A Drive Down the Coast

The view from The Horn in Depoe Bay

The Oregon Coast is slowly filling out its compliment of breweries. In the near future, it should be possible to drive Highway 101 from Astoria all the way to Brookings and get a beer from a brewery in every town along the way. I have driven a chunk of that coast this winter (by far the best time to visit the Oregon Coast) and visited three new or newish breweries. Below are my findings.

Public Coast Brewing, Cannon Beach
Twenty-six miles south of Astoria, you come into Cannon Beach, and one of the first structures you pass is Public Coast, a brewery named for Oregon's law that prohibits private ownership of beaches. It's in a building once occupied by the Lumberyard restaurant, and it follows that place's general vibe and approach, which is to say, upscale mainstream. It's a beautiful space, keyed by the presence of the fermenters and bright tanks that seem to peer in from the brewery. Their height lends an air of grandeur to things.

Public Coast is owned by Ryan Snyder, whose background is in resorts. That's the feel you get here. There's a ton of wood, and the pub goes from cozy and shadowy on one side to bright and sunny on the other, spilling out into a large patio scattered with tables. It is nevertheless a bit faceless, and TVs flicker with sports. The menu is similar, featuring basically burgers and fish and chips. They are muy expensive--I got the most stripped-down cheeseburger with fries and it set me back $15; they can range up to $18 sans fries. They're also fairly average. (The five dollar onion rings are well below average--avoid.) It's not bad food, but nothing to make a special trip for.

The beer, made by erstwhile chef and homebrewer Will Leroux, is more promising. He's got a traditional slate of hoppy beers, but dabbles with experimental projects like a peach wit (perhaps his best beer) and a sour blackberry stout. I presume it's kettle-soured, and it's tart; fruity notes help soften the electric current, and soft roastiness helps offset it. I ordered a pint and quite enjoyed it. For my hoppy selection, I chose a Simcoe-hopped pale ale that had a fair amount of diacetyl, but never mind. These are above-average beers, and a good reason to stop in.

Depoe Bay or ocean view; your choice.

The Horn Public House, Depoe Bay

A horn, spouting.

A hundred and twenty miles south of Astoria you come to Depoe Bay, a rocky crescent that captures the sea in a roiling cauldron of energy. As it has smashed into the lava rock over the millennia, the sea water has carved out channels and tunnels. Sometimes a wave enters one and sends surf skyward through vents in the rock--"spouting horns" in the local vernacular. Since 1951, one of the most popular hangouts in Depoe Bay had been a restaurant called The Spouting Horn. When long-time proprietor Betty Taunton decided to retire in 2014, no one was prepared to take it over, and it closed. In homage, the new brewpub in town, located in the same building, calls itself The Horn.

How Big Will Craft Get? Oregon's Numbers are Suggestive

The Oregon Brewers Guild released the latest juicy batch of beer consumption and brewery statistics for the state, and it is as ever quite fascinating. Let's start with a few of the topline numbers and then jump into some thinking about what they mean.

• 22% of the beer consumed in Oregon was brewed here--and with the exception of 10 Barrel, these all conform to the general sense of "craft breweries."
• 63% of draft beer sold in Oregon is brewed in Oregon. (63%!)
• The amount of Oregon-brewed beer consumed in Oregon increased 11% in the past year, even while...
• The amount of beer brewed in Oregon increased only 3.5%.
• Oregon had 206 brewing companies operating 246 brewing facilities in 72 cities at the end of the year.
• Portland has 65 breweries and there are 95 in the metro area.

Lets break all this down a bit. The Oregon Brewers Guild is not concerned with craft beer, it's concerned with Oregon's breweries. As such it does not try to gather stats for "craft beer," which would include some portion of imported beer and craft beer made in other states. To make the Guild's stats consistent with the Brewers Associations', you'd include craft beer brewed in other states. Let's be extremely cautious and bump the "craft" share of the Oregon market up from 22% to 25% then. How does that compare with national stats? Oregon's market is twice as large: nationally, only 12.8% of beer sold is "craft."  The US market for beer is roughly 200 million barrels and if the country drank beer at Oregon's rate, that would put it at 50 million barrels.  

That's good, but the stats that most interested me were these: Oregon's consumption of craft beer--already the highest in the nation--continued to grow at an 11% clip. But its production only grew at about a third as fast, at 3.5%. Most of Oregon's beer production comes from just a handful of breweries--breweries that sell regionally or nationally. While breweries like Deschutes, Craft Brewers Alliance, Full Sail, and Ninkasi sell a lot of beer locally, they sell way more of it out of state. We can take this to mean that they're having a harder time selling their beer in growing markets outside Oregon.

I think we're seeing this reflected in recent stories about slowing sales for the big flagship brands even as the craft segment continues to grow. The craft segment is changing and becoming more local even as many big brands are expanding and trying to grab a piece of that ever-expanding pie.

I used to think Oregon was a cultural anomaly and that our progress in developing beer culture would not be replicated elsewhere. But I started thinking that when craft brewing had a 4% market share and Oregon was at 12%. Oregon is likely always going to be one of the national leaders in craft beer consumption and production, but it isn't anomalous--it's just ahead of the curve. And it's growing. What proportion of the national beer market will the craft segment on day occupy? At least 25%, I'd guess--and possibly well north of that.