Bloody Valentines Day: Hair of the Dog and Modern Times Announce Closures

Early this morning, one of the second-wave pioneers of Portland brewing announced he was retiring. Alan Sprints founded Hair of the Dog in 1994, and because of brewery closures and acquisitions, it had become one of the oldest left standing.

In his goodbye video, Alan seemed happy and relaxed:

“I’ve decided to retire from my job here at Hair of the Dog, and that means we’ll be closing both the brewery and tasting room. I do have a few more beers to release, and a lot more beers to sell, so I’ll keep the tasting room open until sometime this summer. Beer has been very, very good to me. I feel so fortunate to have been able to spend over half my life doing something I love so much. I’m not selling the brewery, and I do look forward to the possibility of future collaborations…. Please plan on coming down in the next few months and help us celebrate the diverse world of beer that exists today. Cheers!”

Hair of the Dog was remarkably influential—especially given that it was always a pocket-sized brewery. Alan’s vision was decades ahead of a market that finally started catching up to him in the mid-teens. He was inspired by intense, potent beers, particularly those of Belgium. When he founded the brewery, the best-selling beers were amber and wheat ales half the strength of Alan’s four-letter flagships, Adam and Fred. They were so far outside the ken of the beer world that retailers and distributors didn’t know what to do with them. But to a certain group of fans, these beers were why craft beer existed.

Like the Velvet Underground, he inspired a generation of underground beer drinkers who would flock to industrial Southeast Portland on drizzly Saturdays for dock sales. Twenty years before we started to see pictures of long lines of fans waiting to buy cases of Tree House IPAs on Instagram, they were lining up by the railroad tracks in a gritty stretch of warehouses. His numbered bottles were traded among fans long before that was a thing. Eventually, he found a more accessible site for a pub and restaurant on the east side of the Willamette River with views of downtown.

It makes a lot of sense that Alan is just shutting his business down rather than selling the company. No one with a brand as strong as Hair of the Dog does that. But it’s a perfect example of what made the brewery so distinctive. Alan followed a path few others could see, and he’s following it straight into retirement. Based on his comments today, he seems to be going out exactly as he came in—on his own terms.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Modern Times, which today announced it was closing four locations, including the brewery and pub a quarter mile from Hair of the Dog in Southeast Portland.

“As new leadership has stepped up and taken the helm over the last few weeks, it became clear that the financial state of the company that we are now tasked with directing is not just unsustainable, but in immediate and unavoidable peril. As a result of this, we are forced to make some incredibly hard choices, which—while necessary for the health and continued success of our company—will result in many of our talented, hardworking staff losing their jobs.”

The Belmont Fermentorium shortly after it opened.

Last year Modern Times was the 40th-largest craft brewery in the US, but that belied a massive amount of debt the company carried to fund its rapid expansion. In 2019, the brewery launched a crowd-funding effort to shore up losses—though of course that came just before the pandemic. The financial mismanagement, evident now for years, was mystifying to many looking in from the outside. The brewery made excellent beer, had a fantastic, youthful brand, and was a key pioneer of the bottle-club model now common in brewing. It’s hard to understand how a brewery could do those things right while leaders managed to conceal how bad things were. Hints of mismanagement existed elsewhere, too: last year, employees made serious and credible allegations of harassment that forced out founder Jacob McKean, among others. Given the speed of the announcement, it’s difficult to say how much jeopardy the company remains in.

Modern Times’ leased a location originally inhabited by much-loved farmhouse brewery The Commons, a building still owned by that brewery’s founder, Mike Wright. In a post at the New School, Ezra Johnson-Greenough reports that Wright had no advanced warning about the closure and learned about it on social media like everyone else. I will keep my ears open about what might come next for the location, which despite the two failures, is a great location with a wonderful vibe. Let’s hope that the third time is a charm and a new brewery arrives to make the site a success.