Printer-friendly version Email story link

Brews brothers

Widmers are short on pretense, long on profitability

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Oct 11, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

ADVERTISEMENTS

As far as professional beer drinkers go, Kurt and Rob Widmer aren’t what you’d call beer snobs.

They’re pretty easygoing, in fact, considering that they’re the proprietors of the largest brewery in the state and the fifth-largest craft brewery in the country.

“Unless a beer is bad, I’ll drink everything,” says 53-year-old Kurt Widmer, president and brewmaster of Widmer Bros. Brewing Co., the Portland mainstay that turned 21 this year.

“If it’s a hot day and the only thing available is (Molson) XXX beer, that’s what I’ll drink. I love beer. It’s my beverage of choice in any circle.”

Of course, he’s quick to note that “if our beer is available, it’s always my first choice.”

The same goes for 48-year-old Rob, who’s spent years developing his palate for beer through courses in sensory training at Oregon State University.

Rob prefers another term for his brand of expertise: “I’m a beer geek,” he says. “But I use it in a positive way. I could bore most people in conversations about beer.”

“And he does,” his brother chimes in.

The duo Ñ with dry, quick wit and an average Joe sort of charm Ñ have long been the ambassadors of the craft-brew industry in Portland. They consider themselves “geezers” in the beer world.

One of the first breweries to set up shop on a shoestring in Portland, Widmer Brothers helped set the course for one of Portland’s proudest claims to fame: craft-brew capital of the world.

Consider these numbers:

• Oregon is home to 72 breweries, 25 of them in Portland Ñ more than any other city in the world, according to the Oregon Brewers Association.

• The 19-year-old Oregon Brewers Festival, held in Portland each July, is the largest beer festival in North America and attracts about 50,000 people from across the globe.

• Eleven percent of all beer consumed in Oregon is brewed here, while the national average for other states is about 3 percent.

“We’re looked to by everybody on the national scale as the example,” says Jim Parker, editor-in-chief of Zymurgy and The New Brewer, two magazines published by the Oregon Brewers Association. “The big goal for all craft beer at conferences is trying to reach 10 percent. We’ve done it. The brothers are a big part of it.”

Craft beer is the new name for microbrew, which once defined a beer that is produced in quantities less than 15,000 barrels per year. After the industry literally outgrew the term, however, “craft beer” became the term to describe the style of beer that is made of all malt or nearly all malt.

Noncraft beer Ñ the traditional light American lager such as Budweiser and Coors Ñ is produced with rice, corn and sugar adjuncts.

Brian Butenschoen, executive director of the Oregon Brewers Guild, says craft beers are seeing 7 percent growth this year compared to a year ago, while the large domestic beers are down 2.5 percent.

“Knock on wood and cross my fingers, you should probably see single- or double-digit growth for quite a while” in craft beers, he said.

That’s good news for the Widmers, who are already seeing 10 percent growth this year over last year at their North Russell Street operation and continued crowds at the Gasthaus, their adjoining restaurant.

But they’re not about to rest on their laurels.

“We can never rest,” Kurt says. “We always want to exceed expectations, be exciting to people. Every day’s an adrenaline rush.”

Birth of a brewery

Rob is the more reserved one, the kind of guy who’s most comfortable in a one-on-one conversation over a beer on a barstool.

He is a Portlander, through and through: He has two dogs, a 1967 Volkswagen camper that he drives up to Timothy Lake with his wife, Barb (“We get a lot of honks and peace signs,” he says), and he rides his bike to work from his home in Johns Landing Ñ even in the rain.

Before his foray into beer, Rob was a “ski bum” in Montana and a candy maker in Seattle. He made fudge, he says, and “it was good, too.”

Inspired by his Uncle Walter, who made home-brews in his cellar, Rob experimented with home-brews in his basement for five years or so in his early 20s until his brother approached him with the idea of starting a microbrewery.

Kurt is the more talkative of the two, and his eyes light up when he talks about the social aspect of beer drinking and pubs in Germany and other parts of Europe he visited in his 20s.

“People that like to sit down and have a beer are fun people,” he says. “Because if you’re drinking shots, how long are you going to be sitting there?”

Armed only with his University of Oregon psychology degree and his beer-drinking jaunts overseas, he returned to the Northwest, worked part-time jobs and began home brewing to try to replicate the German-style brews.

After a while, he thought it would be good to go into business for himself. So he approached his brother, and they began searching for support.

Not surprisingly, no bank would give them a loan, Kurt says.

“Nobody knew what a microbrew was back then,” he says. “They thought it sounded fun, interesting, but there was no industry, no model, and our background was we were home brewers.”

So they borrowed money from friends and relatives, and invested their life savings Ñ about $20,000 each Ñ in a building on Northwest Lovejoy Street.

They weren’t the only ones trying to market their favorite type of beer to the public.

“None of us knew we’d be around for three months, three years, 30 years, whatever,” says Karl Accrete, brewmaster at Portland’s BridgePort Brewing Co., founded in 1984. “We were all struggling.”

Nowadays, Accrete and Kurt Widmer often have lunch together to talk trade and as friends. “We’re still in it together,” Accrete says. “Our biggest concern is to continue expanding people’s horizons.”