California-Oregon beer exchange--not a trade request, by the way

A lot of it could just be a capacity/production issue. They simply don't make enough product to realistically distribute out to that wide of a footprint, so they just keep in more local/in-state.

 

Portland has the highest percentage of craft beer consumed / total craft beer consumed out of any city. That equates to local beer not being able to keep up with demand in and around the metro areas. Also, Breweries don't tend to grow extremely large here and if they do, it seems that the logical choice would be to distribute north instead of south. It's a 10 hour distro drive between Portland and San Francisco. Compare that to a 3 hour drive to Seattle. Other factors might include the large trend of self distribution as long as possible as well as many breweries being draft only and not packaging their beers.

Those are all conjecture but could be factors.

I believe NorCal recieves:

Deschuttes
Widmer
Bridgeport (maybe?)
Cascade
Commons
Rogue
Ninkasi
Gigantic
Caldera
Occidental (maybe?)
Breakside (maybe?)


Anyway, you are right. There aren't many breweries from Oregon making it over the pass to California. We have smaller breweries than you though.


We receive a bit of California beer though... But not really the best of the state. Off the top of my head:

FW
Stone
BP
GF / Alpine
Drakes
Ale Industries
Trumer
Ale Smith
Anchor
Anderson Valley
BR
Bison
Black Diamond
Bruery
Coronado
Lagunitis
Lost Coast
North Coast
Sierra Nevada

 

Curious what breweries you're thinking of, which breweries I'm the PNW distribute out of the area but not to CA? I've even seen stuff from smaller breweries like Propolis and Upright on the shelves here

 

Ah yeah I forgot about Upright (they are distributed by Shelton so that makes sense). Also Logsdon makes it down there too. I'm a bit surprised Propolis does. A few of my favorite Oregon breweries that I think don't make it down are:

• Boneyard
• Barley Browns
• Ft George
• Pfriem
• Ale Apothecary
• de Garde
• Block 15
• Goodlife
• Silver Moon
• Breakside
• Laurelwood
• Bend Brewing
• Baerlic

All of these have fairly good coverage in the PNW (barring Ale Apothecary, de Garde, Baerlic, & Block 15 - but they will once their new brewery opens up)


California also get Heater Allen, which makes some of the best lagers in the country.

 

I would love to get some Boneyard, Barley Brown, Breakside, and Laurelwood stuff in NorCal. I saw bottles of Breakside stuff in Denver, but never in CA

 

When I go to Oregon, I notice a far higher concentration of local beer and Oregon breweries than NorCal has of NorCal beer.

With the exception of a handful of larger operations, it seems that what is brewed in Oregon stays in Oregon. Even of the ones listed above, the only two major players I see are Deschutes and Ninkasi, followed by Rogue, Widmer and Full Sail to a lesser extent.

I used to see Bridgeport IPA all over NorCal. No longer. I used to see way more Full Sail and Rogue than I do now. All the others listed are small, specialty operations I'm only seeing in craft-centric locations.