Art Larrance Oral History Interview, March 26, 2018

TIAH EDMUNSON-MORTON: Okay, we are rolling. Today is March 26. My name is Tiah Edmunson-Morton. I am interviewing Art Larrance at the Cascade Lodge, is the new name of where we are?

ART LARRANCE: Yeah. We're at the Lodge at Cascade Brewing.

TEM: The Lodge at Cascade. You recently changed, relatively recently changed.

AL: We had been known as Cascade Brewing doing business as the Raccoon Lodge. I've always been Cascade Brewing.

TEM: Okay.

AL: My friend, Jack Joyce, the Jack Joyce of Rogue Brewing, a number of years ago was here for a meeting and I said we were Cascade Brewing and he says, well, why and the hell aren't you using that name?

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: Like Jack could only do. I went, Jack I think you're right. I want to start going as Cascade Brewing. He was part of the impetus of getting that started.

TEM: Interesting. So, you grew up not far from here in Hillsboro? Went to school in Hillsboro? Did you grow up in Hillsboro?

AL: I grew up on the corner of 209th and Kinnaman Road, which is about 140 blocks west of where we're sitting right now. It was a piece of property that my mother got from her mother that got from her father. Her father was a guy named John Swalley . He bought the property in 1906 that I grew up on. He was the foreman for the Ladd & Reed Farm that was adjacent to this property and that's a 500 acre farm. That property is now known as South Hillsboro, a recent addition to the urban growth boundary within the last 5 or 7 years. Now it's being developed for 20,000 people.

TEM: Wow.

AL: As I said, known as South Hillsboro. Earlier we were talking about ancestry, 00:02:00and I just mentioned John Swalley , my great-great grandfather. As we were looking around on the Mormon site with my friend Marsha , I said, put in John Swalley , Oregon, and see what you get. Because I know John Swalley fought in the Civil War because his discharge papers, my mother's got them hanging in the room where she lives. My mom's 99 years old. This is something that's always hung in our house. When she moved into assisted care that went with her. I knew he was from Ohio. He fought for the north. He came out here and I'm not sure what time he did come out west, but I said, my friend, Marsha and I were looking at the site, and I said, check where is John Swalley buried? It says, he died in 1920 and he's buried in Hillsboro, Oregon. I never knew that. When I went out to 00:03:00talk to my mom last week, I said, Mom do you know where your great grandfather is buried or when he died? She said, no. I don't. I said, he's buried in Hillsboro in the Pioneer Cemetery. She went, oh! I didn't know that, either. 1920. Well, mom was born in 1918. She was 2 years old. Whether her mom said something to her, she didn't recall. She does, although she is 99, she still, she says, I don't remember everything anymore, but she does remember a lot of things. I said, well, I'm 74 and I don't remember a lot, either.

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: So, my history is I was a local kid. Even go back further than that-my mom was born in Portland. My dad was born in New Westminster, British Columbia. He came to Portland when he was like 4 or 5 years old. My father went to Grant High School. My mother went to Jefferson High School. My dad joined the Navy in 1936 00:04:00when he got out of high school, got out of the Navy in 1939. He had been stationed at Pearl Harbor on the USS Truxtun Navy ship. He came back to Portland. Went to work at Montgomery Ward. My mother was working at Montgomery Ward. The two of them met in 1939. My dad got an opportunity in the late part of 1939 to go back to Pearl Harbor as a civilian and work in the wooden boatyard, basically taking care of the admiral sailboats other than the other wooden boats that the Navy had at that time. My dad decided to come back and get married. My brother has a letter dated November 12, 1941, from the supervisor at the wooden boatyard in Pearl Harbor to the supervisor at the wooden boatyard in Bremerton, Washington, recommending my dad for employment there. This was 3 weeks before Pearl Harbor got bombed. He left in the middle of November to come back and get 00:05:00married. Pearl Harbor broke out on December 7th. They made plans. They got married in I think around the first of January of '42 and moved to Bremerton and he worked in the wooden boatyard in Bremerton. I was born in Bremerton in 1944. They moved when the war was over in '45, my dad was in merchant marine officer school.

TEM: Bremerton, is that by Seattle?

AL: Yeah, it's over on the inlet side. You go up from Shelton and you go up that way.

TEM: Okay.

AL: He came up. They came back in '45 and we moved in with my grandpa and grandma, my dad's parents at 2144... pardon, not 2144... 2118 Northeast Fremont right next to the Alameda grade school. No, it was 2818, next to the Alameda 00:06:00grade school. I don't ever recall living there, but they built a house out where I grew up on 209th and Kinnaman Road on this property that my mom had got through the family. They also bought a piece of property from my mother's father. They completed a 16 acre parcel that I grew up. I have a brother, named Steve, who's 5 years younger. I went to Reedville grade school, Hillsboro High School, Linfield College. We had a great childhood, Ozzie-and-Harriet type childhood. Great parents. I remember we got a black-and-white TV in 1954. We learned how to amuse ourselves. We had 7 acres of holly that my dad planted on our property, so we cut holly in the wintertime and sold that. The bottom part 00:07:00of our property got farmed.

TEM: What did they grow?

AL: They rotated. About 3rd or 4th year would be the Crimson clover and then they put in oats or wheat, sharecrop farmed it. My dad was a cabinet maker. We had a cabinet shop on the property. When he got out he wanted to build boats. When he started, there'd be one boat and three cabinets and pretty soon it was all cabinets and no boats. My dad, nobody was good enough to work for him in his cabinet shop. I learned how to drink beer from my dad. He was an Oly beer drinker. I remember finishing off Oly when I was a little kid and thinking, oh, that's so bitter!

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: I'd be curious to know what the IBUs were available for beer in the '40s.

TEM: But in the '40s, that was-well, Henry Weinhard's I suppose, but that was, there weren't a whole lot of traces.

AL: Yeah, he always bought Olympia up until one of our friends Tony Molleck worked for Blitz and told Dad that he could go down if he got, I forgot whether it was 5 or 10 cases at the time, he could go up to the dock and back your truck up there and they'd load it, and you pay for it. So, he always bought 10 cases at a time from Blitz. I don't know. When did that start? Probably in the latter '50s or so people started going down there. He'd always at 5:00 he'd shut off the equipment and that was the time to go have a beer. I like to tell the story about our local pastor would come in to see him. We had a Presbyterian Church that we attended in Reedville. Dad did various repairs and woodworking things. If the pastor came at 4:00 dad would stop what he was doing and do the work for the pastor, but at 5:00 he would stop, even if the pastor's work wasn't done. 00:09:00He'd say, Reverend Bowen , how about having a beer with me or maybe shot of whiskey or something. The pastor would say, I don't know if I could do that. My dad would go, well, nobody will know. So, the pastor would have a beer or a shot of whiskey with dad. The pastor would leave and the next person to walk in the cabinet shop dad would go, should have been here. I had the preacher drinking whiskey.

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: He'd always have a couple beers and then go up to the house and have dinner. I don't ever remember my dad drinking at the house. It would be at his cabinet shop if he was going to have a beer in the evening or something like that. When we became 19 or 20 and we were working on our cars or something at his shop, we could go have a beer. You could have 2 beers. Just don't make a fool of yourself. Don't get me in trouble. I credit a lot of my interest in beer from my dad. It wasn't a forbidden fruit. Have it in moderation. He liked to drink the 00:10:00local beer. He died in 1985, September of '85. Fred's dad, Fred Bowman's dad died a couple months before my dad in '85. During this time we were building Portland Brewery. My dad helped us on one door repair and a couple other little things. He had stomach cancer, and pretty soon he was not able to do it. He would have been there drinking beer and helping just like Kurt and Rob Widmer's father, and I was always envious of them having their dad with the smiling face at their brewery. When Fred and I were doing Portland Brewery we were at 14th and Flanders, they were at 14th and Lovejoy, and Bridgeport was on 13th and Marshall and it was not uncommon for one of us to say, hey, I'm a couple bags short of my crystal malt or I need some hops or something. We'd go trade each 00:11:00other. At that time, each of us had some taps coming out the cooler. The first thing you did was go pour yourself a beer. I'd always go pour myself an Alt at the Widmer's. I prefer the Alt. When we got, they got started, they were filtering, or trying to filter, the hefeweizen. Actually, it was a clear beer early on. Then they hired Frank Commanday from us at Portland Brewing and Frank helped them say that beer is tough to filter. Let's just go leave it on the yeast, and bingo there was hefeweizen, and away they went. Back to me, growing up in Reedville. I started at Reedville grade school when it was 4 rooms in the school. Now that area has one high school, two junior highs, and 5 grade schools.

TEM: So, Reedville is not Hillsboro?

AL: It's within the-well, the city limits of Hillsboro have come out and encompassed some of Reedville right now.

TEM: Okay.

AL: Like the Ladd & Reed Farm across the street from where I grew up it's now in the city and we were on the other side of 209th Avenue it's in the county still.

TEM: Okay.

AL: The city of Beaverton comes west. I'm not sure how far west Beaverton comes but there's the no man's land of part of Reedville and lower that's still within the county.

TEM: Okay.

AL: Growing up a couple of things were important to me-Boy Scouts were real important to me as an activity. I was an Eagle Scout. I stayed in it clear through high school. I played 3 sports in high school. I was an all-star in baseball. Our state high school baseball championship got rained out in 1962 and we were to play south Eugene and we never did play the game. I went on to Linfield College and played baseball there and participated in and we won a 00:13:00national championship my senior year at Linfield in baseball 1966. Sports and scouting were important to me. I was a student body officer. I waxed floors on Sunday through junior and senior year of high school, four years of college. I came back from Linfield to wax floors at 7:00 in the morning on Sundays. Those kids that say I don't have time for activities, I go, well, you take time and do what you want to go do. Of course we didn't have this stuff to do [makes handheld device gesture] and to play with. If you were going to play a game it was more Canasta, Monopoly, checkers, kind of thing. Those kids that don't have time to go do, everybody has their priorities, and I think from the direction of our parents that my brother and I got we still hold a lot of the same ideals today.

TEM: Was there food farming around that area of Reedsville and Hillsboro and 00:14:00kind of the Beaverton area? Were there farms around you?

AL: We had dairy farms around us.

TEM: Okay.

AL: Hagg Lake, that's where Scoggins Dam comes in. Henry Hagg and Oscar Hagg their farm was just down the road from us on 209th. These were the days when I was growing up everybody drove by and they waved. Not many cars came by. You waved. You heard a car coming and you got up, looked up from what you were doing, and you waved at each other. The Haggs were real important and they were family friends of ours. I remember going down and I don't know I was 10 years old or something and they were having a big Fourth of July thing, I think, at Henry Hagg's place. They had all kinds of meats and cheeses and stuff out. I was slicing off something and I said, Mom, what's that. She said, oh, that's some brain. I went, eww kind of thing. That's some cow tongue, ew. People eat that 00:15:00stuff! Yeah, growing up they had dairy farms. We all picked berries and strawberries and beans so that was all out between Hillsboro and Forest Grove, Cornelius that part of town. We didn't have any strawberries in our area. We call them hazelnuts now, we had filberts in our neighborhood. We picked filberts in the fall. Other than that, it was, our 16 acres, but there was a lot of one and two and 5-acre plots. Not really enough to do any gentleman farming on, maybe. But there was still the Hagg farm was 150 acres, something like that. The Ladd & Reed farm was across from us, like I said, 500 and... various uses. There was, I know they ran sheep on it for a long time and cattle and grain and seed 00:16:00and now the farm was farmed. It was owned by the Catholic church for a number of years. It was given to them sometime during the process.

TEM: Do you ever, did you go into the big city? Did you go into Portland and go shop or?

AL: I mean, we would go to Montgomery Ward, because that's where Mom and Dad met and they had some friends that still worked there in the '50s as a kid. We would go to Montgomery Ward. I remember when I was 10 years old in 1954 we went to Meier & Frank's and bought a new television set. On the same floor with the television sets was the sporting goods. I ended up with a new catcher's glove that I still have [smiles].

TEM: Did you grandparents still live in Portland at that point?

AL: Yeah, they lived over on Fremont. My mother's father, my mother's mother died when she was an early teenager, but we do have a picture of my mother's mother picking hops in the Reedville area with Henry Hagg of Hagg Lake by Scoggins Dam that I mentioned earlier. We did have hops in the Reedville area. When prohibition came along, the local lore is the hops was torn out and the filberts were planted about the same time. Going into Portland, yeah, I remember going into Portland and buying our TV and me getting a catcher's glove. Beaverton, we went to Beaverton more than Hillsboro for shopping. It seemed to be a mile or two closer. Then what was the next question?

TEM: I think I was, no I was just curious about what those kind of early memories of the surrounding areas were like? I guess Portland being surrounding area.

AL: Yeah, we went into Portland to go to Grandma and Grandpa's all the time. Yeah, going into Portland wasn't a strange thing. We would drive through Portland. I know it was ethnically different at that time. There was a real separation in that southeast Portland there were, I mean, northeast Portland there were Germans and Swedes and then Negros, African Americans, were in that area. A lot of them had come up to work in the shipyards in World War II. Yeah, 00:19:00Portland was, we would come into town. My dad took me to some baseball games at-Vaughn Street ballpark was on 24th and northwest Vaughn were ESCO was located and I ended up working at ESCO in the summertime during college, which would have been the right field and left center, right centerfield of the Vaughn Street ballpark. That was always interesting to me. I collect, because of my playing baseball and stuff, I have different collections and I know you have seen my collection of hop postcards and pre-prohibition brewing advertising. I also collect things on Portland Beaver baseball, Linfield College baseball, and I have a house with another fellow that we built in the latter '70s in Manzanita Beach. I collect postcards and pictures and history from Manzanita and the 00:20:00Neahkahnie Mountain area. My collection starts at 1908 with the picture by Gifford who's a famous local photographer in the northwest. I have some others from a guy named Wood who's a photographer and Wes Andrews, who's another photographer. My hobbies are kind of things that I have related to in the past and I enjoy collecting the things about Manzanita and then sharing them with the local historian in Manzanita. He has recorded all of my postcards and articles and information about the subdivision when Manzanita was subdivided. All that is permanently recorded in the Manzanita historical, but it also gets its way into the library. It's into the Tillamook Library, county library. I feel some of my 00:21:00things that I'm doing to preserve history have been recorded.

TEM: Were you interested in history when you were younger?

AL: Yeah, I always liked-I took that at Linfield, the history of the northwest. I found that to be a real enlightening. We had a guy named Dr. Holmes who did a lot of writing. He taught at Linfield for a number of years. I think maybe he taught at Western Oregon, too. Dr. Kenneth Holmes was his name and I know that he's got published things probably in your library about northwest history. It was only a 2-hour class, but I couldn't wait to go to it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Yeah, history. I've always enjoyed it. My mom enjoyed it. The thing that surprised me, and we're talking about history, is she didn't know that her grandpa Swalley died in 1920 and he's in the Hillsboro Pioneer cemetery. It was 00:22:00kind of funny. I was talking to a lady. I sit on the clean water services advisory board for Washington County and clean water services does storm sewer, sanitary, sewer, riparian rights in the county. It serves about 1/7 of the Oregon population. 550,000, I think, customers within this area. I was sitting next to a gal named Judy Olsen who's on the board and we were talking about how long she lived in the area and she and her husband they both have lived here for a long time. She said that she just found out recently that her great grandfather was in the Hillsboro Pioneer cemetery just like mine! We both started talking and said our mothers never talked to us about that. We never, it was just one of those things. I don't know. My brother didn't know it, either. 00:23:00He's as much of a historian as I am. Nobody said a thing. Earlier I was talking about my mom and her dad was also born in Portland and after my mom graduated high school he moved to southern Oregon and, this was prior to World War II and he lived up on top of a mountain called Roundtop and he was kind of a civilian observer and did work for the Forest Service and he kind of squatted on a piece of property and lived there for like 50 or 60 years, had a goldmine on it. He taught my brother and I how to fly-fish and we would go down there to southern Oregon in the summertime and spend a week. He had a 1928 Rio on his property that quit running. He just parked it. It was sitting there. Had a generator. Had an outhouse. They lived off the land. He had a pet deer and a corral. Ended up 00:24:00some hunter shot it right at his corral right next to his house one time. That was a lot of fun for us to go. He lived down by the Oregon Caves. His place was about 6 miles from the Oregon Caves up on top of this mountain, like I said, Roundtop. I remember you had to drive across Succor Creek to go up to the top of the mountain. He would take us fishing in the creek. We went fishing in the Rogue and the Illinois. He died probably while I was in grade school, about maybe 8th or 9th grade. Something like that. He passed away. My grandpa on my dad's side died my senior year of college, '66. Then his wife, my dad's mother, who was Scottish. She came from Canada but was 100% Scottish, she died about 00:25:00when I was starting this building in 1995 she passed away. She lived to 99 years and 10 months.

TEM: I was going to say the women in your family get longevity.

AL: The women stick around.

TEM: Yeah. Well, that sounds lovely to be in Southern Oregon in the creek. That must have been, for somebody who was into Boy Scouts, I imagine that was exciting.

AL: Yeah, it was out in the woods. They lived in this log cabin, small little log cabin. After he passed away I don't even know whatever happened to it. I don't think he owned the property. We used to like to go into the goldmine. It had, the back of it had collapsed so we couldn't go a long ways into it, but he had a chunk of gold about the size of a golf ball that he had and we went 00:26:00panning for gold with grandpa, too, because those streams had gold in them. We just found specks from time to time. But he taught us how to pan for gold and how to fly-fish and his common law wife was a bait fisherman, so she would teach us how to use periwinkles and worms to fish. He could just lay that fly out right out on the water, even though there were bushes right up next to the creek wherever you were fishing. I'd go get my line tangled up in the bushes and he would just lay that line right out and wouldn't get tangled up.

TEM: I imagine you'd have to be pretty good at that if you were going to live out there.

AL: Yeah, they lived off fish and stuff in the summer.

TEM: Yeah, lots of practice.

AL: That time he used to talk about Californians going up. This is in the '50s. 00:27:00The Californians coming up and buying up, because there was a big ranch up on top of this round top on top of these mountains, and big open meadows up on top. They had real cowboys up there with their cattle. My grandpa and grandma got to know the people who bought the ranch and this guy had something new that we had never seen before-strip malls, shopping center. He built the shopping center in the '50s in California. He was a big developer. I remember, what? All these stores right next to each other! What? I remember seeing a picture in the '50s of this shopping center they were building. They were real wealthy people that bought this big ranch in the '50s. Californians coming north.

TEM: Some things don't change.

AL: Yeah.

TEM: What were you interested in academically when you were in high school? What did you think that you wanted to do with your life when you were an adult?

AL: Well, I was smart enough to know that physics and chemistry was not my thing. I wasn't that good at math. I got through algebra 2 and geometry. Geometry made more sense to me than some of the other stuff. I found out I wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. I better stick to accounting and business. That's what I took at college. Again, I was smart enough to know that I wasn't that good at accounting. I can go hire the accountant to go do it. I would rather be the entrepreneurial type. The one that wanted to go and put together all the pieces and organize it. So, when I got out of college in 1966, the Vietnam War was hot and heavy. We played baseball. My deferment ran out. 00:29:00Most of us our deferments ran out the day we graduated from college, which was May 15, 1966. As I mentioned earlier, I was on a championship baseball team, and we played baseball until June, I think we won a championship, June 6th or June 7th. A lot of us were 3 weeks, 1-A, where you could just get your draft notice and be gone. I got back from St. Joe Missouri, where we played ball. My mom and dad went, well, what are you going to do now? I went, well, I think I'll just go get drafted like everybody else is doing. But I think I'll go back to ESCO where I worked 2 summers in college and see if I can get my old summer job back.

I had done an internship at ESCO as part of the senior internship. I was away from college the first 4 weeks of baseball practice starting senior year and I was the returning starting catcher, but I missed the first actually 3 weeks of practice and came back 1 week before the first game. During that time, I did a project and I was a work simplification project, which is what ESCO called their industrial engineering. I had arranged for this the summer before when I was working there but not knowing what my internship was going to be. Early in the year my senior year I went back down to ESCO to see exactly what my internship would be for the second semester of that year. He said, we're going to put you in with a guy named Jack Seeforth in work simplification and he's going to have 00:31:00a project for you. The project was doing a time-motion study, kind of self-taught teaching it, but watching-they had a small staff doing the same thing I was doing. One-person staff, actually: Jack Seeforth . He explained to me about flow process charts and time motion studies, gave me a stopwatch, a clipboard and said, we're going to take you out to the manufacturing. I'd always worked at ESCO on the molding floor making sand molds for castings. He took me out into an area where the products that I'd made for the sand molds were now being machined. These were parts for rock crushers. There are two types of crushers: the jaws that go like this [makes hand motion] or one called the gyratory that goes like this [makes hand motion]. There's a bowl liner and a mantle and they gyrate around and they crush rock as they go around. Both of these types of crushing equipment are made out of manganese work hardened steel, 00:32:00which ESCO had patented formulas for their manganese steel for these parts. Each of these parts fit into a rock crusher, a big piece of equipment. They have to have some machine parts to them so they fit exactly into whatever they're holding. These parts that go like this [makes jaws motion], the machine, the back of them are gyratory. There's a ring around it that fits into the machine. Well, each of these have got ring around and it fits into the machine. Well, each of these have got a person working on them. I was putting my hard hat on, my safety glasses, my safety boots, took my clipboard, and my stopwatch and got briefly introduced to the two operators on these pieces of equipment. The guy that was running the boring mill, he was in his early 20s. The guy that was doing the planer, he was in his latter 50s. He'd worked there for years and years. He didn't like to see, the older guy didn't like to see some kid coming along with a clipboard and a stopwatch. He was fearful of me. Even though I 00:33:00tried to explain to him what I was trying to do, just trying to follow, he just didn't want to have anything to do with me for the first few days. Then he finally started talking to me a little bit. I said, you know I worked up on the main floor for 2 summers. Who'd you work for? I worked for Larry Rice. He said, I'm going to talk to him and watch and see what kind of kid you are. I had gone and visited back with Larry and told him I'm back working here and he and I got along just great the summers. He said, you're one of the best kids that ever worked for me in the summer time. So, this guy goes up, he talks to Larry, he comes back and goes, Larry says you're a good kid. What do you want? From then on, everything was just perfect between he and I. I ended up doing this project, turning in a report. I go back after graduating looking for a summer job, what they called the time shack area. Now we call it Human Resources or Human Relations. The HR department was called the time shack in those days. They said 00:34:00they want to see you up in the office. I go up in the office. I interview with a guy named Joe Good and I get hired to go into the office. I'm still 1-A. I go in and I start working there and one of the ladies in the office says, what are you going to do about military? I said, well, I'll just get drafted and come back. He said, no, no, no. Why don't you try to get into the Army Reserve or National Guard. My husband's in the National Guard. I called a friend who's in the National Guard in Forest Grove. He was the Sergeant Major, the top enlisted man there. He said, well, we got a couple openings. I went out and was fortunate enough to get one of the openings to join the National Guard and went to Fort Ord in September of 1966. Got trained in the infantry. Went to advanced infantry school at Fort Ord. I spent 6 months there.

During my time there I came home for Christmas. Ended up getting engaged at 00:35:00Christmas. We wanted to buy a house, and I told my neighbor fellow that I worked with for 6 years waxing floors every Sunday. He worked at an elevator company but he also invested in real estate and he said, well, let me see if I can find a house for you. Well, he found a house while I was at Fort Ord. I made an offer sight unseen at a house at 2144 Northwest Flanders in Portland. It was in an estate. He said I think if you put in an offer of $10,500 you can get the house. It's all furnished. It was built in 1885 or 1890, something like that. So, I put in a bid of $10,500 when I was still in the Army. Got the house. We took possession of the house 2 days before we got married. Spent the first night of our marriage in this old house that hadn't really been cleaned. The furniture 00:36:00was there. We put in a new bed and some other stuff. Fixed the house up. Sold it 21 months later for $17,500 and we made $7000 in 21 months and thought we were really rich. The house sold a couple years ago for $720,000.

TEM: I was going to say, I'm picturing where I think that is and that is prime-

AL: Yeah. It's on a 30'x100' lot, but it had knob and tube wiring. It had lead plumbing. It had asbestos siding. It had old windows. Somebody went in and spent a lot of money and fixed it up, and I drive by it and I go, oh that's probably just fine. But, we turned around and bought a house for $18,000 that I still live in that's worth $500,000, so it's probably all relative in what you had to 00:37:00go to modernize that house versus what I didn't have to modernize in the one that I'm-and I still live in the same house that I bought in 1969. I'm one of those that has only owned-I still own the first car I ever bought. I think I've only owned 13 cars.

TEM: What was the first car you ever bought?

AL: A 1922 Chevrolet touring car, which I paid $200 for it in pieces starting the senior year of high school in 1961. It was on the corner of 185th and Baseline. Like I said, I still have the car. It's restored, although I drive stick. The rear end I broke a gear. A bearing broke on it a year and a half ago. It disintegrated. The bearing disintegrated in the rear end and the rear end gears went like that [makes gesture]. Since then I have bought another car just 00:38:00like mine. There was a barn fire. It had gotten burned out. To retrieve the rear end out of it and the front bumper and the transmission. My car I just have to go stick the rear end has been rebuilt. I need a couple guys to help me do it. That's one of the things, my buddy, on my list to get my rear end back in so I can start driving it again. I just recently, my brother had, he said he wanted it and he decided he didn't want our dad's '62 Chevy pickup, C10, that Dad bought new in '63. Dad died in '85. It's got 72,000 miles on it. It's basically been sitting in the garage. My brother Steve said, oh, why don't you take Dad's truck. I took it last summer and spent quite a bit of money not restoring it, because it didn't need restoration, but just getting the rust and a new gas tank. Just a car can waste away just sitting in a garage getting hot and cold, 00:39:00hot and cold. Now the truck is all cleaned up, looks nice, white sidewalls on it like Dad used to put on it. It's still got the sideboard that says Larrance Cabinets on the side. I've been invited to take the truck to the Forest Grove concourse this year because they are featuring Chevy pickups and they want this one out from the '60s. I'll take it up there. It'll be fun. That's July 15th to go up to the Forest Grove concourse. Dad would be, he'd go, what the heck those guys want to look at my truck for? Laughing.

TEM: Backing up a little bit, was there thinking about that time at the end of Linfield where people being drafted? Was there a sense of unease? Was there a 00:40:00sense of people waiting for the inevitable? I'm just curious about what that feeling was like knowing that you were graduating and your friends were graduating.

AL: Well, remember what our fathers went through. All our fathers were World War II. We were baby boomers. We grew up bombs over Tokyo dropping a, I remember the second grade playing marbles and you had a big marble and you stood over some other guy and you dropped the marble, we'd say, bomb's over Tokyo, or something like that. There was a lot post World War II German and Japanese sentiment, anti-German and Japanese sentiment after World War II. I wasn't one that played with a lot of cap guns and toy guns and stuff but there were toy guns around. In 00:41:00fact, I think I still have my toy gun out at my mom's house that had a holster that we got as kids. I was more into bat and ball, throw a ball, kick a ball than shoot somebody. We all just, it was kind of like, well, are you 4-F or 1-A. 4-F meant there was something wrong with you. Maybe you had an injury that the military didn't want to take on, if you had vision or had some health consequences or asthma or different things. But if you were healthy and red-blooded, you were 1-A. 1-A got you in, 4-F got you out. There were friends of mine that had asthma that didn't go. But you just took it, that was just part 00:42:00of life. I was in the military from '66 to '72. That's when a lot of the anti-Vietnam stuff was going on. Obviously, I wasn't going to do anti-Vietnam or burning my draft card. I'd already been drafted, in basic. I was in the service. No, I lost 3 friends in the Vietnam War. One was a fraternity brother at Linfield. Two others went to Hillsboro High School. One was a couple years older than me and one was one year younger than me. The oldest one he was an Oregon State Graduate. He was a Navy jet pilot. The other one was a helicopter pilot and the other one from Linfield was an infantry man, lost in one month. He was a former Linfield football quarterback and fraternity brother. I've seen their 00:43:00pictures. I've seen Mike Barrow's picture, my fraternity brother on the wall in Washington, D.C., and then here in Portland. The three other friends are up there. Yeah, it was scary, especially since I was trained in the infantry. When I left to come home after my 6 months of duty, there were only 20 out of 120 of us that were National Guard, Army Reserve going home. The other 100 were going straight to Vietnam, going to officer school and then to Vietnam, or going to jungle training and then to Vietnam. I still remember leaving Fort Ord on that Saturday morning as we loaded up a '54 Buick with Coors beer, loaded up the trunk. The trunk of a '54 Buick is about as a wide as this table right here. We all got 2 or 3 cases, because you couldn't get Coors in Oregon at that time. We were bringing the banquet beer back to Portland. I still remember those guys 00:44:00waiting to go have their floor inspected. It had been all shined and waiting for their orders. There were a lot of scared people. It made a lifelong impression on me. I'm not sure that the draft is a bad thing. I think a lot of our social ills could be solved by a drill sergeant, because like I said I graduated but there was a lot of kids that I was going through that drafted. I was 22 and I got bunked up. They go-you're there. You're there. You're there. You're there. You're there. You're there.

This other guy and I looked at each other and we're both... he says, do you want the upper bunk or the lower bunk? I said, I'll take the lower. He said, okay I like the upper. His name was Dave Sessiger. He was a college graduate. He had played basketball in college. He was a National Guardsman. We went through advanced infantry training bunking together, too. He lives in Phoenix. I only 00:45:00saw him a couple years he got out of training. We had fun. We tried to, we knew we had an exit. We knew we were going home in 6 months. We tried to make the most of it. Tried to have fun when you could have fun. We did a lot of shooting. I don't need to have any more guns. I got a shotgun at home. I haven't shot for a long time. I gave my deer rifle away. I had an-Uncle Sam let me do a lot of shooting. I don't need to go out and shoot anymore. I'm not one of those that-I don't own a pistol. I have too much respect for them. They're dangerous. I don't want them around. The only reason I kept my shotgun is it's a nice model 12 Winchester. It's not a vented rib. It's a nice gun. It's still got the second 00:46:00box of shells to shoot in it, but I haven't gone bird hunting in 40 years and don't think I will. It hangs in my closet. The military was a good thing. I ended up getting a commission. I transferred from the National Guard to the Army Reserve. They had a program where you could get a direct commission, just like doctors or attorneys get commissions. I had a business degree. Go through take tests. They had an opening in our unit. When I transferred into the Army Reserve it was from the infantry to a post office unit. It was a real different wing than going to the infantry. The infantry goes out and shoots guns on the weekends and we would study and do surveys and when we went to summer camp we didn't go to Yakama we went to New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, because they went to base post offices and they were real busy during the Vietnam War 00:47:00with postage going through. So, I got to see both sides of the military, too. I saw the administrative side and the gun shooting side.

TEM: What was it like to come back to Portland? You came back in '72 to sort of settle?

AL: Well, I came back. I came back from active duty in '67. That's when I bought the house in northwest Portland. I was only gone 6 months. I didn't see any change. The change was from me moving from the country to the friggin' city. I never, ever in my wildest dreams thought I would go into to the heart of the city of Portland at 21st and Flanders. Noisy. If there weren't people fighting in the Flanders apartments next to us, there were raccoons in the tree across the street fighting with each other or people out on the street in general. 00:48:00Sirens. There's always something happening in Portland, especially in that part of the city. It was close for me working at ESCO and I was married at the time and she worked downtown. It was real convenient. I sold my 1960 Austin Healey, which I shouldn't have ever done and bought a Volkswagen, trying to be a married guy.

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: I went to, at ESCO, playing fast pitch softball and after playing college baseball and then going to fast pitch softball, it was a real transition because that ball comes at you faster than in baseball. You're batting with a little bit of an open stance. If you can hit 200 at fast pitch, you're doing real good. I caught as well in that. They can throw rise and drop, they can curve it inside, curve it outside. We were playing top industrial league at ESCO at the time. It 00:49:00was highly competitive in the city. This was pre slow pitch days and this was wooden bats. It was great. There's no more men's fast pitch that I know of around. There's girls fast pitch because they play it in college and high schools. But there's not much of it even played in Portland after the girls get out of high school and college. I still play slow pitch softball on an over 50 team. You see some fast pitch tournaments come through, but no men's fast pitch tournaments. I remember reading when we were playing fast pitch about this new game called slow pitch. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. This started a long time ago, but it started back east and the south before it made 00:50:00it out west here. I remember when I was playing fast pitch at ESCO and stuff we'd get the newspaper and read about slow pitch. What the heck? They lob the ball in? I couldn't believe it.

TEM: Why? What's the-

AL: Anybody can go play slow pitch, basically. Fast pitch you got to have a pitcher and there's not a lot of guys that have got that whip.

TEM: Okay.

AL: It was a popular game after World War II with men. A lot of men came back from the war and wanted to play sports. Fast pitched softball, I can remember as a kid going over to Orenco, which is outside of Hillsboro next to Reedville, and going to watch fast pitched softball with Mom and Dad and there'd be 200 or 300 people in the stands watching men's fast pitch softball under the lights. The same thing with Hillsboro. All the little towns had lighted fast pitch softball team. Beaverton, I don't know that they had lights, but they certainly would 00:51:00have had a team.

TEM: How interesting. What else did you like to do for fun in the late '60s, early '70s? When did you start home brewing?

AL: I started homebrewing with my neighbor, Elsa Padicowsk i. He and I met at ESCO and played softball together. When I moved over here to southwest Portland he was 10 blocks away from me. He had been doing some homebrewing. This was in the latter '80s. You could go to Steinbart's in Portland and they would mill up your grain for you if you wanted to, or you could go buy a can with all the malt in it and everything, the mixture and go brew from that. That's what we did. At the same time, Fred Bowman and Jim Goodwin, two friends from Hillsboro, they were doing some home brewing. Fred would go over and get the grain from Steinbart's and mash it and he and Jim were making some beer together. Then in 00:52:00'83 when Redhook started up up in Seattle and Bert Grant started up in Yakima we would go drink their beer at Hall Street Bar and Grill.

TEM: Where is that?

AL: It's now closed up. It's in Beaverton. They just closed up last year. It was-he was there for 30 years or so and they had a really great beer selection. That's when the McMenamin Brothers were distributors, Brian and Mike I know was distributing. I don't know if Brian was doing it with him, but they were distributing Grant's ale and Redhook in Oregon at that time. We would go drink that. Then we'd go drink our home brew, say well, if they can have a brewery in Yakima or Seattle we can have one in Portland. I called up Bert Grant. I think maybe Fred Bowman told you that story about we called Fred Bowman. Fred and I-I said I'll call Fred and so I called Burt Grant and said we'd like to come up and 00:53:00talk to you about a consulting agreement. He said, yeah come on up Saturday. We went up Saturday. The three of us: Jim Goodwin, Fred Bowman, and I and we took our checkbooks and wrote a check each one for $500 to Burt Grant, $1,500 down payment on an $8,500 consulting agreement to teach us how to build a brewery and make beer.

TEM: What was Burt Grant's facility like then? Seeing it now, seeing Yakima now it's so interesting to me that Burt Grant becomes this kind of kernel, central of craft brewing and the genesis of craft brewing.

AL: Burt was Canadian. He had worked for Carling for a long time. He was a chemist. When he was up in Yakima he was working for Steinerhop [Hopsteiner ] company as a hop chemist. He had done some home brewing and he did his Grants 00:54:00Scottish Ale and he was serving it to the people and Burt said why don't you build a brewery? He did. He built a brewery in an old opera house. He had a small pub in there. It's about a-how big was that kettle? 7 or 8 or 10-barrel kettle? He made his Grants Imperial Stout, his Grant Scottish Ale. He made a Celtic ale. He made his winter ale. We got lice-then after we got an agreement with him, he said how would you like to make my beers under license in Oregon?, because he was shipping into Oregon. We signed a separate agreement with him for royalty on his products. We paid him $10 a barrel.

When we opened up our brewery, we did our first brew at Portland Brewing on 00:55:00January 15 of '86. Our first commercial brew, we started the buildout on July 10 of 1985. We thought it would take us 90 days. It took 185. First beer we made was his winter ale. It had honey, ginger, nutmeg in it. It was 6.5% at least. We didn't know if we could make beer or anything. We made that one because nobody was drinking it down here. We didn't know what it was. That was our first beer. Then we made his Scottish Ale, then his stout. Then the next beer that came online was Portland Ale, which was one of our brands, a recipe. I think the next little beer that came along was Timberline Ale. We did that for a while. Then 00:56:00Timberline Lodge wanted to do it. We did it for them. Then they built a brewery, Jeff did, Const am. I think they maybe make Timberline ale. I don't know if it's the old recipe that we have, but I do have one of the neons from that. I only made three neons. I have one of the three.

TEM: Did you make them?

AL: I didn't. No. We had them made.

TEM: Oh! I was like, wow!

AL: We had them made. No. we had some made with Portland Ale, of which I have a couple of those.

TEM: We skipped right over the '70s [laughs].

AL: Oh! The seventies!

TEM: I realized that.

AL: Right. Because '70, so I came out... I came back from Army, got married in April, went back to ESCO, got my old job. At that time computers had just 00:57:00started coming out. They started kicking out cost studies on products. I ended up working in the division that did the rock crushing equipment, the same stuff that I had made during the summer time. The same stuff that I did the time motion studies on with the boring mill and the planer. Now I was in the middle part of ESCO. ESCO was set up with their manufacturing. Then their product division groups, then the sales group. The sales group was out here [gestures]. I was in the middle group, not in the foundry anymore but in the management where we had the engineers within our group that would design this rock crushing equipment. I started going over the time and motion studies, taking my information from that and taking these cost studies and looking at, I think we had 1,200 items that were my top items, taking the low fruit, 1,200 items that 00:58:00were being made. My job was to take a look at this cost study and analyze all the various, the 20 different pieces that went into make up that cost study, try to get our cost reduced. The foundry was charging us that much for this product and then we sold it through the sales staff and they made their money. I had to go back and basically refute the information that had come out of the foundry that said this is what it's going to make. There was all kinds of input into this, making this cost study. I knew the side of it from down on the molding floor where we made the molds, because it would say, molded in a 40x48 flask so high. Then they would compute how much sand was in this flask to know what the sand charge would be. There were all these various charges. I would go and say, 00:59:00oh, maybe it's not really a 40x48 flask. Maybe there was an error. I'd go back and check the records. Yes, it was a 40x48 flask. Is that really the right size for it? Can you put it into a 30x36 flask and make the same thing and end up with less? I'd go back and try to beat up the cost from that standpoint. How much sand and different types of sand. Because I knew that part of it. Then there would be the machining part of it and there would be all the other parts that made up the cost for that. I'd have to go back to the methods department, because that's where the flask would get determined and start talking to the methods engineer. Well, how come you got it in this size when it can be in this size? We would have a discussion. Sometimes I'd win. Sometimes I'd lose. That's how I did.

Then, I wanted to go back into the work simplification that I'd done during my 01:00:00internship because one of my best friends from high school and grade school was now in charge of work simplification and he needed help. I got transferred to work simplification. We did, like I said earlier, the industrial engineering for the plant and we would go... and if the management said, okay, we got a million-dollar budget. We want to go put in this kind of equipment. We want to go do this this and this. We would go work with the staff to teach them how to do a materials flow chart, because I can go in and do it but it wasn't going to work if I forced it on somebody else. Part of work simplification is determine the problem. Get everybody together. Analyze the various solutions. Implement and follow-up. The same four-step approach that you use. We had to go take the people that worked in the foundry, some of them were high school educated, some of them were not, and try to get them to understand how to make a flow process chart, how to do it themselves. Say, okay, we're going here to here to here 01:01:00[gestures flow]. What happens if we go here to here to here [gestures different flow path] to get something done? If you don't get their endorsement of what it's going to do, it's not going to work. We knew that going in. You had to get the people that worked there to follow you clear through the system and to follow up and implement. That's what I did. I left, I started to get ants in my pants because I'd bought this 3-plex. This house in northwest Portland. It was a 3-plex. It wasn't a single-family house. We had 2 other renters in the house. My payment was $85 a month and we brought in $80 a month. We were living there for like $5 a month plus some gas. We were living there for $50 a month. Real estate started coming back into my brain, wanting to buy some real estate. I wanted to, 01:02:00if I can sell this and make some money. I went and got my real estate license. Then decided I was going to quit ESCO. I had a 5-month old daughter. We had sold our house. We were renting back the house that we'd sold in northwest Portland. Had a 5-month old daughter. Decided I was going to quit a $500 a month job to go work on commission. I had met this real estate broker that had an ad in the paper. I would ask him about different properties in northwest Portland and I ended up going to work for him. It was a small Jewish real estate firm. I was the only Gentile working. There was only 4 of us there. I had taken all my real estate classes from a guy named Joe Weston. Joe Weston's office was right up above and it was in the same building I had taken my classes in. Joe's office was up there. He was a big, he still is a big real estate developer and property owner. He owned the property where we're sitting in right now. I bought it from Joe Weston. He owns the office building next door. He's a wonderful, wonderful 01:03:00person and he donates so much money, does so much charitable work in this city and I don't even think he wants people to know what he does. He's a very generous man and he's always been really nice to me. But I went to work in his building and we sold commercial property. Didn't do houses. This was selling apartments and commercial buildings and land for apartments. I went from making $500 a month to $4,000 a month in 1969. That was a lot of money.

TEM: Yeah.

AL: I worked for this other guy for a year and a half and then went and got my license to be my own broker, moved to Beaverton and started selling commercial property and then partnered up with a real good friend and we started buying 5 or 10 acres of land and putting in the water sewer streets and building houses 01:04:00and duplexes in the latter '70s until President Carter, although he gave us the home brew, legalized it he ran interest rates to 20%. You couldn't buy a home in the early '80s. Everything came to a screeching halt. Well, we were home building and building 35 houses a year. We owned 100 lots at that time. I had to go punt, go sell, sell to pay off the bank. It scared me. To play the real estate game you have to be capitalized because it's cyclical [makes gesture]. Up and down, and it's a feast or famine type thing. Right now, it's a feast. People are feasting. But remember '08, '09, '07 you couldn't give houses away. We know 01:05:00that it's cyclical. If I could look into a crystal ball and tell you when the next cycle's going to be, I would, but I don't know how to do that.

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: I'm more of a historian than a forecaster.

TEM: Too bad.

AL: I jokingly said when we were getting out of the home building business, I'd rather be in the booze business because people are going to drink when it's down. Lo and behold, what got started in '83, '84 became the craft brewing industry and I credit a lot of it to the interest rates. At least for me. I got out of the building business. I enjoyed doing it. I had a great partner with John Jacksick and he built the house. I got the land all ready for building and I had a broker's license. We had sales people that worked for us. We'd go sell the property. What I found out for me to advance, I need to partner up with somebody who's the technician, the mechanical person. I am better at the selling 01:06:00and the organizing and getting the insurance and the financing. I need to partner up with a technical person. That's what I did when I built with John. Then what I've done with Portland Brewing with Fred Bowman and now here at Cascade Brewing with Ron Gansberg. I want to be part of the organizer on the team. I don't need to be the team captain. I'm the risk taker of the group.

TEM: It actually sort of makes sense when you were talking about the work flow management, that it's having somebody that can see how the system works. It seems like that was something interesting.

AL: Yeah, that's maybe a thread that ties it all together. I'm also a starter and a finisher kind of thing. I said earlier I'm an Eagle Scout. I'm the first Eagle Scout in my troop, but my dad was an Eagle Scout. That was always one of 01:07:00my things that he was always very proud of, of being an Eagle Scout. My brother got up to life and he got close to it but he didn't finish up. My son went into Cub Scouts and he didn't want to have anything to do with Boy Scouts. His kids didn't do Cub Scouts. They've had other priorities of life. But it was important, because we didn't have as many choices when I was growing as what the kids do today. Things weren't as mobile. You could go pack 6 kids into a big station wagon and take off for scout camp and have fun. My Reedville Troop had its 50th anniversary 8 or 9 years ago and they invited me to it and all the other past Eagle Scouts and we went out to camp Ireland in Hillsboro and it was very refreshing for me to go out and hear these kids singing goofy songs about 01:08:00eating worms or things like when we did, having just good, old fashioned fun, laughing and now there are more women involved in Boy Scouting and now there are girls involved in Boy Scouting. Scouting has really evolved. I'm still involved in the Eagle Scout alumni association. We have an annual fundraiser here for them. I just went to an event 2 weeks ago with the Eagle Scout alumni. I walk into the room and I see one of the kids that I went to Boy Scout jamboree with in 1960 and then a guy I went to Linfield with! I didn't know he was an Eagle Scout. He didn't know that I was, either. Here we walk in and see each other. We had an even here at the Raccoon Lodge a year ago with Eagle Scout alumni and one of my fraternity brothers from Linfield was, and I didn't know he, Chuck was an Eagle Scout. It's kind of fun to get together to meet other people who had 01:09:00similar goals and drives and interesting parts of their life and try to relate it to others.

TEM: Yeah.

AL: What else did I do in the '60s? I got divorced in the early '60s. I had two kids. They were born in '68 and '70. Got divorced in '71. Started helping youth baseball coaching, because my kids weren't old enough at that time so my friend Elsa Padicowsk I that I mentioned earlier to start me doing into home brewing, he had coached for a long time in the neighborhood, so I helped him out in Babe Ruth baseball for a number of years coaching baseball, continuing playing softball myself. Then got out of playing softball. The teams kind of went away. I started playing more basketball at the Multnomah Club and I played that until about 10 years ago when I had to have back surgery and he said you better not do 01:10:00any jumping anymore. He gave me a great excuse to quit. Then I had knee surgery. Got new knees and new eyes and still play sports. No more basketball. I get to go watch my grandsons play basketball now.

TEM: How did you pick the property for Portland Brewing?

AL: 14th and Flanders, 1339... when Fred and Jim and I decided we wanted to build a brewery, we wanted to do it and use some of my real estate experience. I didn't want to do a zone change. I'd already gone through zone changes and now I'd been on the planning commission in the city of Hillsboro. I did two 4-year stints in the latter '70s and early '80s, so I knew how the inside works kind of within a city. I didn't want to do a zone change. I wanted to go someplace where 01:11:00it was already zoned. I went down to the city of Portland in '83, said, I want to build a brewery. You want to do what? Build a brewery. Well, there's some other guys talking to us about that, too. Well, where can I go where you don't have to do anything? He said, well, the scout tells me, it's real simple, because we had Weinhard's on Burnside. So, Burnside north to the river, northeast Broadway, north Broadway going north and then the freeway going north. It basically puts you between 16th and 6th on Broadway and Burnside out north, what we affectionately call the Pearl District now. Oh, well, that's easy. Okay, so I park my car up by Weinhard's and walked all around the blocks, all around the blocks one afternoon I covered all around those blocks. I couldn't find any little spot. We were looking for a little hole in the wall kind of thing. I go 01:12:00back the next day and up on Everett and Flanders and going through that area. I was walking around all those blocks and I came into Bogart's joint. It was a tavern on the corner of 14th and Flanders. I knew that they served Grant's Ale. We had an agreement with Bert Grant at that time. I came in there and Dave Macko was the bartender and I ordered a Grant's Ale and a sandwich. It was 2:00 in the afternoon. There was nobody else around. I started talking to Dave. Told him, hey, we got the rights to make Grants Ale. He looked at me like, what? What? Yeah, we want to build a brewery in Portland and make Grant's Ale. Oh, okay. He's a little dubious. I said, you know any property? He says, well, yeah the back half of this building where we're in is going to be vacant. No kidding? So 01:13:00I go over there, knock on the door, big solid steel door. The lower windows are all blacked out. You can't even see in. Somebody comes to the door, yeah what do you want. I said, I understand your place is going to be for rent in a little while? How'd you know that? Well, they told me next door. Well, yeah. But we're busy here now. You can't come and see it. I said, who owns it? He said, a guy named Johnny Johnson. Oh. I know Johnny Johnson.

Johnny was a great guy. He passed away a number of years ago but Johnny was the Jack LaLanne of Portland. He had the exercise, lifting, weightlifting. He was on every morning in the '50s, '60s, '70s: Johnny Johnson. He owns some house spots in Portland. He was in great shape and everything and always had a smile on his face. I had bought some property from him on east Burnside and on Couch. He owns 01:14:00some houses over there. I bought 2 houses from him, or three from him. I called him up and I said Johnny here's a voice out of your past. I told him who it was. He started laughing. He said, what do you want? I said, your building on 14th and Flanders, I understand the back pat of it's going to become vacant. Yeah? I'm interested in renting it. He said what do you want to do there? I said, I want to build a brewery. I thought he was going to laugh himself off his chair. He just started laughing and laughing. I knew he was a Mormon, real strong Mormon. He didn't condone alcohol at all. He went, you know, I'd say no to everybody but you. I'll say yes to you. How much do you want for rent? $700 a month. I said, we only got $350 a month right now that we could pay you. Well, can we pay you $350 a month and then when we get everything put together pay you the other $350 that we owe you? Well... okay. So, we levered ourself into this 01:15:00building. The people moved out and it'd been Creamer's creamery originally. Bogart's joint was even part of Creamers creamery. When we got into the beer distribution business, our distributor in Bend were Brad Wells and Dave Creamer . We walked into Brad W ell's son, they have their 10 Barrel now. Dave Creamer's grandfather built Creamer's creamery . We walk into his office in Bend, Oregon, to sell our beer and here's a picture of the building we're in now with Cream er's creamery and three Model A delivery wagons in front of it. Yes, Dave Creamer's father built Creamer's creamery. Johnny would only let us do a 3 story. He wouldn't let us do anything on this floor, this floor [makes gesture], 01:16:00but the top floor was like abandoned. He would let us go up to the third floor. That's where all the coolers were. We went upstairs and that's where we put our hot liquor tank. That's where we put our grain and we built the box for our grain up there. We put our liquor tank and we painted all that upside down. Painted the floor. Painted the walls. Painted everything. The steps going up there. He let us do that, but wouldn't let us do anything down below. When we were seeing investors, because we capitalized with investors $125,000 worth of stock when we started Portland Brewing, we'd walk them up the stairs to show them what we were going to do and say the rest of the place will look like this. That kind of got us out started. Johnny Johnson has since passed away. Rogue Portland Brewing moved out of there. They remodeled Bogart's. They sold it. Rogue bought it at a song. It's still owned by Johnny Johnson's family and Rogue 01:17:00has now gone in and remodeled the building.

TEM: You guys did a lot of work, though, before you opened up.

AL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crammed a little brewery into small space. One of the questions maybe you'll be getting to, or maybe it's time to talk about that now, since we're talking about breweries and starting and one of the questions that gets asked a lot is why Oregon? Why did Oregon take off? And I imagine you've asked a number of people. You've maybe formed some opinions yourself. I'll kind of give a recap of a number of opinions that I have heard through the years, not necessarily in the right order. I forgot when I was doing this for somebody last week I forgot to mention water is one of the important things. But water. I mentioned it later on in our conversation. Water is important. We've got great 01:18:00water, Bull Run water. It suits us just fine. That's one of the reasons we've had success here. Another reason is the people have gone in and got started, the Widmers, the Ponzis, McMenamins, Fred Bowman and I-we're all, we're capitalized. We're all entrepreneurs. You can come and meet us all at our breweries. We were all out selling every night. The Widmer boys were notorious for working all day, gathering their buddies and going out and selling their hefeweizen into a bar and walking in with 20 guys and drinking the place dry. The next night they'd go drink another place dry, another place, another place. We would do, we didn't have as many disciples as what they had in Portland Brewing, but we did that ourselves as well. Fred and I would be out each night out selling our beer, going after retail. What we were selling then was what's new [motions air 01:19:00quotes]. I'm still selling what's new today. Anybody that walks into a tavern, you walk in I'm going to just assume that you walk into a tavern and you look at some tap handles and you go and go, I don't know what that tap handle is. That's something new. Do you do that yourself?

TEM: Mm-hmm [yes].

AL: Yeah. You still go do what's new. I was selling what's new when it was really what's new.

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: Portland Ale was the first craft beer in the Jake's Crawfish. I sold, I was the one that worked with Jake's Crawfish. Simon Ostler was the stockholder of ours. He knew Bill McCormick as well. We double teamed. Bill McCormick, I went to do my sales pitch to Bill. I said, Bill, our kegs cost $50 more. You're going to sell the glass of beer for $.50 more. You're going to make $50 more a keg. He said, well, Art I'm going to tell you why I'm going to buy your beer. My banker does not understand percentage of profits. He understands dollars in the till at 01:20:00the end of the day. He says, I want to upgrade everything. People sit down, I want to upgrade their appetizer. I want to upgrade their beer and their wine. I want to upgrade their meal. I want to upgrade their desert. I want to make 3 or 4 extra $.50 pieces, and you're one of those increments. We were the, there's only one draft beer at RingSide. It was Budweiser and Portland Ale. East Bank Saloon was another one in the early... a lot of the bars and taverns. Widmer was out doing the same thing that we were doing. We were with Portland Distributing and a guy named Teddy Peets was working there. We worked real close with Teddy. They had a salesman that was really good. It was Jim that helped get a lot of 01:21:00Portland Ale in town and then Widmer hired Jim away to be their sales guy. It was fun, exciting in those early days. It's far exceeded my expectations. So, one of the reasons the people were entrepreneurs. They had their personality into it. They were capitalized into it. They were making good beer. Another incident out in Hillsboro. I went out to, I was out there doing something. I had a little sticker on my truck that said Portland Ale when Fred and I were just getting started, getting gas in my car. This old timer was there getting gas. Portland Ale-I've never heard of that. I said, oh we're a new brewery out in Portland. He said, well, son, you make good beer people will drink it. It's about that simple, I think. It hasn't changed. So, we made good beer. Another thing is Oregonians patronize our fellow Oregonians, at least give them a 01:22:00chance. That's all that we asked for to start with. Give us a chance. Give us a chance. They found out that our beer had some flavor, taste, and aroma. Again, we had Weinhard's Brewery in our backyard at that time. Weinhard's used to-the brew master at Weinhard's, a lot of the staff from Weinhard's used to come to Bogart's joint for lunch every day. They'd walk by and snarl at us through the window. What are you little guys doing in here? Except some of the brewers. Brewers would come in. They'd come in and visit with us. The higher ups they'd kind of turn their nose up at us. What are you little upstarts doing? Well, lo and behold who is left? The little upstarts are left. The big dinosaur is gone. I would have liked to have still seen, if Weinhard's Brewery could have survived I think they would be knocking them dead in today's beer market. The Wessinger's 01:23:00sold too early and they sold to the Australian guy, forgot what his name was, but he was the one that went bankrupt when he bought Heileman. They were part of Heileman at that time. He bought in and then he ended up going world wide bankrupt. Then Schlitz picked it up, I think. Maybe I'm wrong in my progressions.

TEM: Yeah, I feel like Weinhard that's one of those that they had, that there was a pretty rapid turnover it seems.

AL: Right at the end. It'd be good to document that because Schlitz came in there for a while and then Heileman had them for a while. That was a real modern little brewery from what we were told. It was up to snuff on everything. Basically the city of Portland, Vera Katz wanted them out is what we've been told. Didn't want manufacturing downtown. They were pretty restricted on where 01:24:00they could come and go from. They were only working at 50% capacity, 40% or 50%.

TEM: You mean, they were restricted like in like deliveries and that kind of breakdown.

AL: Yeah. Right. On what they could do. On today's standards, they wouldn't be able to survive with the way that they enforce parking and all that other stuff. The city doesn't care about business, just give us some money.

TEM: That's what I've heard about the struggles that Chuck Coury and Cartwright Brewing had, that it was a lot of like city tax issues, that beer maybe was inconsistent that he really struggled with being a small business owner.

AL: Yeah. Fred went over and bought some beer from him a couple of times. Fred Bowman still has a receipt from he owes him a case of beer.

TEM: Fred told me the receipt is probably worth more.

AL: I never did meet him. I think Fred met him a couple times. I know Dick Ponzi talked to him and I know that the Widmers did. They got more knowledge about what led to his demise other than poor quality of beer.

TEM: Yeah. The consistency issue.

AL: Yeah. He might have paved the way a little bit for us on getting licensed. Because when we went to get licensed, when Fred and I went to go do it, the inspector that licensed us he had never done it before. Widmer was already licensed, so was McMenamins and so was Bridgeport.

TEM: What was-there was this other pretty important step, which is the Brew Pub Law. I know you were certainly incredibly involved in that. Can you talk about why that was important and how that came about?

AL: Prior to prohibition, many breweries, such as Weinhard's, owned saloons in the cities. Weinhard's I think had 5 saloons in Portland. Most of the other breweries also had saloons. Remember prior to prohibition there were about 5,500 breweries. Dial ahead to today, we finally got back to 5,500 breweries. Prohibition destroyed it. Took us 100 years to recover from, just to digress for a moment. When prohibition, Oregon was an early prohibition state. Oregon came January 1, 1916. Some of the various counties went in 1915. Oswald West was the governor of Oregon at that time and he was a prohibitionist. Marion County went in August, I think they went the summer of '15. The rest of the state went 01:27:00January 1, 1916. Washington went '17. California went '17. The rest of the nation went January 1, 1920. It was lifted officially they could start selling beer April 7, 1933. I happen to have a bottle off of Weinhard's Brewery called "Blitz, the Drink that Fits." It says first off the production line in 1933. It's written in pencil. Our namesake, Portland Brewing, was started in 1906. The backdrop again on 20th and Upshur. 20th and Upshur Portland Brewing was built in 1906. The Schmidts and the Wilhelms and there's one other family where the proprietors of that. They were borrowing money from the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds had a daughter. The daughter married this young Haberdasher that 01:28:00came from Denver, named Arnold Blitz. In 1912 he became president of Portland Brewing. They started making their beer. Prior to that was called Adlebroy Noble Brew, German. Arnold Blitz is Jewish. They made, Blitz the Drink that Fits starting when Arnold became president. Prohibition came along, then the Rothschilds called in all their stock from the Schmidts and the Wilhelms.

TEM: The Rothschild daughter married Blitz?

AL: Uh-huh.

TEM: Okay.

AL: The only reason I know this because the great granddaughters explained all this to Fred Bowman and I and she has, I read it-they used to live over here on Vermont. I don't know where she lives now. She has the original articles of 01:29:00incorporation, and the minutes of the meeting when these people are told to bring their stock in. They're calling the loan. Arnold Blitz getting when president-she's got the documentation of this. Her last name isn't Blitz, but she lives down on the coast right now. Her cousin Blitz lives in this neighborhood who's an attorney.

TEM: Why did they call the stock in?

AL: They recalled their loan. They wanted to brew-I don't know business-wise. They wanted their loan back. They called the loan. The loan became due. They couldn't pay the loan, probably, so they traded the loan for the brewery. Arnold gets appointed president. Prohibition comes along. During prohibition Portland Brewery builds, the only brewery built in the United States during prohibition on 20th and Upshur. The building still stands on 20th and Upshur. For years, the tower that went up where the cool ship used to sit had Point Adams Packing 01:30:00Company written on it. Fred and I went and looked at that building to put Portland Brewing in before we rented on 14th and Flanders, and the cool ship was still up on the 3rd floor at that time. It since has been removed. During prohibition, Portland Brewery bought Weinhard's Brewery. Thus, it became known as Blitz-Weinhard. Arnold Blitz started running the company. Prohibition got lifted and Blitz-Weinhard made, it wasn't called Blitz-Wein-when it became out of prohibition it was called Blitz-Weinhard. No longer did they just make the Weinhard's beer. It became known as Blitz, the Drink that Fits. That was their beer. Later they started calling more Blitz-Weinhard and then they went to Weinhard's with some of their beers in the later years. Oregon adopted part 01:31:00of-when prohibition was lifted federal government came out with a book of various rules for the states. They wanted the states to make up their own rules. They had some guidelines. One of the guidelines was that breweries could no longer own retail establishments. They wanted to get into the 3-tiered system: manufactural, sale, retail, so they could be more controlled. Oregon adopted that part of the law of no breweries could own retail. Thus, Weinhard's had a tasting room and they let clubs come down there. Brewery and a club would go down there a couple times a year and get free beer, hot dogs, and pretzels. You could have the room from like 6:00 to 9:00. They had a bartender and server there with you, but they couldn't sell the beer. We wanted to go sell the beer. When I say, we, by that time there had been 4 groups in '83, '84 that 01:32:00accumulated that wanted to do a brewery: McMenamin Brothers, Widmer Brothers, Dick Ponzi and Nancy, and Fred Bowman, Jim Goodwin, and I. The four of us went to the legislature. When we decided to want to go change the law, I said, oh, my democratic representative in my neighborhood, Tom Mason. I know Tom Mason. I see him all the time. So, where I next saw Tom Mason was in the showers at the Multnomah Club. It was there where I talked to Tom the first time as we were showering. I'd like to change, do some legislation and be able to brew beer and sell it on the same premise. He says, oh great idea. Let's do it! It's been verified with other sources through Tom Mason other than just me that that's a true story. That it did start in the showers at the Multnomah Club: craft 01:33:00brewing and law change. We all four groups of us would pack up and go down to Salem. Well, Vera Katz was running the House of Representatives. We couldn't get an appointment with her, but Dick Ponzi knew that she would come into the office and her real work didn't start until 8:00, but she came in like 7:35 or something and she'd take a walk in the morning and change her shoes. Dick said I think we can get in while she's changing her shoes. We would go down there and get there at 7:30, 7:35 and wait for her to come in. We would get our 5 minutes with her. Kitzhaber ran the senate at that time and he wouldn't give us the time of day. We couldn't get any audience with him. We went down in our 2 common through the house and we made our proposal and the person that was in charge, we were in I think a Ways and Means Committee, because it had to do with money and 01:34:00taxation and we gave our presentation and then the chairman of that committee said maybe you fellas better go out in the hall and talk to the lobbyist for the beer and wine distributors because they're opposing what you're trying to do. We went out in the hall and got our first education on what you have to do to lobby and who's fighting us. It was the beer distributors. Part of what we were proposing is that the brewery could do their own distribution and have a pub on their premise. The beer distributors were very threatened by that.

TEM: At this point, there's Weinhard's is still in existence. Sicks' Brewery, right, down in Salem?

AL: No, they closed in '54, '55.

TEM: Okay. So, were they worried that something would happen? Were they worried 01:35:00about, not that they had a crystal ball, but what-you weren't making that much beer. What were they worried?

AL: We weren't even making any beer. We wanted to make beer at this point. We wanted to make beer and sell it on our premise and it was a threat to them because they were beer distributors. Kurt and Rob wanted to do their own distribution. McMenamins, Ponzi, and us in Portland we wanted to work through a distributor. There were two parts of the law created. The Brew Pub Law that didn't allow distribution, and the brewery law was amended so they could make up to 10,000 barrels and still have a pub. If you made over 10,000 barrels you couldn't have a pub. So, Weinhards stayed the way it was. They were real worried that they were going to take all these distributors were losing their rights and their privileges. You're dealing with third generation building owners and you 01:36:00don't know what their background is. They don't want to relinquish any territory because they have a monopoly on their territory, because it's all territorial and if you do business with them once you do business with them for life because they have a real strong law, so you can't go take your product away from them. But, we were able to maneuver our way and deal with that and got it passed through the house. Then it went to the senate, and here's where the real fear came. Coors was not sold in Oregon at that time. It was a non-union brewery. Weinhard's is a union brewery. Weinhard's is pasteurized. Pasteurized union brewery. Coors is a non-pasteurized but cold filtered non-union brewery. The unions didn't want them in the state. Weinhard's kept Coors out for a number of 01:37:00years by keeping this it's got to be pasteurized in the law. Simultaneously while we were going through our legislation in '85, Coors was suing the state of Oregon over this word pasteurization. The democratic senate was run by two people: Glen Otto and L.B. Day. Now, because this is being recorded I probably shouldn't say anything derogatory about these people, but they were the ones that derailed craft brewing. They each have buildings named after them at the state fair, but if I think if we got in and found out how corrupt they may have been, we might be changing the names of those buildings like they're attempting to do at Oregon State, because they were afraid that Coors was coming in. These guys were getting paid by Weinhard's. They had their hands out for Weinhard's, 01:38:00big union filling their pockets with union money. They were doing everything. They thought, Glen Otto and L.B. Day thought that we were the precursor to bringing in Coors. Our bill got in the senate. It got gutted and they threw their own bill that they wanted into there and went back through the house to go get their bill. Second to the last day of the legislature of southern Oregon legislature grabs our part of the bill with our sympathy and I don't know how all that happened but it got into a bed and breakfast bill so they could serve beer in bed and breakfast and we came through on the shirt tails of a bed and breakfast being able to serve beer on their bill and went back through the house and got ratified and signed by Atiye h, our governor who also presented me my Eagle Scout badge and was a regular here until his death at Cascade Brewing at 01:39:00the lodge, because he just lived in the neighborhood. He was also an Eagle Scout and my dad was in the same troop with him, although my dad was older than him but my dad was in with his brother, George, in the same Boy Scout troop. We came through on the hair of our chinny chin chin of even creating this whole thing. Coors ends up winning their court case and Coors comes into the state. There's some real good information on that within the McMenamins library because they had a thing on the 25th anniversary of the Brew Pub Bill when we all went over to the Bagdad Theater, and the judge was there that did the ruling, so we got to hear it straight from him. That's all recorded within the McMenamins. That might be something good. If you don't have that within your library go to Tim over 01:40:00there and he can get you a copy because they recorded the whole thing, filmed it.

TEM: I think I saw the one, the 30th anniversary was...

AL: Maybe it was the 30th anniversary.

TEM: There was another one, though.

AL: Oh, we did one that you came to that was over at the McMenamins at the Mission Theater.

TEM: Yeah.

AL: But we did one five years before that over at the Bagdad.

TEM: That's right.

AL: Yeah.

TEM: Did you guys ever talk to people from Coors?

AL: No. We had nothing to do with Coors.

TEM: [Laughs]. But it's so funny that you ended up at least in the legislature's mind, that you ended up as if you were colluding.

AL: Well, yeah, I guess. I just read something the other day about, yeah, about if you don't know all the facts I guess you have to live on the rumors, or something.

TEM: So, Brew Pub bill passes in '85. You open in '86. What were the first few 01:41:00years like? What was it like to-did you do other stuff, too?

AL: Well, we went through... we sold stocks and we had to go through an offering. We hired an, Fred and I hired an attorney. By this time our third partner, Jim, had wanted to get back to playing Dixieland Jazz music. Jim was a great guy. He passed away a few years ago. He was on our high school championship baseball team. He was an internationally known trumpet player. Could not read music. Played a lot in the Netherlands, in Germany, Belgium, France with Dixieland jazz bands. At age 16 he was playing professionally with Mottie Beaulieu and the Castle Jazz Band. He was an excellent first baseman at baseball. Left-hander, really a great first baseman. He ended up passing away 01:42:00too early in life. What was the basic question?

TEM: Oh, first few years of Portland?

AL: Oh, the first few years. Well, like I said, it took us maybe a year to get ourself set up to go sell stock because we didn't want to self-capitalize. We got the idea real early. We could have been out of the box earlier if it didn't take us long to go get set up to sell stock. I'd just been through the crunch in real estate and said I don't want to use my own money. Let's use somebody else's. Probably been smarter to go use our own money. In retrospect we would have maintained control of the company longer than what we did. When we broke out of the box selling, Burt Grant had 22 accounts. When we quit making his 01:43:00product we were up to 44 accounts. We had doubled it. When we got started, he gave us our first 22 accounts. Instead of the beer coming from Yakima it came from Portland Distributing who was the distributor. It gave us a real kickstart compared to Bridgeport and Widmer, because we had 22 accounts to start with. It was exciting, really it was. I went to work for no pay to start with. Fred was getting a pittance to start with. We worked for free for a while to get it started, just like anybody that starts their own little business. It was fun to go around selling, exciting to go meet new people tell the story over and over and over and over. I think that's why we've been successful because the story got told and told and told and told and told. It allowed for a lot of people to 01:44:00come and experience the beer and then the Oregon Brewer's Festival came along and I think that gave us a great opportunity. 1988 was the first one of the festival. That festival got started because of 1987 Blues Festival. The sponsors for the Blues Festival was, it's now called Papa Aldo's Pizza. It was Papa Hayden... not Papa Hayden, Papa-it's now Papa Murphy's. What was it called? Another Papa. Anyway, they were some Hillsboro guys and they were in my brother's class, one of them was in my brother's class. They came in with the Price Brothers and said, hey Art we've got this blues festival coming up July 01:45:0017th. We need to have some beer there. Would you guys like to sell the beer there? We went, okay.

TEM: This is '87?

AL: '87.

TEM: Okay.

AL: How much beer do you think you can sell? I don't know. We figured we'd sell 16 to 20 kegs at this blues festival. It was a one-day event. We had some friends come. We were selling beer for $3 a cup, a 10 oz cup I think was $3. We ended up selling 76 kegs. Cleaned out the brewery of beer. I would put 11 kegs on the back of my little Nissan pickup drive from 14th and Flanders down to Waterfront Park, haul those kegs off, put 12 empties, 11 empties back on my truck. I'd race up there. By the time I got back with some more, they were out of that beer. Put some more beer on. We ended up making $5,000. We went holy smokes!

TEM: What kind of beer were you selling?

AL: It was our, selling our Portland Ale. Pretty soon it was anything that we had in the brewery we were selling because we did empty everything out. Next year the pizza company said you know we have a 2-year permit for this festival and we have '87 and '88. We're going to sell this festival, we don't want to do it because it wasn't our family. It wasn't family atmosphere. We want a family event. We're going to sell this event to the Blues Association. They don't want July 17th, they want 4th of July. So, July 17, 1988 was available. I talked and they said, do you want it? I said, yeah, we'll buy it for $500 subject to approval from the city. I went down and talked to the lady at the parks 01:47:00department, explained it, and she said yeah. They can sell it to you. You go ahead. So, Portland Brewing bought it and then I went and went to Widmers, went to Bridgeport and went to McMenamins, because those were the four breweries in the state at that time. Brian and Mike said oh it's a great idea, but we're busy doing our stuff. You guys go do it. So, Widmer, Bridgeport and Portland did it and we each had different responsibilities for the festival and we put on the first festival and we made some money. Then Bridgeport, Dick and Nancy that they would sell Bridgeport and I had left Portland Brewing in November of '94. When I did Portland Brewing gave me the 1/3 interest they owned in the festival. I bought the 1/3 interest from Bridgeport and bought the 1/3 interest from Widmers to end up with owning the mutual benefit corporation Portland Brewers Festival 01:48:00doing business as the Oregon Brewers Festival.

TEM: What do you buy when you buy a festival?

AL: You bought the name and its past earning. I took control of the festival 24, 25 years ago, something like that. Our original purpose was, and this came from Kurt, really. Kurt brought that idea up we want people to come to Portland to try our beer. We want to bring other people's beer to Portland so they can see what other jurisdictions, what other cities are doing, what other brewers are doing. We had 17 brewers in the first festival. They were from, we had 1 or 2 01:49:00from California. We have the list. It's up on the wall upstairs. We got a couple from Idaho. One from Montana, our four from Oregon, plus buy that time Full Sail had started up. Deschutes was getting started.

TEM: Oregon Trail?

AL: Yeah, Oregon Trail. He was around. Dave, he's still around. It's served its purpose. We got people to come to Portland to try our beer. We have our Portland people to try other people's beer and kind of subconsciously we were saying I think our beer is better than the other people's so we're going to bring it in and let, without saying anything, let the consumer make up his mind. I think that got us off to a real roaring start.

TEM: The first year it was smaller. What was the growth like? Obviously, if we 01:50:00go compare the first year to last year, this year, it's a big change. But what was the growth like in the first few years? Did you see a spike in interest or was it a slower rise?

AL: Well, we had more people show up than what we thought were going to show up. We were using these little tickets and we didn't know how many tickets we even put out. We weren't putting wrist bands on people that are numbered, so we could number. There were some estimations done in the early attendance that were very generous, let's say. Without a lot of fact. Oh, I think, oh yeah that's a pretty good number [gestures grabbing something out of the air]. When we started counting people, we were probably maybe overestimating by quite a few in the early days. Once we started numbering, having the wristbands numbered and you 01:51:00check how many go on each day you start from this number to this number, we'd come up with a real accurate number now on the people that would attend. Early on when we said we were getting 65 or 70, we were probably half of that number of people. But it was enough to go build a reputation, be one of the early brew festivals, kind of set the standard of how we wanted to do a festival. We wanted to be a brewer's festival, not a beer festival. We wanted to be put on by brewers, managed by brewers, controlled by brewers, not a promotion event company doing the event.

TEM: Why was that? Can you say more about why that was important?

AL: Oh, just for the endorsement of the brewers. That hey, we're brewers. We want you to be in mind. You don't have to come here and serve your beer. We want 01:52:00you to come here and drink and talk about your beer. We want you to fraternize with your other brewers. We're going to have a dinner which you get invited to for free. Now we brought in our parade that you get invited to, and the brunch that you get invited to and you get some shirts. We try to give it a reason for the brewers to want to come. This year we have 80 brewers coming. It's kind of been our magic number. Last year we went up to 90, because we just have a heck of a time making a decision on who's going to come. It's the toughest thing to do every year. We had 135 apply and we had 80 for this year, so you have to tell a lot of people I'm sorry. There are some notable brewers that are not going to be there this year. There's a lot of new, young upstart brewers that need to be given the opportunity to expose their beers. So, that's the hardest dog gon' thing that we sit down here in this room and try and decide, pull names out of a 01:53:00hat and try to make everybody happy and it's tough.

TEM: Were the customers in those early years asking questions of brewers? Was there a-it feels like if we, again, looking at where we are now, there are lots of feedback loops and expectations I think of people?

AL: Yeah, we used to have the brewers standing around their brews before. Now they can't. There's too many people. You get lost in the shuffle. We had a little meet the brewers, where the people could come and talk to the brewers and different brewers would be scheduled in and people would come and talk to them. That's not a need anymore. We have knowledgeable beer consumers now. Very, very-even in our early days we weren't talking that much of hops. In our early days, in the mid '80s there were a lot of people that drove to Salem and thought 01:54:00they were tall beanpoles instead of hops. Now, you can virtually walk into any retail pub in this city and you can talk to men and women and they can sit down and tell you what the hops were in that beer and taste the Cascade and taste the different kind of hops and start naming off varieties of hops. That's the thing that's really impressed me is how the consumer has picked up with all of what's in there from... I mean, you can go ask anybody what dry hopping is and they know what dry hopping is. They know what a hop jack is. They know all the different varieties. They know aromatic hops. They know the bittering hops. They know about the acids. They can talk to you about mash temperatures. Nobody talked about that stuff when we were getting started. Now it's common language.

Early on the things that really blew Fred and my's mind was ladies wanting to 01:55:00drink these beers. It was, you know, 80%, 90% men. Then when we came in with our craft beer we started seeing more and more ladies, more and more couples drinking the beer. Just now, and that's what we've seen at the brewer's fest. There's times at the brewer's fest last year, because we do a sampling, I used Eastern Oregon State University Dr. Jeff Dense who teaches out beer and sociology at Eastern Oregon and they come over and do our economic impact assessment for us each year. They do a survey and not only males and females and that kind of information but we had a peak of last year the brewers festival on a Saturday afternoon 45% women at the brewer's festival. I remember before we were doing surveys even, even since he started doing the surveys we have seen 01:56:00the increase of ladies drinking these beers and talking about hops and talking about wanting something bitter. Now they're very intelligent. I see most ladies come in and they'll want an IPA and be able to talk to you and there will be 3 different IPAs on tap in some places, or 5. They'll be able to tell you the differences between them. All this has far exceeded my expectations, but probably if I would have thought about it and related it to cooking it's a real parallel. Now the cider is taking off. I'm glad to see cider taking off the way it has and our distilleries. What are there sixty-some craft distilleries in the state of Oregon. I like their style. I have a house at Manzanita. I like to drink Cannon Beach Distillery products. They come down to Manzanita in the 01:57:00summer time to the farmer's market. I usually buy a bottle, $50 bottle each time. I like their, they can't call it tequila, but I like their agave. They got some nice bourbons.

TEM: What about, you said the reference to cooking made me think about ingredients and proximity to ingredients. When you were in the early, well, during your time at Portland Brewing, so between '86 and '94, were people talking about the proximity to hops? Were people talking about the fact that this geographically is a special place for the ingredients?

AL: Not really. No. I mean, prior to prohibition, Salem Brewing's coasters said, 01:58:00Salem, Oregon. The hop center of the world. The governor's mansion in Salem, who built that? A hop grower. Still uses the governor's mansion. A hop grower built that in the '30s, I guess it was, after prohibition. Oregon grows 5%, 6%, 7% of the world's hops. We really became familiar with hops kind of from the start because of Burt Grant and his association with hops. Then because of some stockholders that we had in Portland Brewing they were good friends with hop growing people and we got to know the Weathers family. We still know the Weathers family very well in Keizer. I haven't done it the last couple of years, but many years we'd go down and take a BBQ, 6 chickens, half a keg of beer, 01:59:00potato salad, watermelon and go feed the Weathers family and their people during hop time and come home with a bunch of fresh hops for making beer. Tony and Doug are still good friends. In fact, those hops right up there came from Susan Weathers. You see those hops up there that she's preserved.

TEM: Yeah, I was going to say they look really good. Usually when you see hops at this stage of the year, they are not beautiful like that.

AL: Well, you know how they preserve them?

TEM: Huh-uh [no].

AL: Glycol.

TEM: Oh.

AL: Same thing that we use in our refrigeration here. Put it in a 5-gallon bucket and she will go and, she being Susan, will go into one of the barns and they hang them all the way up and they put the bucket down on the ground. They sit there in that bucket for 4 or 5 days and she puts coloring.I don't know if 02:00:00it's 4 or 5 days or a week or how long she puts it in there. But she puts some coloring and that's the green ones. She does ones that are kind of purple-y maroon color, maroon more from preserving hops. We will keep that. Last one we had upstairs lasted, I think, 6 or 7 years before the flowers or the cones started falling apart.

TEM: I've seen some sad, brown ones in places.

AL: Yeah.

TEM: So, those are...

AL: Yeah, Marsh a's got some at home that we got when we were down at Tony and Susan's this last fall during hop time. We went down there for dinner that they were having. We got invited to a diner that they had and part of the dinner was a tour. Tony took us out in the hop fields and they were doing harvesting. We got to go see the harvest going on.

TEM: Some of my favorites. I love that.

AL: Yeah. We'd go, we grow, I don't know, you hear from 5-7% of the world's hops. Yakima's 25-30%, depends on the year and how the rest of the world's production. I think Tony told us they have 20 varieties now and the weather and stuff. I know two are experimental, maybe 4 that are experimental. Probably some other people got experimental ones down there, because there's a number of experimental hops out there right now being developed.

TEM: Well, I think is a, we are sitting in a brewery that does experimental things, or we are sitting with the camera facing the brewery. So, 1994 you leave Portland Brewing. Do you want to talk about what that transition was like? What 02:02:00was the point between Portland Brewing and starting Cascade Brewing?

AL: Okay, Portland Brewing figured that my useful life to them was up and they said we don't need you anymore and fired me because I was the dissenting person, it seemed like. That was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was 50 years old. I said, ah, maybe I don't want to do anything anymore. Maybe I'll just run the beer festival. I kept driving by this piece of property that we're sitting right now. Joe Weston, I mentioned earlier, owned the property and I thought well, I don't want to go into the city of Portland. I'd like to be in Washington County. This property's in Washington County. Let me see if I can buy this property from Joe.

TEM: With the intent of doing something beer related?

AL: Yeah. Building a brew pub. Joe said, gosh I really don't like to sell, but 02:03:00yeah come on over. I'll talk to you. So, I went over and it took us 30 seconds to negotiate a deal on this. We shook hands. Wrote 3 sentences on a piece of paper, on a handy pad. That was it. I had to do a zone change. I had to do a comprehensive plan change. I had to go through design review and permitting and construction. From when I signed my paper with Joe in February of '95 until I opened on December 11 of '98, it was 3 years and 10 months of nothing but money going out. Nothing other than going through all the paperwork stuff and permitting and plans. It took me 3 years and 10 months to open the doors of which I felt like I should have got a master's degree in perseverance if nothing else.

TEM: Form-filling, I can't even imagine what that...

AL: Just the permit process, even. I submitted for permits in the middle of December. We didn't get permitted until July. There was a lot of construction going on at that time. Washington County sent the plans to San Diego architectural firm for review and they came back with 22 pages the first time. Only 16 pages the second time, and then we cut out the plumbing and electrical. By that time I selected a contractor and they went and finished up the permitting out there with that. It was a nightmare trying to deal with the politics and how they interpret things in California and how we do things here, even though they read out of the same book. Simultaneously, earthquake specs had changed. Originally I wanted to have lodging in this building. Because when we would go to Germany we would stay in little breweries that had a hotel and the 02:05:00brewery was back behind. It was all attached sometimes, and I wanted to have some rooms up above. But we picked up the earthquake specs the same as San Francisco through Oregon at that time, and it would have been prohibitive for me to go another floor. I would have had to take my back patio area and turn that into parking. I would only have 4 to 6 parking places out of it. And the budget was just going out of site. He said, chop the top floor. Get the lodging out of here. That's the name lodge, it stuck. I wanted it to be a hunting lodge kind of thing, not a lodge where people could stay. We still get calls on the phone of wanting rooms to rent. We haven't had any since we changed the name from Raccoon Lodge to the Lodge at Cascade Brewing, but still people think that we can rent a room here.

TEM: That'd be convenient.

AL: Yeah, but I think it's best done the way it is. We were talking about hops earlier and we had what we affectionately called a hops arms race that took place in Oregon, 12, 14 years ago with I can make beer with more hops than your beer and the next brewer'd go I can put more hops in it than you. In fact, I can put 5 more different hops in it than you. We affectionately called that the hops arms race and Ron Gansberg and I are just enough of everybody's marching this direction we are going to be the one or two that want to go the other way. We went the other way by meaning what can we do with less hops? How can we expand our business. We found out that we really couldn't be competitive with Widmer, Full Sail, Bridgeport being a big producer. We wanted to make 3,500 barrels not 35,000 barrels, or 350,000 or something in today's terms. We wanted to be a 02:07:00small producer. Well, a small producer is tough to be competitive against the big boys. You can be in there with one product for a little while. We said, well, how can we expand and not borrow a lot of money? One of the ways... and use resources that are local. Local resources meant wood barrels and fruit. We're in wine country. We're the 4th leading wine producer. There's a lot of wine barrels around. Got into a relationship with a couple wineries and started buying their wine barrels and doing some aging in them. We knew that there was a beer called a kriek, which is Flemish for cherry. We knew that that was done in Belgium. We knew that we had cherries in Oregon. We have sour pie cherries in Yamhill. We got Bing cherries up in the Hood River area. We knew that kriek used 02:08:00those and that was aged in a wood barrel. We knew that there was a bacteria attached to it and Ron chose the bacteria lactobacillus and we started out trying to make some kriek beer. That's how we got started in the sour beer business. That's 80% of our production goes to sour beer production and the other 20% we sell at our 2 retail establishments. It gave us a chance to be an early participant in the sour beer revelation that's taking place in the United States and now we are one of the many producers of sour beers. We sell our beer now in 40 states and 12 countries. One of our big purchasers now becoming the Providence of Ontario, Canada. Another one of our big buyers, we have two 02:09:00distributors in Florida; I mean, pardon me, 5 distributors in Florida, two distributors in California. That's our second leading market. Texas is our next steady market. Now our market into Europe has expanded rapidly. We have a distributor in Copenhagen that we've been with for a little less than a year, and he's come up to our fourth leading buyer of beer. Then comes, the next one, then they fall into a big group, a group out of Ohio and Virginia, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and my son is in charge of that. We have gone and moved from our property on 14th-pardon me, 10th and Southeast Belmont that we call our Barrel House and we have been doing all our aging there.

TEM: I have to just pause because that was impressive that you fit through there [referring to background movement].

AL: Oh.

TEM: Yeah. I was impressed.

AL: [Laughs] We've gone and moved our equipment from 10th and Delmont to our warehouse in Beaverton where we have just spent, well, 3 years ago, spent $2.5 million putting in an aging facility for our sour beers.

TEM: Do you do any production over on Belmont or it's just serving?

AL: [Shakes head] Retail and now the space where we did do production, you know any open space fills up with oh, take it over there and dump it. All brewing-this is the only brewery, all brewing is done here. Once a week we put it in wood barrels and take it to our blending house in Beaverton and there are 1,800 wood barrels of beer in there and there are nine 1,800 gallon feeder tanks and there are 160 barrel blending tanks with beer in them. That's where all the beer gets packaged. It's bottle conditioned there. It's shipped out of there.

TEM: That was something I was thinking about the difference, we see the brewery behind you but that you have this other facility because of the aging, that it just it's-

AL: Yeah, well, it's got the bacteria, the lactobacillus bacteria. You want to get that bacteria. You don't want it mingling with what you're doing here, although we did do that for a while. That's asking for trouble, and we avoided the trouble. But you want to be into a controlled environment, and so that we have 18,500 foot walk-in cooler that's climate controlled at 62 degrees, 85% humidity. There's little spitzers that go out [makes spritz noises] with the water to keep the humidity up in the building. We want to keep the barrels good and tight because as Ron Gansberg says, we know that the angels take their share but they don't share.

TEM: How did you and Ron end up together? He has his own history in the Portland brewing history, Portland brewing not the company, Portland brewing the general place?

AL: Ron started at Bridgeport in '86. He was underneath Karl Ockert. Karl said there's only one brew master and the rest are slaves. He was one of the salves. He helped build Bridgeport because he's a stainless steel welder as well. He's an imagineer. He's a creative person. We hired him in 1992 at Portland Brewing to help put together the brewery that we bought in Germany and put the pieces together and he stayed there until, he came to work with me in the summer of '96, and when we first started digging, having the ground dug for this building 02:13:00we had a construction shack in the back. We started working here the day they started building the building. We had a shell put up for us for $900,000 and we spent another $2.5 million putting the roof on, the windows, all interior finish instillation, sheet rock, HVAC, water, sewer, everything it takes building it out. We supervised that ourselves, including the landscaping and the irrigation and basically I had a shell put up and all the underground and the parking lot paved and then we did the rest.

TEM: Were you talking about what beer you wanted to make?

AL: We wanted beer that wasn't fruity, a nice, clean yeast. We picked the 02:14:00California yeast. A lot of brewers use that California yeast and it's been, we've stuck with that yeast.

TEM: Just seems like such an interesting time. Many talk about the mid '90s as that first burst, the first bubble burst where there were lots of new companies and then lots of closures. I wonder was there a shifting of taste during the mid '90s? We talk about the hop wars, that's early 2000s, but what about heading into mid to late '90s. What did people like?

AL: Well, it started out with Widmer with their hefeweizen. Pyramid did their hefeweizen. That showed people, well, if people can drink a beer that they can't see through, a beer that's not overly hopped, and each of them have more than one of. I think we tried to develop our style of beers here, a style of beer and 02:15:00let's have more than one of them. Rather than, yeah, that's pretty good but what else you got? We wanted a beer, Ron and I are both, I call myself a common sewer rather than a connoisseur. I wanted something I could just have more than one of. That's the style of beers that we still do. Never got off overly hoppy. We make IPAs, just like everybody else does but we try to be more middle of the road or creative and there's a lot of hop varieties that are out there now that you can do some creative hop things with, if you can buy the hops a second time. Sometimes you brew with what you can get, because we're the type of brewery that doesn't have these long-term hop contracts. We go buy off the spot market and sometimes Amarillo's aren't available. Somebody's bought them up for the next 2 02:16:00or 3 years, so maybe we would bring in some new hop variety or something else that's limited quantity and we'll come up with a nice beer but we can't get the hops again, so right now we're trying to develop a couple recipes that we know we can get continuing hop supply.

TEM: It's interesting that, are you more agile than larger breweries would be because you...?

AL: Yeah, I think we can turn quick. We used to like to use the analogy of World War II ship that wants to make a left turn. You know how long it takes to make a left turn?

TEM: Yeah.

AL: Nowadays you see new aircraft carriers that can just about turn 90 degrees because they got these jets down and swing around so they can turn the ship easier. We think we can make little quick strides that we're doing. We want to 02:17:00end up packaging our Portland Ale in cans, probably. We're going through a review of that recipe and review of the continuous supply of hops that we'd need to continue that for long-term. It's kind of a natural thing for us to progress into, to cans. The Widmers with their, I'd say, mid '80s to mid '90s and then the hop when Bridgeport came out with their IPA, that changed things a little bit. We started thinking IPAs more. IPAs are still a hot item. Everybody's playing. Not everybody, but many breweries are playing with sour beers in limited quantities. I don't know if anybody's doing as much as we are, as many 02:18:00varieties as what we have. If you look over your left shoulder you can see there's like 12 northwest sours limited releases of those beers. Sang Noir is bottled, Sang du Chêne, Kriek, Rose City, the one's on the right side none of those are bottled. Those are just limited production draft beers that come out of our sour system. We tap over once a week, every week we tap a live barrel at our barrel house at 10th and Belmont on a one-off beer that they pull a barrel off and create something unique for that beer and so we've been doing it, we're onto 6 years now and I don't know anybody in the history of the world that has tapped a different sour beer once a week for 6 years. Maybe we ought to go to 02:19:00the Guinness Book for that.

TEM: What do you see or think of as how things have changed from when you opened this facility and how things have stayed the same? You've been here for a long time now.

AL: People are starting to think about loggers. Nobody was thinking loggers early on. We were all thinking ales. Two weeks, two to three weeks for maturation. Loggers are four to six weeks. If your banker's looking, you say banker should I make an ale or a logger and he says how quick can you turn over your tank? You say this one three times faster than that one he's going to tell you to take the ale. Turn it over quicker. Turn it over quicker. It's not as capital intensive. But I see people playing with loggers, pilsners. I have such 02:20:00a respect for the pilsners, like you drink in Germany, Austria, Czech that take 7 minutes to pour. I have trouble really endorsing our pilsners here. They're not the same as what we drink overseas because they don't come up with that nice head that comes up over the top. Like I said, it takes 7 minutes to pour it because they're not going to scrape the head off. The Germans are not going to go give away any beer. They're going to let that settle back down. It takes at least 3 pours to pour a pils in Germany if that led that head come down, settle down, go up, settle up, go back up, settle down and then top it off with a nice merengue head that doesn't flop over the side. It'll just hold. It's got retention of the bubbles. The whole art, there's a whole science.

TEM: I seems like they eat it with a spoon.

AL: Yeah. There's a whole science to retention of the head of the beer. I see people maybe really getting into some other German techniques. They'll really maybe come out with some unique styles that are unique to other parts of the world that they have perfected here. pFriem Brewery is doing a great job with some brands. I like their products.

TEM: I'm just going to get a drink. I'm going to have a coughing fit as I explain for the camera that. It's fizzy water, not cracking open a beer. pFriem.

AL: I like pFriem beer. I think that they're doing some pils that are unique to them. I don't see it with a big head retention like they're doing.

UNIDENTIFIED: Are you on camera?

AL: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED: Right now?

AL: You want to be on camera?

UNIDENTIFIED: No.

TEM: [Laughs].

UNIDENTIFIED: It's just enough to have my picture at the post office. Did you 02:22:00get snowed on this weekend?

AL: Huh-uh.

UNIDENTIFIED: Huh. They had 26 closed going down to the beach for a while on Saturday.

AL: What was it?

UNIDENTIFIED: Yeah, they said about 8" to 10" of snow in some places going down there.

TEM: Winter's back.

UNIDENTIFIED: Huh?

TEM: Winter's back.

AL: It was okay on Friday.

UNIDENTIFIED: Tell me about it. We just got home from four months in Arizona last Monday and I'm ready to go back.

TEM: Oh, yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED: Geez. Alright.

AL: Bobby sometime we got to do that rack change upstairs.

UNIDENTIFIED: Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED: ...picnic tables.

UNIDENTIFIED: Materials are on their way for your picnic tables. The rack we can probably, can't do tomorrow morning, maybe Wednesday morning.

AL: Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED: Okay.

UNIDENTIFIED: Sorry, Art. Real quick-are you all done in the office? Do you want me to close up shop, put it straight and everything?

AL: I got a key.

UNIDENTIFIED: Okay. Do you want me to close the safe?

AL: Yeah. I don't need it.

UNIDENTIFIED: Okay cool. I'll see you later.

TEM: This is the business part. This is the beauty of the, we get to see the business part.

AL: Yeah, this is every day.

TEM: What has changed that has surprised you?

AL: You always know there's going to be a little sorting out when this happens. My surprise is there hasn't been more sorting out. I don't know how many up close. I know Peak, or Pike it was called Pike over in Milwaukee, he did a long time ago, or P-e-a-k. Then Nor 'Wester that we used to affectionately call Nor'Bluster, then the one that was down in Tualatin that was named after Henry Saxer, Saxer Brewing. It combined with Nor 'Wester. There are some others that's 02:24:00closed. I can't think of them right now, but not very many out of the 220 or 30, whatever we have now. The surprise to me maybe has been cities like Astoria that have taken off. Got it's nice little brewing community there. Enterprise, Oregon, way out on the fringe of our state. They're picking up down along the Oregon coast with the tourists. We had the one at Cannon Beach for a long time. We've got a couple of them in Tillamook. That surprised me, that breweries out 02:25:00on the fringes can transport their beer clear into the markets in the city. It's exactly the opposite what I would do. I would be close to the center of distribution rather than a long ways away. They seemed to have made a business out of being, having to truck their products into the main distribution channels. We've always had a good assortment of equipment. We have JV Northwest that was actively making equipment and got into the beer and wine side of it. They've been making soda pop and wine before that but were right here. JV to build equipment and other equipment suppliers came on board. One of the equipment suppliers closed up a year ago that we bought a lot of tanks, very good tanks from. I don't know the entire reason but it's always more than one 02:26:00reason why something happens like that.

TEM: Who was the supplier?

AL: Charlie at, what was he called? I don't know. Go look on our tanks. Metal-Fab.

TEM: Yes, okay.

AL: Metal-Fab tanks. Charlie at Metal-Fab did a great job. Brought a lot of brewers around the country with good equipment. That was maybe another reason why we took off. Earlier I was saying there are a number of reasons of why craft brewing took off in Oregon. We had equipment manufacturers readily available to us. Yes we had hops. Yes, we had Great Western Malting across the river from us. We had all the ingredients were right here: water. We could buy the yeast. The 02:27:00ingredients were right here for us. We didn't have to forage too far away from where we went. The '90s and then jump to the 2000s, IPAs held on strong and they're still holding on strong. I think you're seeing a lot of different creativity coming out of the brewers. I just know from this year when we went through the selections for the brewer's festival, we think this is going to be one of the best ones we've ever had with the variety of beers that are available. Everybody's doing a better job. The thing that I am maybe the proudest of and had no anticipation of when the craft brewing got started in Oregon of how we have influenced the world out of Oregon. Not to sound 02:28:00egotistical, but what some dreamers got started here in Portland has radiated all throughout North America, South America, Europe. A year ago last January, Van Havig from Gigantic Distributing and I got invited to speak to the first annual Dutch craft brewers conference in the Netherlands. There's 400 craft brewers in the Netherlands, 220 of them were there. There's a lot of what we call gypsy brewing going on there: one brewery but a number of brewers will use it. Because only several actual brew pubs that we would call brew pubs by today's standards in the Netherlands, although more of them are coming.

TEM: Are they small facilities? Like the brewing facilities? Does more than one brewer brew at the same time in the same facility?

AL: No. One brewer would come in and they have other tanks and you come in and use the kettle and stuff and then pump it into one of those tanks. Yeah, but they are expanding and they're making better beer. Some of them now can do their own propagation of their yeast more so they can do more brewing than what they had been doing. But it's happening in England. It's happening in the Soviet Union. Moscow has got brew pubs. St. Petersburg has got brew pubs. I've met the brewers from them. They come through here to visit with us now. South America it's happening. I have a friend that's down in Chile right now and it's going on in Colombia, Brazil, probably not Venezuela but other South American countries. New Zealand, Australia, Japan is making some great beer. Now for the Oregon 02:30:00Brewer's Festival I've been bringing over guest brewers for the last 6 years. Started out with a Dutch brewers and I've built a strong relationship and friendships with the Dutch brewers. We had brewers from New Zealand. We've had brewers from Japan. This year, I'm bringing brewers from Baja California. Five brewers are coming up. I drank their beer in San Diego in October. They're making great beer. They got the San Diego influence. San Diego is brewing great beers and it's a real hotbed of beer in San Diego.

TEM: What are the styles that the Baja brewers gravitate towards?

AL: Towards San Diego beers. They're not doing Mexican loggers. They fiddle with that, but they're doing nice ales. Very creative stuff, still.

TEM: I had fabulous, fabulous experience in San Diego. I was there last year.

AL: I went to a craft brewers conference, not conference but festival in National City, which is between Tijuana and San Diego. That's where I met these brewers and that's where I met a lot of California brewers and their beer quality is all coming up. It's all being raised. San Diego is doing great beer.

TEM: When you go, a couple different distinguished hats that you wear-you wear one of the founders of one of the original craft breweries hat. You wear the hat with the founder of the brew festival, but you also just wear the hat of being in beer in Portland and in Oregon. What is it like to travel around? What do 02:32:00people say about what has happened here?

AL: They have been here, most of them, and tried the beers. Our reputation brought them here. They've got influence from more than just us in the northwest. They've got influence from all over the world, but this is a hotbed. We do have a reputation and if you don't go around and brag than nobody can learn anything about you, either. One thing that we learned early, early on that Fred and I learned is there's an open door policy with brewers. Big brewers, little brewers-there's an open door policy. Fred and I saw that for the first time in 1988 in the city of Tettnang in Germany where the Tettnanger hop is grown. It's one of the four hop growing regions in Germany and it's way down in 02:33:00southern Germany. It's much like Oregon. It's not in Bavaria. I think it's in Baden-Württemberg. I think it's in that state. You're like two and a half hours to France. You're like half an hour, forty minutes to Switzerland. Hour and a half to Italy. Hour and a half, two hours to Austria and you're right looking at the Alps like we look at Mt. Hood. You're 2 ½ hours south of Munich. We went and we were over there with a friend that sells hop twine and he was over there talking to hop twine people. We went and knocked on the door at the brewery at 10:00 in the morning to see if they would receive us. They said, yes come back in an hour and this was the Kronenbrauerei in Tettnang. It's been in the same 02:34:00family now for close to 200 years-the Tauscher family. We got to be good friends with them. I was last there in '06. Gosh, that was a long time ago. It was '06. I do want to get back to take my friend Marsha down to southern Germany. She got her first taste of Germany last year. She felt much more at home after she found out that she had a German grandmother. We went back to this town where her great grandfather carved all the icons in the church.

TEM: Oh, wow.

AL: When we were on that trip, we went to a brewery that we had brought over to the beer festival named Lang Brewing. Lang Brewing has a fella who married a gal 02:35:00from Beaverton and he would come over to visit his in-laws and introduce us to his beer. Well, we went and met him at his house and went to the brewery that he helps sell for and met that family. They're the fifth and sixth generation. They're last name is Hopf, which is hop. They're last name is hop. H-o-p-f in German. Hopf. So, we got to go see and visit a logger brewery that's running at 1/3 capacity and now the two boys that are in their 30s are running it. Dad is still there, but one of the boys is head brewer. They're having trouble selling their beer because the younger people are wanting something else. They're making some ales to hope to get the market kick started in their area. They're 12 miles from the Czechoslovakian border. Way, way out in the country. What's the name of the town? Mackovice. We spent a couple nights in that little town and we'd go 02:36:00down to the local pub and they wouldn't, the locals wouldn't talk to us. It was a bunch of men and they were all speaking German. They didn't want to talk to us. But part of it is the friendship that you get, the friendship that I got expressed to me by the German brewer couldn't speak any English. But his wife could speak English and his two kids. To me, that kind of completes the whole circle. The same thing we experienced in Tettnang in '88. There's such a sharing, comradeship and when we went over there in '06 we took one of our sour beers over. Even our German friend, he went, oh yes. Oh it's quite, quite sour! [Laughs]. He didn't want to say anything bad about it. But there's a recognized 02:37:00different styles throughout the world, and a lot of it's done regionally, with what your regional supplies would be, your raw materials. I think some of the brewers are having fun experimenting more and more with raw materials, like we're doing stuff with pawpaw. Pawpaw is an Oregon native plant that not many people know about, a fruit.

TEM: You're making beers with pawpaw?

AL: Uh-huh [yes].

TEM: Wow.

AL: Some of our sours.

TEM: That's awesome.

AL: Yeah. We're trying. I mean, there's been stuff done with spruce for a long time, spruce tips. Different other raw materials that people play with. I think that's going to keep, there's going to be more and more experiential raw material work done as time goes on.

TEM: One thing that's different about northwest brewing as opposed to Germany is the handing down, and so your son is involved in the business. Is that something 02:38:00that, do you see it as a legacy, family company?

AL: Well, my daughter was involved with the business too until a year and a half ago. She wanted to do something else. My son, Tim, is 2 years younger than my daughter. He started in the beer business between his junior and senior year in college. He went to work through Portland Brewing. They paid half his salary and Maletis Beverage paid the other half. He worked a summer for Robby Maletis running the distribution side and then when he graduated from Oregon State he came and worked for Portland Brewing. Then got head hunted away and then came to work for me and then got head hunted away again going back into the beverage business again. Then he worked for the company that bought Budweiser for a while. He could have gone to work for Stella Artois at one time in Belgium. Then 02:39:00after he worked for North American Beverage after Budweiser came into and bought Stella Artois or Stella Artois bought into Budweiser, they had to spin off some of their brands. Their [unclear] brand and some other brands and he lost his job. He came back here. Went to work for a manufacturing company for a short time and then went back into the beverage business. He went to work for William Grant & Son. They're the largest family owned Scottish distillery. They make Glenfiddich, Balvenie, Tllamore D.E.W., and those products. He's been, he's 47 now, 48. He's been in the beverage business all of his adult life. He's able to really relate to our distributors, work with them, talk the language. I'm sure he, as long as I can pay his salary he'll keep working here.

TEM: But it sounds like he's traveled around and experienced the beverage industry, not just working...

AL: Yeah, fortunately when he was with William Grant he got to go to Scotland one or two times a year to play golf and drink scotch.

TEM: That can be the way that you keep him.

AL: Well, I want to go there and drink some scotch. He did introduce me to good scotch, of which I don't drink bourbon any more. I'm more of a single malt scotch drinker. It's all very expensive.

TEM: What did I not ask you about that you thought that I would ask you about in this interview? Or something that you wanted to share?

AL: Maybe we could dwell more upon... you kind of touched on what do you think the future's going to be? Where are we going from here? There's a lot more room 02:41:00left in the business, although we see Budweiser sales sliding. Our craft brewer sales are still gaining. I think they're going to keep gaining because we've all got taste buds. We all want some variety. I don't know how to peg the new consumers that are coming onto the market. I don't. Even though I got grandchildren in that market. I don't know how to peg them. They like the beers. They drink the beers. They've grown up with them. I used to laugh at Portland Brewing and say oh those kids are born today wait until they're 21 because they've grown up with this craft beer. Fred and I were 40 years old when we decided to get into it. Now a kid that's born into it, his dad was always drinking it-I see the parallel to me draining my dad's Olympia bottles to kids draining their Widmer hefeweizen bottle. You grow up with it. It's more 02:42:00acceptable to you, because it's nothing new. It's something that's always been here. I do know that other parts of the country are not as privileged as what we are as far as craft beers that are there, especially in the east and in the south. It's now starting, finally, to take place in the south. There's been such, and there's still bastions of, even Maryland's right now going through it. They're going backwards. They're trying to limit the amount of brewers, what they can sell on their own premise because they have such great pressure from their beer distributors that sell yellow beer. They're threatened. These third generation kids that work for the beer industry that their grandpa started generally have never had to wash their own car or polish their own shoes. Got a corvette when they graduated from high school. They don't understand the same thing. Some of them got the same work ethic as grandpa, but some of them don't. 02:43:00All they're trying to do is protect their monopoly and you protect your monopoly by paying off your legislatures. It's no different in the state of Oregon. The legislatures walk around with their hands out and they listen to the guy that's got the most gold. It's causing economic issues within all the states, not to do with alcohol necessarily, but to do with public employees' pensions. I know you're subject to that and I know that my friend Marsh a is, but I think there's been abuses in the system. A doctor gets close to a million dollars a year in retirement and my friend gets $40,000 a year in her retirement, there's some inequity some place in the system. I would like to see those inequities solved so that the rest of us businessmen don't have to take that on, because this is 02:44:00more and more responsibility, especially in Oregon with our minimum wage. That's what's going to kill Oregon. Minimum wage in the serving industry until we get tip credit. We're one of the seven states that don't give tip credit. We have servers here that make as much as electricians and nurses. There's not as much risk and you don't have to have as much knowledge. I would like the light to go on someplace. I'm not denying these people the opportunity to earn income, but we just raised our burger and fries prices to $14 and they're going to be at $15 when the wages go up again in July. We're not that far away from a $20 burger. Is this what the legislators wanted? They're going to get it. In the meantime, housing prices have gone out of site. We're trying to house people. Well, raising the minimum wage is not going to do that.

TEM: Have you had to hire fewer people as a result of that?

AL: Yeah. We've changed our menu in the kitchen to eliminate. We've eliminated 02:45:00four people in our kitchen. We keep a much closer eye on what the people do with their closing hours. We're watching every friggin' penny. This business, the food business is one of the harder businesses. Grocery, they make about 1.5%. The national average in restaurants is 3-5% of your gross. We do $2 million here. 5% is $100,000. We work really, really hard to make $100,000 a year here, and I don't get paid out of this. I don't get paid out of the restaurant. I get paid out of the brewery. So, we work our tails off. All the costs are going up. We don't have turnover. Fortunately, we don't have to do a lot of retraining with our staff, because we've got some long-we got one person that's been here 02:46:00since we opened. We have a lot of long-term employees. What we have done is gone to more education with our staff. All of our staff has got the first level cicerone training. We're trying to get more to get on the second level to educate. We're selling sour beer, so we have to do a lot of education with our staff, so it takes longer for our staff to go do the serving at the meal. What I'm going to probably end up doing eventually as the wages go up eliminate more wait staff. You're going to do self-ordering. I'll probably have a wine steward or somebody or beer steward that walks around and do more education.

TEM: Well, it's interesting. Because it's such a thing that is sold regionally as a part of regional identity and yet there is this struggle of where we live and how people make livings here and how they pay their rent or their housing and it can feel like there's a real tension there between we want to sell this 02:47:00as a state that produces this stuff but then the reality of living here can be different.

AL: Yeah. The other thing that's happened is more jurisdictions have become aware of what wastewater we emit from here. There's more monitoring of that. From the fire department side, we mill grain. The pendulum swings from one extreme to the next, so now the fire departments are really into the dust that gets created. They're usually not as knowledgeable as what they think they are and they impose very tough restrictions. It usually comes along for the smallest guy gets treated just like the big guy. The small guy doesn't really have a problem, and maybe the big guy has one but the poor little guy on the bottom 02:48:00gets booted around by the inspector and he doesn't have the attorneys and all the horsepower to fight the restrictions. I know that there are some local brewers in Portland that have trouble with that, with the inspections that come around. They don't give any direction and they overkill. What I would like to see is-and the fire department needs some education, I would say, if they are educatable. Usually they're not real educatable. I'd like to see them go take the rule and tents, like we have a little tent here, or whatever temporary and let's not use the word temporary but why do I have to take my tent up and down? Can I have it up for 6 months? It can't be up for 6 months unless I go get a building permit? For me, that's the stupidest thing in the world. It's just 02:49:00another, it's another form of taxation.

TEM: I bet you really run into that at the Oregon Brewer's Festival. It seems like regulations have caused changes in the way that operates.

AL: Well, the first year that we did it, it cost $5 to rent the park. Last year, to rent the park the parks department, including the renovation was $52,000. The police were $9,000. Fire permit was $1,350. The OACC was only $250.

TEM: That's a huge, in 30 years? That's a-and the changes... didn't you used to have, did you ever have glass cups?

AL: We had glasses there two years and then when a massacre happened back in Boston all the cops and everybody got together and came up with a bunch of new 02:50:00rules. They won't let us have glass in the park anymore. You can break a glass and cut somebody's throat, I guess. I don't know. I wish we could use glass glasses, because the beer tastes better out of glass than plastic. We did have one glass thrown through a window one time. We had glasses get broken downtown. From that standpoint, it's better to have plastic.

TEM: Yeah. It's a lot of people, too.

AL: Yeah, you're going to get a few knuckleheads if you get 70,000 together.

TEM: There's always a knucklehead.

AL: What do I... if I go look in the future, I think we're always going to have these formidable products around. We're going to have the ciders. We're going to have the hard sodas. We're going to have varieties of hard liquors now because of our distillers that can go do things and the brewers will still be around, 02:51:00still be creating. I don't know if we're going to have as many mega breweries. We went through a whole thing with Sierra Nevada going to the east coast, Deschutes going to the east coast. New Belgium going to the east coast building big breweries. Budweiser says that they're just treading water now and buying any new acquisitions. That pendulum can swing from one extreme to the next because they change their management like we change our socks. Every new manager guy can't do what the last guy did because he got fired. They got to go find something else. I still see there's still big beer companies or finance 02:52:00companies or holding companies that are going to go out and buy a brewery. That will still happen. When that will stop, I don't know, but there's always been a consolidation of breweries through the years, especially in the Midwest. Not so much out here. Small brewers will get bought up by other brewers.

TEM: What is it that keeps you coming every day to work? What is it that...?

AL: Oh, we have a mortgage to pay here.

TEM: [Laughs] Okay, there's the practical side.

AL: I want to see my friends John, Barry.

TEM: With the supreme heart driving?

AL: I have fun here every day. There's a challenge every day. Somedays I walk in and go alright, what's going to fall apart today or what am I going to get 02:53:00notified on that I didn't do? What rules are going to change? Meeting people, that's another thing. My dad was the kind of guy, like me and my brother, you meet people and then you start doing business with them. He bought his cars from cars Chevrolet and pretty soon he was good friends with guy car, the car Chevrolet. Thus, I became a good friend of guy car and he helped me on my '22 Chevrolet in my restoration days and he would let me take one of his antique cards to college. He would say, three rules: bring it back clean, with gas in it, and call me if there's a problem. There's going to be people, the people that are in the beer business are giving, sharing people. This sharing is going to continue going on and what I see more of is what we call collaborative 02:54:00brewing, where you come into another brewer's brewery and you brew his beer and maybe you brew your beer in his brewery and you combine the two. I see collaborative brewing as something that we do and I see more of that happening. That's the sharing part of it. There are some small brewers, I guess opening up finally in Germany. That's been one of the last little spots, because their small breweries have closed up. A small brewery would be like Portland Brewing. The equipment that we bought over there, the 80... no, it's not 80, 130 hectoliter system, I think it is. Those size of breweries have closed up 20 years ago, 25 years ago. They are really dominated by a large number of big 02:55:00brewers. The other reason, to digress on another reason why craft brewing has taken off in the United States early on was because of our federal laws that do not allow brewers to buy their way into the business. In other words, I can't walk into a retail establishment and say here's $100, put my beer on tap. There's big things going on right now with TTB nationwide. There's big investigations going on in the Tied House and buying your way into business. That was one thing that we learned early at Portland Brewing: you don't buy your way into business. You don't go give them a cooler. You don't go do anything that's not up to par, up to legal. Those rules are put into place to keep a level playing field. If it wasn't level, like it's not level in Europe. That's 02:56:00why those guys have trouble in the Netherlands. Most of the, there's these old countries that have been around for hundreds of years. The big brewers bought up the real estate. They own the real estate. They own that pub that's there. They say, okay, we're going to rent it to you, but you have got to sell all of our beer. You can't do any other beer. Now they're starting to find there are, in the Netherlands, there's a couple people over there that don't lease or buy buildings unless they have control of the beer. They want to sell something other than InBev's beer.

TEM: Was that how-when the breweries owned saloons here, was that kind of what it was like? That if it was a Weinhard saloon, it was only serving Weinhard's beer?

AL: I would assume so. I don't know.

TEM: Yeah.

AL: I would assume so.

TEM: I guess this is a little bit different than that, because those were the 02:57:00brewery saloons. This is more about-

AL: Well, yeah, it would be the same thing. The brewery would own the saloon, just like they do over in Europe right now. Some of my friends that rent from them they've gone and gone oh, screw you. I'll put in one. Then they got two. Then they got three. Then they got four. Some of them are sitting on leases that maybe the guy won't renew my lease again because I'm not selling just his beer. It's happening over there. it's really tied. That's one of the reasons that they're such 1% share of the market, because you walk in to a place: I'll buy a new TV set. I'll take you to the whatever over there. You buy your way in. Then once you get obligated it's tough to say no, especially if he's your landlord.

TEM: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

AL: I don't see us... in Oregon if anything happened we got such a consolidation of distributors, and another consolidation is happening with General Distributing being bought by Columbia. There's another one of them family-owned distributorships since prohibition. The Fick family. They're really nice people. They used to sell our beer, but evidently somebody made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Columbia Distributing is owned out of New York. They're a big investment house that had bought them. They just bought another small distributor up in Washington. They're hell bent on controlling the northwest. I don't know if they're going to Idaho. Maybe they're in Idaho already. I don't know. They've got the money behind them and the investment and they must run a 02:59:00good company. First of all, there's no poor beer distributors that I know of in big markets. They're all, live in nice houses and kids go to right schools, drive new cars. So, when I look in that crystal ball, we still got taste buds. We're still going to drink something different, try what's new. I don't know exactly what's on the new horizon. Wine is flourishing in the state. Like we said, distillation is going and ciders are booming. I looked for a big cider fest. I like cider myself and when Marsha and I were over in France a couple years ago I've always wanted to see the D-Day invasion beaches. We decided we wanted to go there and she was up in the neighborhood at a garage sale and she 03:00:00heard this lady speaking French. She said, are you French? She says, yeah. Marsh a said, well, we're going to France in a couple months. She says, well, I'm going go my place in Paris in a couple months, too. The lady went where are you going in France? She said, well, we're going to go down to D-Day invasion beaches. She said, oh okay. Go to a town called Arromanches and stay in a hotel de la Marine. Oh, okay. I rent a car in the Netherlands. We go to Breaux for a couple days. We drive from Breaux down to Arromanches. We stopped and we spent a day outside La Havre in another city, because that's just at the north of Normandy and then drove down to the D-Day invasion beaches to Arromanches. Arromanches is a little, tiny town. That's, Arromanches is where Gold Beach was 03:01:00in the D-Day Invasion beaches. The beaches go from north to south: Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah. United States were Omaha and Utah. The British were Gold. The British were also with the Canadians in Sword and at Juno. The big one on Arromanches is where you see most of the D-Day invasion beach pictures where they made these what they called [unclear]. These were like big concrete barges and they made them over in Britain and sailed them over there like the day before, dropped them down into the ocean because the beach, the D-Day invasion beaches rise 25' with each tide change. The little town of Arromanches is like 03:02:0020th the size of Seaside. We stayed right downtown at the Hotel de La Marine. It was right in the-it's the only hotel in the city of any size. The sea wall is right in front of it. Waves come up, woke us up at 1:30 in the morning, water splashing against the sea wall. That's how far it comes up. Then it goes out. When it goes out, it goes out half a mile at least! They drive out in tractors and park their tractors and go out and throw nets and fish and then the tide chases them back in. Arromanches is also apple growing region. Arromanches is right on the beach but inland is the apple growing region and so I started drinking some hard ciders over there and found out there's a lot of different products. There's September festivals in cider and I think that's on our list of 03:03:00things to do. Now we've been reading about going to Spain and Portugal and there's lots of apples in Spain and Portugal and they do big cider events. So, after Ireland and Scotland, maybe coming up for a cider fest.

TEM: Well, I feel like taste wise there's a lot of overlap between sour and cider, that it hits the same, quenches the same thing.

AL: One's sweeter a little bit.

TEM: Yeah, but it has the same... I like them both. For kind of the same reasons.

AL: In Belgium you get sours. They're different than our northwest style sour, but there's a lot of sours that we never even hear about. There's a couple hundred breweries over there. Small breweries, big breweries.

TEM: Your pawpaw cider. That's amazing. AL: Maybe there's somebody going to do 03:04:00pawpaw cider, I don't know. You asked why do I want to come in every day other than yeah, we have a mortgage to pay. I'm trying to do a little bit less of coming in and maybe more projects at home or doing more stuff at home or spending more time at the beach... last, over the last two years we were in Europe four times, three times, two weeks each. We came back and went, when was the last time we were at Crater Lake? I went 1954. When was the last time, and Marsha went I don't know. I think I was there with my folks about that time. She's never been to see Yellowstone. I was there in 1960 on the Boy Scout Jamboree and last year we said we're just going to drive around, which we 03:05:00didn't. We just stayed at home working. We had one of our Dutch friends come over for a couple of weeks and we spent some time with them. This is my friend that lives... he started a brewery named Maximus. He just left Maximus. He's doing some consulting, but he lives in Amsterdam on a 1908 river barge that he converted into housing. Have you been to Amsterdam?

TEM: Hmm-mm [no].

AL: Okay. But he's on the main river. The Amstel River comes in and that's what feeds all the canals and he's right on the Amstel, right downtown Amsterdam. Well, it's not directly downtown. It's a 10-minute walk downtown. It's right by city hall and all this other... so we kind of got to know Amsterdam and walk around and know the brewers there and know the people that run the beer saloons. 03:06:00Spent some time at the museums but not that much time.

TEM: Maybe it's a good reminder that we live in a place that people want to come, that we live in a place that we can also be tourists and go to Crater Lake.

AL: This year, we better get to Crater Lake. Now with all the little distilleries and breweries you can kind of wander around the state and see a lot of different things. Speaking of old breweries, in your research did you ever run across the brewery in, oh I just had the name on the tip of my tongue-it's east of Klamath Falls... Lakeview. Lakeview.

TEM: You know, I actually I feel like I did. Because I remember looking at it on 03:07:00a map and thinking where...

AL: I had the label. Brian Anderson has it now from the brewery there. One of the most beautiful labels that I've ever seen that I bought from a guy. Somehow he got my name out of the brewer's association... no, beer can collectors group, American Brewery & Association. This was years ago. Sent me a, mailed me a copy, this is before you could send stuff, and it had these 6 labels on it. I bought it from him and they were in a photo album that used to have glue stuck across and then a page taped across. You remember those? It was stuck to those.

TEM: I do remember those. As an archivist we don't like those.

AL: Well, I took them to my friend Jack Thompson, who's a paper conservator. 03:08:00Have you ever met Jack Thompson?

TEM: I haven't.

AL: He's here in Portland. He's probably retired now. But he's a paper conservator, and he worked in the building across the street from our old Portland Brewery on 14th and Flanders. The brewery was the former building of Meier & Frank and it was owned by the historical society and he did a lot of work for the historical society and he had a studio there. I took those labels to him and he did testing on the glue and alright, here's what you do. You just cover them. I'm like ahh!

TEM: [Laughs].

AL: Then it dissolved the glue. He cleaned them up for me and pressed them. Brian's got them from Lakeview. One of the most beautiful labels. It closed in 1895, I think. It's in the list of breweries around the state.

TEM: It's funny. I've been carrying that book around with me. I don't actually have it in my bag today.

AL: Then there's the one in Canyonville. What was the-it started with an S, who 03:09:00owned that one I think. Brian's got something from that brewery.

TEM: I think I need to take another visit to Brian's museum. His basement museum.

AL: Yeah.

TEM: It's so interesting. I think how much we can glean from those labels. I appreciate that people like you and people like Brian continue to collect them, because there's so much that you just can't get from newspaper articles or...

AL: Between you and me... he doesn't tell people this, he'll go buy a collection for $30,000.

TEM: Oh, I bet! I mean, it's amazing.

AL: People will get 5 or 10 items out of it and sell off the rest, kind of thing. He's capitalized enough that he can go play that game.

TEM: He has an amazing...

AL: And he knows, and he pays top dollar for things. He knows what stuff is worth. He and I are softball players, too. We used to play on the same team. We 03:10:00don't-he's had to quit. He's just picked up Parkinson's, too.

TEM: Oh, I didn't know that.

AL: Just in the last few months it's come out on him. Then he had his hip replaced. So, he's not-he's got a ball. He won like 750 softball games pitching or something like that. He used to play on a couple of teams and manage a team and used to travel. He spent a lot of time in softball. But he's still collecting big time.

TEM: Well, I'll have to give him a call now that I'm armed with my new knowledge of pre-prohibition.

AL: He kind of branches off into stuff. Weinhards owned hotels and they had one in Astoria. So, I just found, well it was a few months ago I found some things 03:11:00for him from the Astoria hotel. One was a letter written on some hotel stationary. Another was a couple postcards. The hotel's still down in Astoria. I think there were other hotels around the state also that Weinhard did. I think he did one up in Washington, too, if I'm not mistaken. Brian knows all that information.

TEM: Weinhard, the thing I see the most are Weinhard's ice houses, that those, or I have seen those more, where it doesn't seem like there is a brewing facility but there's a Weinhard's ice house. I don't know if he was into ice.

AL: Well, here's why he had the ice house. He had the largest, Weinhard's Brewery was built in Portland. It was the largest ice producer west of the 03:12:00Mississippi. When he shipped his beer in railcars, it was iced down. So, he would go and station ice along the railroad route so when the ice would melt when it got to Salem, wherever, Medford, wherever he was going and he went down the valley and he went up and down the river. You also see that he had those saloons that he built. You see the picture with the guys down below and then there's somebody then up on the third floor and there's women hanging out. That's where the brothel was. There's a couple of those pictures that are, you can buy them on EBay all the time, the famous one with people.

TEM: Yeah, the common ones.

AL: The common one, that.

TEM: Well, thank you very much.

AL: Do you have time for some lunch?

TEM: I-[recording ends].