How does Portland do it?

You're in a beautiful area, not too unlike the Columbia Valley in OR/WA, so you might be onto something with the Portland comparison.

 

I'd like to explore this "beer tourism" angle a little bit. Maybe I'm just uninformed, but I don't know of too many people (around here anyway) who would frequently travel very long distances for the express purpose of drinking beer. Maybe the hardest of hardcore beer geeks, people who don't have kids or families (who often don't share their interest in beer), and people going to the occasional Hair of the Dog release—but that's about it AFAIK. I don't think it's a major industry by any stretch, certainly nothing like what the wine industry has in Washington/Oregon, let alone California. I did see an organized tour show up in a stretch van when I was visiting the Lost Abbey in SD County last year, so maybe this kind of thing is more prevalent in places where things are more spread out.

In any case, I don't want to be a wet blanket but unless I'm misunderstanding this I'd be skeptical about relying on "beer tourism" to support a working brewery. I guess it depends on what kind of brewery you want to run, but I just don't know that you could sell the volume you'd need to based largely on beer tourism. Seems to me you'd absolutely have to have a solid local base of regular consumers and ideally accounts with a few local restaurants. If anything, I'd see that sort of thing as supplementing your regular customer base and also a tool to spread the word about your beer.

I also don't know that using a place like Hill Farmstead as a model is all that useful. They seem to have caught lightning in a bottle, but there probably aren't going to be too many Hill Farmsteads popping up all over. Then again, Logsdon seems to be doing pretty well... and I guess on that note, I'm not sure if you're talking about turning the Mid-Hudson Valley into the next Portland or the next Bend (not that Logsdon is in Bend, but close enough)—and before beer, I think Bend already had a pretty healthy tourism/skiing industry.

Again, I don't know really anything at all about beer tourism so maybe it's a lot bigger than I'm aware. I also don't know anything about starting a brewery, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

 

@ draheim. I think most "beer tourism" is part of a vacation, not the reason for the vacation, in general,and with the exception of the hard core beer nerds. Look at all "visiting PDX" threads. Even I couldn't spend all day, every day of a trip, drinking. Most people have a variety of interests, but when posting a thread here, they probably don't mention the fact the main reason they're coming is to fulfill their life-long dream of visiting the alarm clock hall of fame, or whatever. I know that when I go some place, I certainly want to find new beers, but there HAS to be other stuff to keep me involved, even when I visit Bend.

 

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I meant "close enough" in terms of how similar they are, roughly speaking. Bend has skiing/snowboarding, Hood River has windsailing. Both are tourism/getaway destinations, and serve as launching points for hikers, bikers, etc. Both have a pretty solid and growing beer presence. Both basically have a generally similar demographics/economies that serve as the foundation for a healthy beer culture. Close enough?

 

I definitely do some "beer tourism". I'm heading to Bend in August with the main purpose of visiting some breweries and going to the Bend Brewfest.

But most of the time I'm travelling for different reasons, and add beer destinations into the itinerary.

 

It depends on how good your beer is... HF and the Alchemist are wel known for a reason, though I know Shaun Hill would tell you there should be at least one HF-equivalent brewery in every state. Shaun succeeded because he was determined to make his vision work where he lives. Others have to do that where they live.

 

This is an outsider speaking, but there's something else that's always struck me that hasn't yet been mentioned in this excellent thread. While Portland has a reputation of being super left-leaning big government liberal, it's quite evident that the city is very pro-business, in terms of ease of starting up, regulations and operating a company in comparison to other places (of course, I'm certainly not one of those people who thinks liberal = anti-business, but of all the PDX stereotypes out there, 'business friendly' doesn't tend to one of them - though maybe it should be).

It's something that I notice not just for breweries but in a general sense: the food cart lots, the lesser regulated strip clubs, the pop up artisan shops. I see so many things like that, and stumble past, say, a double decker bus selling high-end dresses, and it always hits me: "this type of business would never be allowed to exist in LA." A lot of that, as people have mentioned, I'm sure comes from the prioritization of locally-owned establishments.

I don't mean to imply that PDX brewery owners don't deal with a whole mess of bureaucratic red tape and there aren't the typical hurdles and runarounds that come with that. But again, speaking as an outsider, what seems to be permitted to exist and flourish in Portland is pretty substantially different than for California and many other places.

 

Would love to taste your homebrew.