It's HERE! The Inaugural edition of the Oregon Beer Growler,
Above!

Double Mountain Brewery Expanding

Will: You and Matt Swihart founded Double Mountain in 2007, and already, you’ve expanded. What prompted this?

Charlie: We’ve been fortunate to have been on a really healthy growth curve since our first year, and despite our best efforts to shove as many tanks as possible in the brewery area, we’re currently out of room. We jumped at the opportunity to buy the building next door to us, which will double our footprint and allow us to expand both our Taproom and the production area.
Will: What will change at Double Mountain as a result of the expansion?
Charlie: The two big changes will be a doubling of the square footage of our Taproom (which can get too busy on weekends) and the installation of a bottling line. We’ll be rolling out half-liter (16.9 oz.) bottles by the end of the year. Other than that, we’re making a concerted effort to keep things the same. 

Will: What were you doing before you made beer? What inspired you to be a brewer? Tell us how you and Matt founded this business? What was the hardest part about breaking into this industry?

Charlie: I was a college student looking for a career in a small-business setting that would keep me entertained. I visited Oregon for the first time in 1990 and was smitten with the quality of the beer being brewed here and the fantastic quality of life. Two years later I landed a job with Full Sail and lo and behold I was a Northwest brewer.

Matt & I worked as shift brewers together at Full Sail for a couple of years and became friends. I moved on to other places in 1995, but he stayed and eventually became assistant brewmaster in charge of beer production. I’ve always had tremendous respect for his brewing acumen and skills, so when the time came for him to spread his wings, I proposed we do it together. It took us about 18 months to find a building, secure financing, build it out and get beer on the bar.

Back when I broke in it was a lot less competitive. I guess the hardest part was doing hard labor for very little pay… and that hasn’t changed much in two decades, actually.

Will: What was the first beer you ever made? 

Charlie: I think it was a homebrewed porter. Kinda smelled like bananas… the Laffy Taffy kind. Not so successful.

Charlie Devereux and Matt Swihart

Will: Why locate your brewery and restaurant in Hood River?


Charlie: The short answer is that Hood River is a great town that draws fun people. We view great beer and food as a quality-of-life enhancer; people come to Hood River to improve their quality-of-life, so we fit right in.

Will: Have you found it easy to conduct business in the Gorge? If another brewer wanted to set up shop in the area, what would your advice be?

Charlie: The Gorge is a great place to run a brewery. We have a strong little community of brewers, many of whom have worked together somewhere along the way… it’s very supportive and inclusive.My advice would be to do a great job! People respect quality and will flock to it. 

Will: What sets your beer apart from the others?

Charlie: In my opinion, Matt and our team of brewers do a top job of making beers that are robust, complex, balanced and drinkable, and they do it at a consistently high level. I think that’s what our customers react to.
Will: Do people have to come to Hood River to find your beer?

Charlie: No, we can be found on draft in most of Oregon and in Western Washington.

Will: Your restaurant gets overwhelmingly good reviews. Why?

Charlie: We have a great staff that serves simple food made well. It’s a social hub for a bunch of locals, which makes for a fun vibe that’s infectious. And we have lots of good beer.

---

Crosby Hop Farm Caters to Craft Brewers

By Gail Oberst
Publisher, Oregon Beer Growler

If you’re born into the fifth-generation in a line of Willamette Valley hop farmers, do you feel compelled to farm hops?
Not Blake Crosby, son of Kevin and Jennifer Crosby, whose hop farm west of Woodburn has been a source of beer ingredients since the 1800s.

Blake, now 27, went to the University of Oregon, eventually graduating in history, a degree that earns him plenty of friendly derision from his fellow farmers who largely earned ag degrees from Oregon State University.

“I was interested in exploring new things, new people,” Crosby said. “I was looking for a new perspective.”

But eventually, craft beer brought him home to the farm. He developed a love for Oregon’s craft beer, and began dabbling in home brewing when he was still a college student.
Four years ago, Crosby turned his interest in craft beers into a sideline of his family’s hop, grass seed and natural angus beef farm. What began as Albert Crosby’s 10-acre patch of hops in the mid-1800s has now expanded to 250 acres of hops and another 150 acres in other crops and livestock.
Crosby entered the hops market during the roughest patch hops has seen in recent history, largely the result of a sluggish market for alpha hops (those used by most macro breweries) but he was not deterred. Although his parents grow on contract for some of the larger companies, Crosby set aside his own acreage to grow specialty hops for Oregon’s smaller craft breweries. There, he set up a farming niche he hopes will appeal to the burgeoning craft brew industry in Oregon. He began by planting Cascade, Centennial, Crystal and other hop varieties that grow best in the Willamette Valley. Today, Crosby sells direct to home brewers and breweries that include 10 Barrel, Deschutes, BridgePort, Burnside Brewing and others.

In cramped quarters set up behind an ancient barn on his family’s farm, Crosby squeezes past his crewmembers as they package hop rhizomes to be mailed to customers. Home brewing, the rising popularity of fresh hop brews, and increased awareness of hops have prompted an interest in growing the sticky hop vines at home, at businesses and even in public places. Crosby has responded to the demand by setting up an online market for plants at his website, www.bcrosbyhops.com. Orders come with growing tips from Crosby, who passes on his family’s knowledge of 

growing hops. Rhizome sales supplement his direct sales of hops from his fields.
Although family experience has aided Crosby’s business venture, his energy, attention to quality and willingness to try new things have set him apart from larger hop growers.  He offers free tours of his hop farm to clubs and brewers – visitors can see hops growing but they can also see the drying and baling operations. Garden clubs, home brew clubs and brewers guilds have toured his place.
His energies don’t stop at the farm. In 2010, Crosby was appointed commissioner for the Oregon Hop Commission. He’s now vice chair. In addition to hop work, he’s pursuing an MBA at Willamette University and in his spare time, plays the drums for his band, “Beware the Bear.”

What keeps him going? “I love what I’m doing,” Crosby said. “It makes me happy.”

An edited version of the following article, with photos, appears in July's Oregon Beer Growler.

Following is the full version of Dr. David Lewis' text.

Grand Ronde Indians keep Oregon beer alive through Prohibition

Prohibition impacted beer-making nationwide, but in Oregon, tribal entities, including the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, helped keep the art alive. Following is the edited version of the story by tribal historian David Lewis, who will talk July 26 as part of the Willamette Heritage Center’s “History on Tap” series celebrating Oregon Craft Beer Month. The unedited text of the story is below. The edited version is in July's edition of the Oregon Beer Growler.

By Dr. David Lewis
The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon is a federally recognized tribe that was restored in 1983. Previous to the final termination of the tribe in 1956, the people of the Grand Ronde Reservation lived there for 100 years. The people are the descendants of over 27 tribes and bands from western Oregon; the main tribes being the Clackamas Chinook, Kalapuya, Molalla, Upper Umpqua, Athapaskan, Takelma, Tillamook and Shasta. The reservation was organized as a military encampment where travel off the reservation was strictly controlled and people needed passes to leave. The military also prevented unwanted white people from entering the reservation to eliminate the racial conflicts.

    From the earliest administrative history of the reservations, the United States government worked to control the access of native people to alcohol and made it a crime to sell to natives. The control of alcohol was linked to issues of halting the corruption of moral values of the Indians, and to pseudo-scientific stereotypes that linked natives to alcoholism.  Prohibition for the tribes of the United States was a constant state for over a century. In Oregon the initiation of the treaties and the tribal removals to the reservations in 1856 caused the federal government to impose laws and rules against the sale of alcohol to the Indian people on the reservation.  In fact the Treaty with the Kalapuya etc.  states

“In order to prevent the evils of intemperance among said Indians, it is hereby provided that any one of them who shall drink liquor, or procure it for other Indians to drink, may have his or her proportion of the annuities withheld from him or her for such time as the President may determine.”[1]

The Bureau of Indian Affairs passed policies against American citizens selling alcohol to the Indians and disallowed travel onto the reservation to protect the tribes from those sales. Indians at the reservation were tried and found guilty of crimes of bringing spirits onto the reservation. More

---

---