What does it mean when Oregon’s oldest operating brewery closes? That’s what people are figuring out with this week’s announcement that BridgePort Brewing is ceasing operations at its brewery effective immediately, with the brewpub to close shortly thereafter. That announcement was issued on Tuesday, February 12; as of the evening of the 13th, as I’m starting to write this post, even the website appears to be offline.

Reactions have varied. Ultimately, the writing had been on the wall the last few years but it’s still shocking to see a founding brewery of Oregon beer going into its 35th year close suddenly and entirely. Unfortunately too, it’s simply the latest in a number of brewery closures over the past year, including some Lompoc locations, Alameda Brewing, the Widmer Brothers pub, and most recently Burnside Brewing.

Here’s the official announcement from BridgePort, issued on the 12th:

Dear Friends of BridgePort,

Today we unfortunately announce that the BridgePort Brewery will cease brewing operations effective immediately, while the BridgePort Brew Pub will close effective March 10th, 2019. The decision to close was extremely difficult for all involved. Back in April 2017, declining sales caused the brewery to restructure its operations. However, sales and distribution continued declining in the extremely competitive craft beer market of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, which resulted in this final decision.

We extend our most sincere thanks and gratitude to our hardworking brewers, pub staff, our suppliers, and sales and marketing team for their dedication to BridgePort over the years. Because of their contributions, BridgePort’s enduring legacy as Portland’s craft beer pioneer will always be remembered.

We communicated this news earlier today to our employees and all are being provided with comprehensive severance packages.

We would also like to thank you—our BridgePort drinkers, pub customers, and fans—for your loyal support over the past 35 years. We invite you to stop by the pub for one last pint before we close next month. We would love to host you and reminisce one last time.

With our heartfelt appreciation,

The BridgePort Team

At Brewpublic, D.J. Paul offers up a tangible result of what this means (emphasis mine):

With this closure we wonder what it means for the sponsorship of the Hillsboro Hops that BridgePort provided. We will miss you BridgePort Brewing and wish the 87 employees who are now in the job market much success!

Pete Dunlop on his Beervana Buzz blog has an excellent piece up on BridgePort’s history, and breaks down how it went wrong. This particularly covers the 1995 sale to Texas-based Gambrinus. More presciently, back in 2014 for the 30th anniversary Pete wrote about many of the issues that led to this week’s closure:

I was going to say Bridgeport’s problem is lack of vision. But that’s not right. There’s a distinct vision and it emanates from [Gambrinus’ founder Carlos] Alvarez, who dictates strategy and maintains veto power over recipes under development. Unfortunately, that kind of leadership very often leads to stifled creativity…which may help explain why they have latched onto a brewing trend that started well over a decade ago and is likely to produce mostly “me too” beers. So much for innovation.

Bridgeport is not a bad brewery. It remains among the top 10 Oregon breweries in production. They sell a lot of beer here. But the generic branding project flopped. And even though they’re making a serious effort to reclaim their rightful place in Oregon, production has dropped in each of the past three years. That trend continues into 2014.

Jeff Alworth of Beervana has a sharp writeup of the closure as well:

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, no brewery was more closely associated with the city of Portland than BridgePort. Its original flagship, Blue Heron, featured the city bird, and the homey, wood-paneled pizza pub was Stumptown’s rec room. In 1996 it launched IPA, sending Oregon into the realm of “juiciness” a decade and a half before that concept would filter into the general public.

The last decade plus has been marked by an endless series of forgettable beers. (Raise your hand if you remember Supris. How about Dark Rain? Smooth Ryed? Fallen Friar, Beertown Brown?) The number of reinventions and pivots were legion. All the while, the brewery kept milking the IPA brand until it had fallen into irrelevance. Without a stable identity, relying on a dying flagship, and inhabiting an increasingly dated, unlovable space in the increasingly valuable Pearl District, BridgePort’s volumes dropped precipitously.

Like Pete, Jeff also saw the warning signs in 2014, and then two years ago he broke it down entirely with How to Tank Spectacularly in the New Market:

Craft breweries have to connect to their local market to succeed. There are a few rare exceptions–Rogue sells 84% of its beer outside the state–but even breweries like Widmer and Deschutes depend enormously on local sales. The Texas-based ownership of BridgePort has not just neglected its home market, but seems actively antagonistic to it. Until recently, it was possible for BridgePort to bumble along and still hang onto its local volume, which was basically flat from 2006-2013. But mature markets are not kind to bumblers. Why is anyone going to gamble on a six-pack of ORA (Oatmeal Red Ale) when there are twenty other much safer bets at the store? They’re not. The numbers starkly demonstrate this point.

Ten years ago, BridgePort was one of Oregon’s best and best-selling breweries. It had the kind of credibility you can’t manufacture. It was indelibly connected to the city and seemed to be one of the most stable, reliable breweries in the country. Today it teeters on the edge of failure. If we were running a dead pool now, it would be at or near the top. It’s main function now seems to be as a cautionary tale about how not to run your brewery.

This BridgePort problem touches upon issues many of the older, founding craft breweries are struggling with. Pete and Jeff put much of the blame in this case on Gambrinus and Carlos Alvarez, and it’s notable that many of the older breweries dealing with these types of issues are owned or controlled by someone else. Though there is also a big emphasis on “local,” and the dangers inherent in abandoning your local market.

Portland writer Jason Notte has some astute commentary on Twitter addressing this as well, which I’ll re-post here to collapse the thread:

A lesson from the @bridgeportbrew announcement: Local control and local autonomy matter more in a locally focused craft #beer industry than local sponsorship and ties. Sponsoring the Hillsboro Hops and subsidizing beer industry programs at Oregon State were fine ideas, but @bridgeportbrew lost Oregon when it stopped focusing on the local connection to its beers and pub… as @Beervana already stated so eloquently.

But we saw evidence of this in Oregon long before @bridgeportbrew closed. Look at Portland Brewing. A very similar story: It’s changed hands on several occasions, it was completely renamed at one point, its lineup kept shifting, and now its owners are in Costa Rica. Ideally, that’s shouldn’t matter, right? But it does when your major sports franchise picks your parent company as a beer sponsor, and that company gives it @PyramidBrew instead of the brewery with the city’s name on it. It matters when that company opts to shut down Portland Brewing’s pub just as a neighborhood starts to sprout up around it. It matters when that company still doesn’t know how to push that company’s beer when it isn’t MacTarnahan’s.

Then we have Full Sail, which is now owned by a private equity firm in San Francisco. We’ve seen a needed brand refresh and a shift in focus to its Session line, but raise your hand if you’ve heard of Atomizer. Airstream. Citrus Maxima. Malted Milkshake. Raise your hand if you knew Session Black was gone? Or if you knew they made “Mexican” lager with marketing that might be uncomfortable to present to a local Spanish-speaking community. Full Sail’s pub is active (and bustling, even in competitive Hood River), but for how long?

Then, finally, there’s Widmer. The Craft Brew Alliance that owns it is based in Portland, but looks far beyond its borders. It’s taken a “Kona first” strategy that has reduced Widmer’s reach and blurred its focus. It’s alternately presented Widmer Hefe as its crown jewel, and diluted it with variants while selling it for kick-the-keg prices at its pub. Also, despite its founders lobbying for the right to that pub in the first place, CBA has now closed it… twice.

As the industry consolidates and as older Oregon breweries go through their second and third owners, consumers can expect to see more of them lose the plot. Consistency is still key to success in craft beer, but that doesn’t mean a consistent lineup or space. Consistency in craft beer is about consistent quality and connection to your surrounding community. Lose either of them, or a combination of the two, and it’s going to be nearly impossible to get them back.

For my part, I didn’t have an opinion on the brewpub either way; I was only ever able to visit a couple of times over the years, once before the remodel, once after, but as I didn’t have a local stake in it, it frankly didn’t leave much impression with me.

The beers of course were a different matter, and I had long been a fan. BridgePort IPA was the first “modern” IPA I experienced, first back in 1997 or 1998, and it blew me away. The beers were solid (anyone remember Highland Ambush? Raven Mad?) and while the Stumptown Tart series wasn’t my favorite I appreciated the effort. Of course once the “local” aspect was stripped away you ended up with the random beers with varied, inconsistent branding, that could have been from anywhere.

So I was shocked but upon reflection, ultimately not surprised to learn of the closure. And in light of the reactions and analysis surrounding this closure, I think there’s quite a bit of cautionary lessons that the other older (“legacy”) craft breweries should be taking heed of, as well. As a comment on this I saw online (but can’t remember where, so cannot properly attribute, sorry) mention, we don’t know what a mature craft beer market looks like—we’re just entering it now. The next few years will be the ones to watch.