

TEM: Oh, oh, oh, okay.

BH: In Seattle. The Morris Brothers, Peter and John. One of John's closest friends is Greg Schirf who started Wasatch. That's how we got there. He wanted 01:07:00to start. We helped consult with that and Mellie and come to him to brew. Mellie came and lived with us. So she came Kalama and lived with us for a month or two and worked in the brewery side by side with Tom and learned there and yeah we became good friends. I adore her.

TEM: She came to live with you right when you were opening?

BH: No this was at the end, just before we sold. It was just before we sold, about the time we had met Greg through John and Peter and John and Peter helped us do the sale. It was just that time. it was the same time Full Sail was starting. It was toward the end when we were getting close to selling. Full Sail had come to us and we had consulted with them. it was the same with Greg Schirf. Mellie came and she lived with us at that time to learn and then she went back 01:08:00to Park City and so she brewed with him for a while until she moved on and got her doctorate, and now-I just love her path, too. It's wonderful. Even with Full Sail, it was fun. I was talking to somebody I had lunch with like the oldest original employee you know there. We have so many breweries in Hood River. He said, well they all came out of here. Which again it was like since we consulted on Full Sail there's still that connection of our place in the industry at that time and how it continues to still feed and educate and keep the industry going. It was just a little flutter of oh, good, more good things came of that time.

TEM: Your saying that reminded me of yeast propagation. The you start with like... you just have to have a little...

BH: No you're right. Uh-huh. Yeah.

TEM: I will not say anymore because I don't actually understand how yeast works. 01:09:00How did-

BH: It just eats sugar.

TEM: Yeah, for me it's the-

BH: It eats sugar and gives off CO2 and that's the carbonation.

TEM: It's the keeping it alive. That's the-

BH: Feeding it and keeping it in temperatures that it likes.

TEM: Yes. I'm very good at killing yeast.

BH: Yeah [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs] It's kind of a superpower.

BH: It may have to do with temperature or not enough sugar.

TEM: It's the paying attention. I think that's honestly where it-so how did you decide what kind of beer to make? What was the-we were talking about how Tom didn't necessarily write down recipes and that he had this amazing memory pallet that he could adjust and decide based on that. How did the actual recipe-thing work? How was that decided?

BH: Just like so many, it came out of home brewing. The difference is we didn't have a long history of home brewing. It was when we sold the store in Seattle that we decided to do the brewery that the home brewing really started. Tom really is brilliant and he learns everything from books. He learned to weld from a book. He learned to stainless steel weld from a book. He went to the library, got the book, went and bought the equipment, brought it in and started going at it. It was much the same way. He just read and read and I think in the same way I can read a recipe, taste it, and have a sense of its texture and how in the process it comes out. I think you just get to that point. I would say he definitely had that skill. He did tons of home brewing. I don't know how many batches he made. We did not drink them all. He'd make them and taste them and then let them go. I'm sure, yeah, he took elaborate notes and continued to go on.

That's the thing I love about Mike Hale was when the big brew, because again there weren't brewing festivals until we all existed. The great beer festival in Denver that was created, he said I don't think we should participate. He says it's not like wine where you take the grape and you do the best you can with it. In brewing you can make it taste however you want. You don't have that same kind of risk I guess, or unknowns. Your hops do change a little from year to year but they're more subtle and you have that. Basically he had just said, you know, we shouldn't compete because all we're doing is I like this better and I like this 01:12:00better and brewers make what they like, basically. That was kind of how it was and so the first beer we made, the Pale Ale, was his favorite beer of all the ones that he brewed. As I said then, Carl Lockhart had taken him aside, Carl the sole educated brewer, because he had done his brewing course, they had one brewing course at Davis at the time which was a big wine school. He just thought it was too many hops. He's like you've got that a little over-hopped, and I still laugh about that looking at what we've got with the IPAs and double-hopping and all that. That was it. That was our first beer.

The second beer was our Christmas beer. We called it St. Nick's. It was a barley wine. Again, we just made it for a short amount of time, just a few kegs. I had 01:13:00real concerns about its alcohol level and people driving. I always felt strongly that we be taxed. I always thought we should be taxed for our alcohol and it should go into systems that support alcoholism, you know, recovery-there we go. I think too there is a lot of alcoholism in the industry. I did a lot of tastings. I knew the ones that were hanging out with their elbows on the counter and I think that we have some responsibility to that. I say that now having not owned a brewery for 30 years. But still, I always felt strongly about that. Anyways, we had the barely wine. We made the wheat beer but we didn't want to put that in bottles because we knew we'd have trouble keeping up until we really 01:14:00got the bottle line working. We also did another beer called Pacific Crest Ale, instead of Pacific Crest trail. Like all of our labels, it's just kind of like the pyramid and the trees. The water that came in to Kalama was off of St. Helens. It was just glacier melt that came directly into the brewery that we made the beer from. It was all using those kinds of images in our branding. Then we did a stout we called Sphinx Stout. Again, it was a short run. Eventually it all came under the pyramid label instead of each having its own thing.

TEM: Oh, so before that there would be-

BH: There was the Pyramid Pale Ale. There was the Sphynx Stout. There was the Pacific Crest Trail.

TEM: Oh, that makes sense. Okay.

BH: Yeah, St. Nick's special. That was fun because we found these little like 01:15:00nutcracker heads, these little wooden nutcracker heads. There was a man in town who turned all of our tap handles. So we just stuck those little nutcracker heads on the ends of the tap handles he turned for our Christmas ales. It was great to be able to really support local people, using local printers in Longview and buy what we could locally.

TEM: I imagine, too, that there's only so much you could get done in the town and you would want to support people who were in neighboring towns.

BH: Right. As much as we could.

TEM: So you didn't have to drive.

BH: Well, we'd be driving anyway. I mean, I still had to go get, you know, plumbing parts. My gosh. Well that was the other thing. I'd go in to get the plumbing parts and I'd tell them what they want and their like, I'm not sure you 01:16:00want that. And I'm like, no this is exactly what I want. They're just like I'm not sure. I'm like okay, I'll buy both and I'll bring the next one and you don't complain. Every time I'd take back exactly what they told me I needed and I didn't. You know. It was just that continual you can't know what you need. I was in Portland doing that kind of stuff and picking up barely, malt, and all that.

TEM: From Steinbarts.

BH: From Steinbarts, yeah [laughs]. They were great and of course Sterling was always with me so everybody knew him and he and the cat would play and it was just, yeah, it was a family business. It was a family business for the family business. You know, work with family businesses. All breweries were that way at the time. We were all just starting out. Marriages came because a lot of the guys were single to start. It grew and then it became an industry. It just got 01:17:00to the size where, yeah, employees starting doing the tastings because they had to. You just got to the point where there was so many. You couldn't keep up and that's when we were just ready to be done.

TEM: It's interesting to think about that, that as probably an imperfect marker, but there was this switch that it became a thing.

BH: It was based on volume. I mean, if you're tripling your size every year there comes a time where it's just where you can't do anything else but that. It's somebody has to start planning, just the fabrication and where it goes from there. And there really needs to be somebody else brewing. You have to have a full team because like the people that now know how to brew can't take time to clean kegs. It's just that whole thing and it just you know put us to the point 01:18:00where it was like-and you have to keep up, especially when you're bottling. You have to have shelf space. If you can't meet demand, then you're going to start losing shelf space which means you're going to lose recognition everywhere. That's really what happened. In some ways it's been great as it's gone on because now there can be small neighborhood breweries that can afford equipment because there's used stuff out there for small brew houses. Then you get the chance-because we just got to the point where consistency was key. It had to be exactly the same. It had to continue to be consistent, consistent. How many new beers could you come out with? How many more labels and how many more products? That's a huge advantage. I think the piece that I think we might have dreamed to 01:19:00be in and might have been happier doing would be where you have a small enough brew house that you can be trying different recipes and having more seasonal ales and to have that.

TEM: Did you feel like, I want to know about the customers. I want to know who was drinking the beer and what did they expect? What was the feedback loop was like for what they liked and didn't like? When I ask about customers what comes to mind?

BH: I think surprise. I think that's what I loved most about tasting is getting people to open their mouths and taste it. They'd say oh I don't' drink beer. And I'm like oh then you're really the one I want to talk to because this isn't anything like you've tasted before.

It was just that surprise of people and a lot of people who'd been drinking 01:20:00industrial brews weren't coming around to it. We didn't sell much in Kalama. The pub next door had to have a keg on tap. It didn't sell there so much. Again, it's people with more adventurous pallets. People willing to try and that's really where we began. But it didn't take that long for more to take it on and people who, again, hadn't really thought about drinking beer were drinking beer.

TEM: Did they have suggestions of what they liked? Was the consumer base educated enough that they could say actually could you try out making this kind of beer or I would like for you to do a little less of this or more of this?

BH: That's interesting. I don't remember anything like that.

TEM: Yeah.

BH: I think so much of the time was describing to them what they were tasting.

TEM: Oh okay, yeah.

BH: Because before there hadn't been a way to dismantle or, you know, it's just whatever that flavor is of all those industrial brews I still haven't acquired a taste.

TEM: Beer.

BH: Right. but to be able to put it in and describe. You've got your malt and that's your sweet and that's depending on how much it's roasted is how full that flavor is. If you can taste that sweet and that grainy stuff that's the malt. The hop is what comes up because if you didn't have the hop it would be so gummy sweet and the hop just cleans that pallet. It's that little grapefruit flavor you taste. A lot of the time it was that. It was explaining to people how beer 01:22:00was made and what to taste for and then once they started to identify, yes, they could then parse out what they were looking for as far as something darker or richer. They fell more towards the multi flavors where others wanted that cleaner, that hop flavor or more floral hops. Really it was still to the point where most people, other than our Eckhardts and Catones and others who were in the industry and who were beer critics and wrote about it and home brewers. They already understood those things. The greatest part of introducing our beers and creating this market was education. It really was. It was helping them understand what they were tasting. Why it was different.

TEM: I've heard people talk about Fred Eckhardt for lots of reasons but that it was so important for somebody to be writing about beer in the Oregonian. It was worthy enough that it had a column where somebody wanted to describe and educate, not to the masses, but kind of more to the masses. That you as somebody at a tasting can only talk to so many people and then the tasting ends and that extension of education to get people to understand more and be able to parse that out: I like this, I don't like this so I'm going to go more towards that and not that.

BH: You're right. It was, I mean that was just part of the wave. Like you say, Cartwright started just before us. Again, it's hard to be the lone ranger. It really helped to have somebody coming on at the same time that we created a community. We could fill a row of taps. We could fill a shelf of bottles. There 01:24:00were enough of us that we could create that. To have the writers, and I think in some ways too they had something they could really write about finally, too. The writers were there and then again all of our being able to, because I know that there are maltsters now. We had to buy all of our malt in like 50-pound sacks. We could get the big boxes. I would drive down to great western they'd use the forklift and we had a big hole in the side of the pickup our only vehicle from a misjudge unloading the box that we would auger out of the back of the pickup when we first started out and then getting our specialty malts and hops in orders together with the Portland breweries.

Yeah it was just that wave that we all needed each other. We needed the writers, 01:25:00and Fred was just such a dear man. I don't' know, I just have a fondness for epicures of all kinds and just his enthusiasm.

TEM: Do you remember the day that he came to take those pictures I was showing you? Do you remember him visiting the brewery?

BH: I do remember him visiting the brewery. I don't know if that was the day we poured in September of '84, because we got to be kind of a popular stop. I do remember him being in the brewery. Again, his little mustache and his little just-so and his pallet and his excitement and enthusiasm and again his just encouragement. I think he just loved knowing that, I mean we were all little 01:26:00families or just coming at it from just a love of the product. It was not, I mean for us we made the decision for income reasons because we knew we needed to support ourselves and we needed to employ ourselves but there was something about it that was just right. he was just thrilled with it. I think he was as happy as can be knowing that we were all just creating ourselves and giving him more to write about.

TEM: Did you ever meet Charles Coury? Did you ever visit Cartwright Brewing?

BH: Nope. I think we were probably in Seattle at that time, so no we didn't ever meet him. I remember, I mean we had our heroes with Sierra Nevada and with 01:27:00Anchor Steam. I remember the day Fritz Maytag came up and did a tasting and we're just all in this circle asking him all these questions and him telling stories about starting it behind the existing brewery and him carrying yeast and having it overflow on the floor of his Porsche. Again, it's just, there's a certain you know it's that entrepreneurial nature. Some of the bigger breweries it wasn't so much. With Redhook it really wasn't so much that way. It seemed more corporate investors, corporate money. Then the real love of it with Yakima, Burt Grant.

TEM: Oh Burt, yeah.

BH: I mean Burt just came out of the hop fields and he was Scottish. He loved wearing his kilt and telling the stories and being the authority, which wasn't always the case. He made some mistakes [laughs]. But still most of it were the people that really had that, especially being able to imagine something that didn't really exist.

TEM: Yeah, and it had been so long that it hadn't existed in this state.

BH: Yeah a long time. Yeah, because when was prohibition? It was in the late 1800s, right?

TEM: Prohibition, well, it there was a lot of prohibition agitation in the late 1800s but the local options started early 1900s. Corvallis went dry in 1904 but 01:29:00of course Albany wasn't. Then Oregon prohibition was in '16 and then national was in '20; no, '14. Oh, my gosh. Well, that's where the edit will come.

BH: Quizzing the historian [laughs].

TEM: Well women got the right to vote in Oregon in 1912 and them immediately voted prohibition in. So, it must not have been enacted until '16. That may be what it-

BH: But that makes sense, yeah.

TEM: So, we were earlier. I think it must be that it was voted in in '14 and then enacted in '16.

BH: That's funny. I didn't even draw those together. But I can totally understand that.

TEM: Yes, it's very ironic.

BH: It probably goes back to some of my earlier comments about our responsibility.

TEM: Probably, yes. Yeah, and I think the, yes the nastiness of saloons that 01:30:00kind of unseemly-

BH: Right. Unsavory, yes.

TEM: Unsavoriness, yeah. Oh, Burt Grant, proximity to hops. Did you have a sense of this being a hop-growing region? Was there a connection to the localness of farms or the localness of ingredients when you started?

BH: It was a huge advantage. It really tied into like I was saying earlier about our beers can be on draft. It was just right that, so those we weren't importing from Europe or anything like that. But I don't-again, it just comes back, as I 01:31:00was speaking about, equipment or anything, you know just the ability to have local hops and to support hop growers in even a larger realm that they could start to grow other varieties and really expand in the way they did.

TEM: Where'd you buy your hops from?

BH: Oh. You know, I just, I mean initially I think we pretty much bought everything through Steinbarts. But then eventually we would be contracting with hop growers, because we need so many bales or whatever. Trying to estimate our sales and then getting as much fresh for our walk-in, our hop cooler, and then not having to buy things late in the season.

TEM: It's probably in that notebook.

BH: Yeah, it might-it might be in that notebook. It'll be interesting to see. It's been a while since it was all assembled and I think I remember flipping 01:32:00through it and seeing she'd done a great job of assembling it with all of our drawer full of everything we'd set aside. One day I'll get to that and then it was just like I'm not going to get to that. Petey, you want to take a month to put this notebook together.

TEM: It's interesting that link to individual hop growers is a relatively, not a new invention, but it's a relatively new marketing tactic. I don't want to disparage the people that do say that they get their hops from such and such farm, but it seems that it wasn't part of what was-you may say that you use Cascade hops or you may say that you use Willamette's or whatever variety but that it wasn't necessarily part of what was talked about.

BH: Oh I think it was.

TEM: You think it was?

BH: Oh yeah. We bought all our hops locally. Yeah, we did. We didn't buy hops from anywhere outside of the northwest region.

TEM: Yeah, okay.

BH: It would be something we said. I don't see as the being the number one reason we started brewing but it was definitely a part of what we, how we brewed and how we shared what we did. In the same way when it came down do we have 4 ingredients. And it's always felt like it's been a piece that's been rooted in me through most of my life and it's why I live in Hood River now. To be a cook and not have to grow everything, to be someplace where I can get a CSA for my meat and for my badge and for everything that we have all local farmers. The 01:34:00majority of the things we eat. I get my coffee from a local roaster.

TEM: It's part of operations.

BH: Right and in the longer realm and it's my personal philosophy, sometimes I look back and I'm like have I always thought this way? And I'm like yeah, I always have. But the need for community. I think I speak to just how we started out and now, as I refer to our beautiful and broken world, as we go forward I think the most important thing that we do is continue to build community to find the ways that we support and care for each other, because it's not coming from anywhere else. I think that I've had those lessons through my life in the businesses I've had and the customer base and the way I feel about my vendors and suppliers.

I'm not going to hold them over hot coals when I know they're the ones that are 01:35:00going to save me when I short ordered. I mean I think it's important, you know, our customers are as important as our employees, as our vendors, as our anything when you have a business. To be in the role of always looking at the bottom line and being in negotiation is, I think, foul. With Pyramid I mean it was one thing with Young Pine, our grocery store, in creating neighborhood where a lot of the neighbors actually met in our store and found they lived down the street and of a lot of the ways we promoted our business there. The same with a brewery and as I was saying and working with the other brewers in creating this market. They've all proven out to be things that we continue to need and they just keep getting reinforced through my life. It's great to be at this age where it's all starting 01:36:00to really blossom in me that the simpler and the clearer that it has become that those principles that always felt important are now able to be like 100% my personal path.

TEM: I think it's, as an oral historian, it's interesting, I feel like there's often in so many lives there are these obvious trajectories and it's interesting in interviews to be able to have somebody tell me their life story and to have it be very clear from the outsider perspective that you made this choice, you made this choice, you made this choice that that kind of through line. But it's hard I think for your own life until you have lived long enough and reflected long enough, not everybody can see that through line.

BH: I know. I was just talking to my nephew's wife who's, she lives a very busy 01:37:00life. She's in Orange County, so there's certain things about appearance and how you have to entertain for everything these gender-reveal parties. Oh my gosh. You know gender reveal happened at birth [laughs]. She's like now what are you going to do now that you're retired and it's like actually I've been doing a lot of my life and what I want is space between the doing. That space between the doing and where I've spent a life of it being okay I have 20 minutes to accomplish this and that means I've got this much time to drive and just have everything parsed into time capsules. The tick-tock is to really say that is not 01:38:00what I want driving my life. There are other things I want driving my life and I believe there are ways that I can do that and not have that real push. I was really pretty clear about that. I've worked a lot through the winter of thinking what I want times to look like now that it's really that change from punching the clock. The really hilarious thing is I had put my watch away like in April and just did these gradual things. I was just with my parents and my dad just bought me this watch [laughs].

TEM: [Laughs].

BH: You know, it's beautiful. It doesn't need batteries and I can do dishes with it. It's not going to stop. I've just struggled with watches, you know. It's one more of those tasks. Get the battery, get a new watch because it seized because it steamed up.

TEM: Now it's like a bracelet.

BH: Now it's like a bracelet, but it's also a very vivid reminder of it just being an ornamental piece that that's what time is.

TEM: Talk about what you did after the business closed and that that was clearly things were the sort of opposite of free time space to breathe within the things or within the space between the things. What happened after that?

BH: Well, initially I actually did do some part-time sales. I did some food brokering. I never felt comfortable saying I'm done or not knowing that I was staying current and could always, there was always just that peace of knowing 01:40:00that I could always support myself as part of having children late and all that.

So I did do some food brokering. There were requests for that as well because I still had a lot of connections in Seattle, people starting food products and wanting to get into the Portland market and vice versa and because I had those relationships I did that for a little while. But really after Vance was born I pretty much stayed and I've always done volunteer work in communities. I always feel like it's important to give back and participate. We lived on the farm, which is just beautiful. We had purchased it in the 2nd or 3rd year of the brewery. It was originally 48 acres. It's 38 now. We had the cows. We moved up 01:41:00there and had the big garden and you know, but there were just, it still, the frustrations and the reasons for selling the brewery and for selling the store were part of life behind the gate and the farm. I had actually taken a trip. My grandmother took me to Indonesia. It was her last long trip. Coming back was really a whole new awakening for me.

We spent three weeks pretty much in the third world but in a country that had so many faiths and so many religions and yet there were times that everyone worshipped together. It was that daily seeing people, daily build their daily altars, daily dressing their statuary. It made a big shift in me in what I 01:42:00wanted to have in my life and then to come home and still have a lot of challenges that it was just, yeah, I left the farm. I left it to Tom and the boys. I lived nearby and we traded the kids week-on/week-off for six years and then at that point I did move to Bend. It felt important that I have more space away, a sanctuary for the boys to come that wasn't some place that Tom drove by every day. In Bend a really significant piece that kind of shifted in my life, even though I've talked about community and that, I worked for a start-up and 01:43:00then I ended up starting a little take-out shop there when it was after dot-com and 9/11 and things had kind of dried up and I was... Bend has never been, it's been a great retirement community, so there's lots of service work but there hasn't been career work in Bend for decades. In all the time I can remember. I would've moved there in the '70s if there had been work. Anyway, when I had my little shop. It was just a little take-out. One girl. I could do it all. I opened at 5:30 so I was there by 3:00 and closed about 2:00 and I just had thermoses for self-serve coffee and food to go. One-handed breakfast and sack lunches with a note from mom. Had the sandwich, cookies, chips, and veggie. One day a guy came in, a homeless guy, and put his 50 cents down for his coffee and 01:44:00sat in my only chair and I remember thinking, oh, hmm. I wonder if my customers are going to notice or am I safe? Just that whole old-school worry. As it turned out, within a week or two, I'd been discovered and had a whole homeless community as part of my daily family. After hearing stories and knowing everyone individually, it really was a major shift in how I saw the world and how I continue to live my life.

Having come from this type-A Republican family, you can do it, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and then through time things really became a lot more, I 01:45:00think being a woman you see things differently and you want life to be far more equitable, but to really see that and to know that we all aren't born into the ability to be successful in every way. Part of it having a child who struggled with his education. Sterling broke his neck when he was 16. We spent a month in the hospital. They aren't the same as someone who has lost a child or who has a totally paralyzed child, but you can understand the depth and the compassion and the empathy from that, and the same with Vance and his educational struggles.

Then to meet these manly men and some women who were proud, could say they were 01:46:00proud that they'd never had a felony, that they'd been able to make choices so that they didn't have a felony and who had created communities amongst themselves and laid down their lives for-oh, I could never leave this community because he put a blanket on me when I passed out when otherwise I would've frozen, and to understand the depth of that. So, yeah, I directed family kitchen for a couple of years at the time that we really knew we needed to move to a board, creating offices and making that thing before I moved to Hood River. Then at Hood River being on the board of the food bank and doing food for our burgeoning warming shelter. Working with immigrants. All of it. It has all just, 01:47:00that's called my life. I've had analytical work, because you own a business you can do accounting and book work. I've worked in telecom. I've worked in technology. They didn't call me. They allowed me to live my life into service and be able to support a household, that I had work that could support a household and allow me still the ability to work into serving the community, creating community.

TEM: It's interesting too. I think both Hood River and Bend are cities that I think of as those communities as being harder for people to afford to live in.

BH: Oh yes.

TEM: I think at the time when you were starting to do this work that was when it 01:48:00was becoming harder and harder, and so I imagine that there's even more need for that kind of community support service, people who have lived in the community and now can't afford to live in a community.

BH: And they have grown. At the same time I was with family kitchen, Trinity Church, which was downtown Bend, was the kitchen that offered Tuesday nights and Thursday night for hot plated meals and Saturday they had sack lunches. At the same time, the church was negotiating to purchase the Lutheran church who was rebuilding out of town. So we purchased the Lutheran church next door, which gave us a second kitchen which was just ear marked for a family kitchen. Then it could expand to more. At that time, that was in, let's see I moved to Hood River in September of '06, so I was with family kitchen from like '04 to '06 and it 01:49:00was planning to move into that space, planning to increase the board and move into that. So it was from two hot plated meals. We were serving close to 100 people every night at that time. Yeah, so I know that they do meals far more often. Then the move into Hood River, it's been the same thing. Being on the food bank board and kind of initiating some thinking to getting a place. Because they just have a basement in a falling apart church and carrying cases of food up and down stairs all day every day and being able to be on the board and do some planning to actually build a huge facility that again has changed how the food bank has been able to serve and to understand how much generosity there is in a community.

That's where you see it. The food bank in Hood River is in such a position that 01:50:00they get food not only from the Oregon Food Bank but they do a lot of purchasing of perishables. Have a huge, huge garden behind the new building where so much produce is grown and given away during the summer.

TEM: I heard about-I can't remember where it was, I don't think it was in Oregon-but they were building not a food bank orchard, but it was essentially that. That it was a more like trees or bushes that would produce.

BH: Perma-culture.

TEM: It's like I hadn't thought of that as, oh well that makes sense.

BH: Right.

TEM: That you would have something that was more permanent in addition to the turning over every year of crops.

BH: That where you actually have, yeah, and perma-culture is a great, it's that whole concept of fruit trees and orchards and berries as they move in and 01:51:00amongst other things that you can landscape entirely in edibles.

TEM: You were in two big beer cities, Bend and Hood River.

BH: Oh, right. Yes, they have become so.

TEM: They have become certainly destinations. What has that been like?

BH: You know it makes me giddy. It does make me giddy. I think I had shared with you before that when I was in Bend, Anders Jo Hanson had come and met me and said come on over to Deschutes because I had, again, selling the brewery was really hard. I wasn't ready to give it up. I felt, again, it's kind of like birthing a child. I had Sterling at the same time. But, when you create it from 01:52:00the beginning, you name it, you market it, you sell it, you put it in people's mouths. You have a lot personally invested in it. You started a business. It's not a job you acquired and you're coming from and going to. I had really didn't tell people who I was. I really didn't talk about it. I really didn't drink. I didn't drink for probably two years at all. When I did come back it was a while before I started drinking beer. That pretty much changed after I got to Bend and met Anders and he said, you've got to come over. So I went and did the tour with Dr. Bill and that was it. When I could finally come in and see what it had come to and how it had grown so much and the equipment and seeing from Anders stories 01:53:00and seeing how much work there was, how much used equipment so more people could start again. This was in 2000, in those early 2000s. But to walk into Deschutes. To walk into Deschutes Brewery and get the whole tour which was all of it, talking about beer and the challenges of and talk about recipes. I had not allowed myself that. It's just a different way of doing grief. That's how I did it at that stage of my life. But to go in and I think when he opened up the walk-in cooler, the hop cooler we walked in and I just started bawling, just emotionally sobbing. The smell of the hops in that way of it was the smell of my 01:54:00children's hair and our laundry, that that kind of broke it open. After that, now I just kind of, I don't hesitate. I love the beers out in enterprise. I remember I just hung out and I said I want a tour. Well, we're not giving tours today. I'm like, well, actually I really hope you will because you know...

TEM: I love it that you named dropped your own name.

BH: Yeah-I do it once, you know, and it really surprises me that it's acknowledged because I feel like I just, you know, it wasn't that many years, five years. Even in Pyramid in Seattle I walked in one time and I was like, you know, I need a table. And they say what's your name, and I said Beth Hartwell and the hostess just looked up and she goes just a minute [laughs].

This was before that time. it was in the '90s, but you know she went and before 01:55:00you know it we had a huge table, the party I was with. There are times. But it's been a long time. but I still do. I just, there's nothing like that love of stainless and the smell of caustic and the hops and to be able to smell where it is in the process and just the excitement, all the women brewers at McMenamins this year and hearing their stories and seeing these small breweries and these young people are... I mean, they're the age of my son. They were babies or hadn't been born yet so many of them who are opening breweries now and the women too. It's great to see what they can do, that we couldn't for any number of reasons. The laws didn't allow that multiplicity of function.

TEM: Were there laws in Washington-I think the equivalent of the Oregon Brew Pub Law happened in Washington earlier, right?

BH: No. I don't-so we couldn't have multiple, I don't think at that time we could do anything but one thing. We actually had been carrying a contract for our store, which had been a licensee and so we couldn't, so we sold our contract. Somebody bought our contract, so we were able to get our cash. We could then apply for a Washington license. I think later we could have but I remember, and I think it was really, it was drawn a lot. Because McMenamins had 01:57:00their tap houses and then they also did some distributing, but they wanted to be able to brew. Again, when you're in Portland not in Kalama there's a greater desire to be able to have a pub with your brewery and then you have the volume of so many in one location: the three, Portland, Bridgeport, and Widmer, who all really started within months of each other. We were in that same timeframe. Again, you had that ability to really lobby and make that change.

TEM: Well, and I think that it's an urban center where people would-

BH: Right, and it made a difference. They were just, I mean, both Washington and Oregon and even the ATF, they had to redo all their licensing, paperwork. I mean 01:58:00it's just like we can't even figure out how to do this paperwork because there was no way we were going to be producing this many barrels that fit in these columns and trying to estimate that. Because I mean you have to track it all. You have to track, because they want to make sure that every drop you make gets into a bottle and gets reported.

TEM: I read in Fred's notes, I think, that were you brewing-how much were you brewing? I saw 5,000 barrels at some point. Does that sound about right?

BH: Yeah, whatever you read is going to be more accurate than anything I'm going to conjure at this point.

TEM: [Laughs] Historical record says I think somewhere I read... [laughs]. I 01:59:00mean, I guess, I'm so taken by this idea that I felt this way with Mellie Pullman too, that this is this person who is so important in this story and that in a way she and probably you can be much more incognito on one hand, than somebody like one of the Widmers or Carl, but on the other hand it feels like that it has to be a sort of, there's a weird sense of it too that anonymity that can be both good and bad. In a way I feel bothered that it's six years in and I'm not talking to you until today, that there's that kind of absence in the historical record.

We have this narrative that's already set for craft brewing that says these guys 02:00:00did this thing and now here we are and that I mean I, I think that they are much more complicated than that tight narrative too and the stories of their businesses. I imagine it is a sort of strange-

BH: It is, yeah. I feel like I've, I mean what happened in Bend was just my personal desire to look in, but I still wasn't really doing that much. I think it's been four years, three years, or four years a young friend of mine who had like a 2-year-old child found that she had a brain tumor and she lived in Portland and I just couldn't ask to be on her, there wasn't an email list of how she is doing because it's all Facebook and I hadn't gotten on Facebook yet, it's 02:01:00just like [makes blowing noise]. But, for her it was just like, no I'm going to get on Facebook because this is how I keep track of the people I love and care for. It was kind of like that. So I got on Facebook and it was like 2 weeks later and I got this friend request from somebody I had never heard of and then a message, and I didn't even know I could get messages. I open it up and it's Tara Nurin, who's a journalist from New Jersey, and she says: hi, my name's Tara Nurin, I'm a journalist from New Jersey and she says and I think you're the first woman brewery owner since prohibition. I was like, whoa. I just texted right back and said I think I am but I don't' knoq anybody else noticed [laughs]. And someone says and the first woman brewer is Mellie Pullman, and she 02:02:00said Mellie's the one who told me about you, gave me your name. I had just kind of, I don't know, yeah hadn't tooted my own horn at all.

That changed everything because once you know she and I had had a conversation over the phone, just a little interview. I thought why not. My husband and I were up in Seattle for something else, so he had a work thing. He had be up there for some training for a week. I went up and we went over to the brewery over at Pyramid and had lunch and I kind of told the waiter who I was, so he gave us his set of 30-year-old anniversary glasses because I said oh I want a couple of those. I was going to pay for them and he's like no [laughs]. My husband took a picture of me outside the building and I just posted it so the Pyramid page on the anniversary, the September anniversary of our first pour. 02:03:00Then that's when I heard back from Pyramid and the general manager, he's just like where are you? I'm coming. He came down to Hood River. It was great to see how it's going and he came down and had lunch. A few months later he came and a guy from New York and like two from branding and two from marketing and they were wanting to redo their packaging and they were like you know you did such a great job of branding what would you do. I'm like I could do whatever I wanted, you know? I had that total freedom. You don't have that. I mean, you have to do it and how many committees have to okay it and then it has to go to a focus group and then it has to go to what? It's like, you know. I had just shared some of my ideas and that's why I love Pyramid more than anything. It allowed you to 02:04:00really just kind of be on the edge and just do magical things.

TEM: Well, it is funny that I emailed Mellie and said do you by any chance have contact? And then she Facebook messaged you. She said I don't have her email but I am friends with her on Facebook. This is a very weird world that we live in.

BH: Yeah. It is.

TEM: Wonderful in that kind of connection sense and that ability to connect but also very strange.

BH: Again, how it all ties in.

TEM: What did you think that we would talk about that we didn't talk about? Or what's the story that's free-floating in your mind still that you haven't told that you thought about and wanted to tell?

BH: It's funny because it seems like almost the first question I get asked is 02:05:00about the name. I think, you know at the time it was, people were using their names or a location and I really wanted an image. I wanted an icon. I wanted something that had some mystery and that you know gave one freedom to kind of do anything with. So Pyramid, when it was just like so many of the things that have led me into new paths in my life have been in those waking hours, when you're awake, you're asleep. Those early dreams when your grandparents come to you and you can smell the pot roast. It was like, you know, knowing that, it was just like Pyramid came and then I was done. I didn't have to think anymore. It was 02:06:00fun because, and it continued through all the years we had the business. People would want to know and this and that. Every time, because we had a lot of people stop. Again, between Seattle and Portland we had so many people stop at the brewery. And they'd say, oh I heard this story, this waitress told me, blah, blah, blah. You know? I was just like you remember her name? What restaurant was that? I'd send her a t-shirt. For every good story I got back it was just so fun to send something out again.

TEM: Did people make up stories? Were there creative stories about-

BH: You know, it's just like, oh yeah the tap handles are made from part of the garage door. Yeah, it was crazy stuff. People would hear it. It was just like telephone, you know, how it just comes down and hear crazy things about it. But 02:07:00it was really fun just doing our labels and putting the Pyramids right here on our northwest hills. At one point I had a local artist take an image of St. Helens, which, again had only erupted a few years before we started. It was a pretty significant landmark and to say that our water came from there, was took the image of St. Helens and then they airbrushed the pyramid over to complete the peak. You could barely see it, it was just kind of airbrushed in and it said the source. It was just that whole idea of you know what are the pyramids about and that mystical piece.

TEM: It reminds me of the fun in McMenamins, that kind of embracing of the fun 02:08:00of the place.

BH: Right, and keeping artists on staff and historians on staff and I have so much respect for them.

TEM: Absolutely.

BH: Yeah, they're really fun. I remember the morning we met and they just piled into the kitchen and fed them breakfast. We got together quite a few times and Mike and Mary Ann had all their kids and oh she's so beautiful. And just fun, fun.

TEM: So you didn't overlap with them here?

BH: McMenamins when we started they had 4 locations.

TEM: Oh, no, I mean like when you were at school here.

BH: No, I didn't know them. oh so they were both alums from here?

TEM: Yeah, because I only play a historian on TV I have no date memory. I can't 02:09:00remember what the-I'll check it out. That would be pretty funny.

BH: I'm curious. Yeah, no, we didn't here.

TEM: Because the McMenamins that's over now across Monroe that's on the spot that the Togo's was.

BH: Togo's! Oh yeah. Because we all knew Togo's.

TEM: That was one of my first, when I first started here, the first year or so they were building that and they wanted to recreate the history or have historic pictures and I remember there was somebody who was working with the history department who came down to do research here. I remember thinking, this is the most ridiculous thing. A brewery that has a historian? I mean, what is this about. I remember thinking, this is weird. And then now, I'm like, oh I remember that.

BH: Yeah. Well it's the same. Was it Tim Hills?

TEM: It wasn't Tim Hills and now I can't remember what his name was, but I think 02:10:00h e worked with Tim.

BH: I'm sure he did because when they started building Kalama, which is at the same site, the second brewery went there at that same location. He came to Hood River and we had lunch and it was so fun because I love Kalama so much. It was such a great town and home and we were so welcomed, even though the planning commission felt like they had to give us a run for our money, but they didn't have anything else they'd done in years, so we had to fire it up I think. Yeah to be able to, because Kalama was, John Kalama, was a trapper who was Hawaiian and so he came and then he ended up marrying a native woman and so there's that whole indigenous family from the area and the totem pole that's in Kalama and 02:11:00the women's club, who, they were wonderful and they were called Amalak, which is Kalama spelled backwards. It was, yeah, and how welcome we were in the community. like the women's club they started with a call, and it, you know it's just like setting the tone for how we address each other and how we connect. It was a great town and so it's been fun. I still haven't been in the Pyramid room there yet. I have to go up and stay a night and book it.

TEM: It's the one that you can-is that the one you can see from the highway.

BH: Yeah. Kalama Harbor, it's called. It's done in a Hawaiian theme.

TEM: I haven't been to that one.

BH: I just went up there one afternoon and had lunch and walked around but some 02:12:00friends and I said we're going to plan ahead enough to get a room for the night.

TEM: That's when you need to name drop.

BH: Well, no that's not a problem they know who I am [laughs].

TEM: Well, thank you for talking with me.

BH: Well, thank you. I had no idea this is what was happening.

TEM: Well, I hope it was enjoyable.

BH: Yeah, it was. Thank you.