Sasquatch Brewing 2012-2022; Is it Just the Start?
Yesterday morning, one of Portland’s few west-side breweries announced it was shutting down. Sasquatch Brewing was founded a decade ago in the sleepy Hillsdale neighborhood, and managed to produce an impressive line of beers from their tiny brewhouse. It was long one of the bright spots for a half of the city that had few brewery options. In 2017, owners Tom Sims and Alex Beard found a bright, cheery spot in industrial Northwest Portland for a proper 15-barrel brewery, a facility with enough space to produce New West Cider on the side.
Outside of Portland, few people will have heard of Sasquatch, yet it is probably far more characteristic of the average US brewery than the well-known names across the river. Even when it was making beer in the tiny brewpub, Sasquatch attended to its beer, which was good and sometimes great. It’s like so many breweries that serve a local audience well without seeking national recognition. Unfortunately, the hard times of the past three years have scrambled Sasquatch’s business and made it very hard to continue. At The Oregonian, Andre Meunier has a great article explaining why Sims and Beard are shutting things down.
Sims told Meunier:
“With the rising costs of everything, things didn’t come back from COVID the way we expected,” he said. “The taproom in (the Northwest industrial district) was doing half the business from before. There’s just nobody down there working the way they used to be. Costs of materials has just gone crazy, and they’re going to get more crazy,” he continued. “Aluminum cans are going up, everything’s going up.”
The owners are keeping the restaurant, and Sims said there’s some chance they might start brewing there again under the Sasquatch name (a really good one in these parts, incidentally). Yet it stands as a testament to the giant squeeze in which so many of these little neighborhood breweries now find themselves. It has been nearly three years of a white-knuckle grind to keep their businesses afloat, and the prospects of stable, predictable revenues seem ever to recede out on the horizon. It’s no wonder many want out. Sims said he was relieved that the struggle was finally over. He can’t be alone.
Could a Shakeout Be Coming?
I don’t have any special insight into the fortunes of other breweries like Sasquatch—none have contacted me to hint at coming closures. Yet this seems to be a pivotal winter. Covid is still not over, and epidemiologists are warning of a serious wave of flu and RSV cases over the cold months. (The respiratory syncytial virus—RSV—causes symptoms similar to a cold.) In normal years, winter is a hard time for breweries in cold parts of the country, and anything that dampens pub-going is bad. Smaller breweries like Sasquatch (which sold about 1,700 barrels in Oregon before Covid), can thrive selling beer on draft to local communities, but can’t easily enter or compete the grocery market where scores of larger breweries dominate. That’s especially true given the challenges Sims described—and all these headwinds combine to compound difficulties.
I count around two dozen of breweries akin to Sasquatch in the Portland area—of a population, depending on how you count, of around sixty companies selling beer in the city. That’s 40% of the city’s breweries, which probably understates this tier’s size nationally. (Portland has an unusual number of established and successful breweries—the reason we’ve seen so many high-profile closures here over the past five years.)
Breweries went into crisis mode in March 2020, and many have never fully recovered. I would guess a lot of the Sasquatch-type breweries are avoiding insolvency, but how long is “avoiding insolvency” good enough? Breweries are a lot of hard work, but they’re also incredibly rewarding. The vast majority don’t sell a ton of beer, but they offer owners a fun way to make a living. For the better part of a decade, Sasquatch was a great little business, one folks in Hillsdale appreciated. The last three it’s been a grind, and now it may not even pencil out anymore. It’s no wonder Sims and Beard decided to try something new.
How many other American breweries are considering the same decision?