DBO PDX: When Up North 65 Visited (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Friday, April 22, 2016, 15:00 (3231 days ago) @ BeardFade

That's an awful lot of corporate beer for a Portland crew, isn't it? ;-)

Corporate beer? Widmer is here in Portland, Deschutes in Bend, Full Sail in Hood River. Every beer in that picture is brewed locally. It's not an insult to call it "corporate" when you're local beer is so appreciated by others that it's sold regionally.

Widmer's part of the Craft Brew Alliance, which by itself is the 9th largest brewing company in the US (hard to call yourself a microbrew at that point), and is 1/3 owned by Anheuser-Busch now. (The Widmer brothers currently own less than a fifth of the business.)

Full Sail sold itself to a private equity firm last year; they're not owned by a corporate beer company, but they ARE owned by a corporation (that has very little to do with the beer industry).

Deschutes is now big enough that they're building an east coast production facility. (Again, they're local, sure... but they're hardly 'micro'. ;) )

Heh. I remember stopping by Widmer's storefront for whatever was being experimented with on the way home regularly (they were 2 blocks off my standard route) - in those days, the only Widmer available in restaurants was Hefeweizen, but they had some pretty interesting stuff that came and went that you could really only get in that store. I think it's cool they got as big as they did (and I STILL enjoy their Hefe).