From the Portland Mercury‘s Craft Beer Issue!
There was beer in Portland before 1984. There was even craft beer in Portland before then. But 1984 marked the opening of two foundational breweries that signaled the local start of the craft beer movement, a seismological shift in drinking that continues to this day.
It might be hard to remember—or, most likely, imagine—what beer was like back then, because the past three and a half decades have utterly redefined American beer. Once an exclusive landscape of bland yellow lagers, America’s brewing scene has grown to incorporate beers of all shades and stripes, from painstaking recreations of old-world styles to experimental concoctions that push the envelope. And Oregon—and, specifically, Portland—has been at the vanguard of this movement, evidenced by the density of breweries within the city, which itself is surrounded by some of the best access in the nation to the raw ingredients that make up beer.
Prior to 1984, craft breweries (or, as they were called for years, microbreweries) were just a murmur. Considered the first new American brewery since Prohibition, New Albion Brewing opened its doors in Sonoma, California, in 1976, the first signal of the forthcoming wave of craft beer. By 1982 New Albion had closed, but by then, Portland had already seen its own first craft brewery open and shut its doors—Cartwright Brewing, which operated roughly between 1979 and 1981. By all accounts, Cartwright’s beer was inconsistent and plagued by bottling problems, and it faced a drinking market that wasn’t quite ready for it.
That market seemed to have matured by 1984—a year that, for what may have been entirely serendipitous reasons, saw the opening of not one but two major breweries in Portland.