De Garde Sees Wild Success in Cowtown by the Sea

The January issue of BeerAdvocate is finally hitting mailboxes, as well as shelves in pubs and breweries. It contains a piece I wrote on de Garde Brewing of Tillamook, based on an early October visit. Things don't exactly move at the speed of light in the print publishing business.

Cowtown

When you think of Tillamook, you tend to think of a quiet coastal town that has a lot of cows and smells like it. Of course, there's more, including the Tillamook Cheese Factory, a popular destination for visitors. But the face of the town is changing and de Garde is part of that.

Linsey Hamacher and Trevor Rogers launched de Garde in 2013. Their wild ales attracted a following almost instantly. In the article, I discuss why they chose Tillamook, why their beers have been in short supply and why it was struggle to get the business off the ground..

Trevor and his coolship

As this issue of BeerAdvocate was going to press, I started seeing bottles of de Garde beer in local bottleshops. Belmont Station had quite a few cases by early December and still has some of that beer. That's good news for fans and a big change. Because de Garde beers were extremely hard to find for most of 2014.

The thing is, Trevor and Linsey tried their hand at limited distribution early on, That's what helped rev up interest in Portland and around the Northwest. But they had to pull back because they could barely make enough beer to meet the demand in their tasting room. When people drive to Tillamook hoping to buy your beer, you don't want to hang them out to dry.

Barrels occupy most of the space

Quick success can be hard to manage and you might say that's what happened with de Garde. Although Trevor and Linsey were sure there was unmet demand for barrel-aged wild beers, they had no idea their little brewery would be such a huge success so quickly. The big challenge was and is the time it takes for wild beer to reach maturity, a couple of years in some cases.

These guys surely would have been well-advised to produce time-intensive wild beers alongside a standard lineup, as they do at Russian River and other places. Funding would have been easier and profits would have come sooner. But the focus at de Garde, outside some forays into standard styles early on, has been wild beer.

The de Garde crew

Part of what has recently mended the gap between demand and production is time. Some of their stock is maturing. To address the demand for their beer going forward, they have added a couple of employees and increased their production capacity and space. But they intend to stay fairly small and have no plans to expand on a grand scale.

The elephant in the living room (not addressed in the article) is the future of wild beer. These beers have become wildly (haha) popular over a relatively short period of time. Some believe part of their appeal is that they are rare and expensive. Could it all come tumbling down? Time will tell. For now, joints that make decent wild beers are selling all they can produce.

There's a whole lot more about de Garde in the BeerAdvocate article, which you'll have to search out if you don't subscribe. I'm told the magazine's content will soon be available in some sort of online format, but that hasn't yet happened and I'm not sure when it will.

Update (4/16): The online version of the article is here, at last.

McMenamins Highlights Barrel-aged Beer Program

It will almost certainly come as a surprise to many beer fans that McMenamin's has a barrel-aged beer program. I had no idea until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended Inside the Barrel down at the Crystal Brewery (inside the Crystal Ballroom). More on what they're up to shortly. First, some brief history.

The early days..Mike and Brian with Hillsdale brewer, Ron Wolf

One of the generally unappreciated aspects of the McMenamin's story is that Mike and Brian have generally gone about their business quietly. They and their organization have made many positive contributions to the community. Yet they have never been particularly active in honking their own horn about any of it.

For instance, on the day they were scheduled to receive the keys to the Kennedy School in 1995, Brian saw a huge crowd and TV cameras as he approached the school. For a moment, he considered turning around and driving home. He obviously didn't and, anyway, the Kennedy School turned out to be one of their great success stories.

Looking at those successes, it seems to me the primary story revolves around their knack for acquiring and restoring unique (and often decrepit) historic properties. Beer's role has always been somewhat secondary...to attract fans. Mike and Brian liked good beer and they figured a lot of other people did, too. Time has proven them exactly right.

When I bumped into Brian prior to Inside the Barrel, he told me he sees beer in more of a leading role today. Frankly, I don't think he fully agrees with my view of where beer has fit in the McMenamin's scheme, but never mind. Inside the Barrel suggests they recognize the need to push what they're doing more fully with social media and other PR tools.

The truth is, the barrel program isn't all that new. It was launched in 2005, when Mike McMenamin asked brewers to create a bourbon barrel-aged beer for a special event they were holding at Edgefield. They've been gradually moving barrel aging forward in the years since.

These guys are well-positioned to age beer in barrels. Why? Because way back in 1998, they started a highly successful distilling program at Edgefield. They launched a second distilling facility at Cornelius Pass in 2012. This means their brewers have easy access to barrels. Many breweries don't have that luxury.

"The distilling program presented us with a unique opportunity to begin barrel-aging," said Graham Brogan, head brewer. "The ease of access to freshly dumped barrels (sometimes filled with beer the same day they are released by the distillery) combined with the creative freedom here to make barrel-aging a no brainer."

The beers they showcased at Inside the Barrel were produced at a number of McMenamin's breweries. A few examples: Whiskey Widow (Bourbon barrel-aged porter) from Concordia Brewery; Venomator Imperial IPA (Hogshead Whisky barrel-aged) from the Crystal Brewery; Night Court Barleywine (Rum barrel-aged) from the Edgefield Brewery. And others.

In fact, Inside the Barrel was a sort of pre-launch party for a hoard of events that will feature barrel-aged beer in coming weeks. There's a list of dates, beers and locations here. By the way, these beers will only be available at certain McMenamin's locations. This is standard operating procedure for these guys. They have never really distributed beyond their own walls.

As for the future of the barrel-aged beer program at McMenamins, it will likely continue to flourish. There's something about barrel-aged beer that attracts the interest of brewers and the pallets of beer consumers. Indeed, the savvy pallets of Portland beer fans are driving increased demand for premium, complex, barrel-aged beers. It's all good.

"Almost all of our breweries would like to be involved in barrel-aging," Brogan said. "The problem is, most don't have the necessary space. We are currently looking into acquiring smaller barrels so our smaller breweries can play around with barrel-aging."