Barley Brown’s: 25 Years of Invention in Oregon's High Desert

Barley Brown’s is a legendary brewery in Oregon, winner of a bucketful of medals and author of one of the most popular IPAs in the state’s history. But it’s also located in Baker City, a 4.5-hour drive from Portland in the high desert of Eastern Oregon. That means not so many people have visited. My father lives another two hours southeast on I-84, so I’ve stopped in for pints at the pub plenty of times, but until last Thursday, I’d never actually toured it.

It’s always a good idea to visit a brewery if you only know the disembodied emissaries that arrive in 12-ounce packages (or in Barley Brown’s case—an all-draft brewery—16-ounce glasses). You can appreciate a beer and even love it, but it’s hard to truly understand it if you’ve never seen where it’s made.

That’s especially true of a brewery like Barley Brown’s. The five counties that comprise northeast Oregon contain 115,000 people and occupy a stretch of land larger than eight states. Unlike southeast Oregon, which is mainly bare hillsides and plains, much of the northeast is forested, including the mountainous Wallowa-Whitman National Forest north of Baker City—one of the gems of Oregon’s incredible scenic wonders. Eastern Oregon is dominated by ranch and farmland, and still has the feel of the frontier. If you were going to draw up a business plan for a brewery in these Coors Light-drinking parts, you wouldn’t make it very ambitious.

When Tyler Brown started Barley Brown’s, it wasn’t. He had never brewed professionally and found a four-barrel brewhouse fabricated by inmates in Monroe (WA) Correctional Facility. (That was a cool program; inmates learned how to weld and earned going rates for their work.) He brought the little brewery back and installed it in an erstwhile Mexican restaurant in his hometown. He’d only ever homebrewed, so he visited Hood River, where the Big Horse Brewery was using the same system, and after watching brewer Randy Orzeck use it, returned to start making beer on his own system. “I didn’t know anything about commercial brewing. I thought, I guess I’ll learn on the fly!” he said. House-made beer was a nice reason for locals to come into the restaurant.

I mention this history because today, after 25 years of business, Barley Brown casts such a large shadow across Oregon beer that it’s hard to remember it was once a tiny little place helmed by a brewer who didn’t know what he was doing in one of the most remote stretches of the United States. But that reality is very much alive in Tyler’s experience—and except for the reputation, is still mostly true. Baker City is still small (circa 5,000 barrels) and still remote.

Remote Discoveries

What makes the Barley Brown story fascinating is that, despite its size and distance from the brewing mainstream, it nevertheless did become an iconic Oregon brewery. One could argue that the distance actually helped Tyler create the brewery Barley Brown’s has become. It’s true that he didn’t have the kind of local brewing community to consult when he had difficulties. A lot of times that means a brewery isn’t challenged and never grows. But in some cases, it gives a brewer the freedom to experiment and screw around without a lot of scrutiny. That’s what Tyler did, and as I listened to him talk about his evolution, I was reminded how a good brewer will use their context to their advantage.

Take for example how he figured out double dry hopping. A few years after Tyler launched the brewery, he brought on a local homebrewer who is now pretty famous in his own right—Shawn Kelso—who became a creative partner. Back in the early aughts, they started tinkering with dry-hopping, trying to figure out ways to infuse more hoppy aromas into their beers. At one point they bought some clear PET water bottles for their experiments. It was easy to dump out the water and have a purified container for fermenting wort. “We didn’t know anything, so we wondered, ‘What happens if we just pour the pellets in?’” he said. They started by putting mostly-fermented wort in the bottles and leaving the caps on loosely, but the result wasn’t especially promising. “It’s hazy green and that doesn’t look very appetizing,” he remembered. But then Shawn took one of the bottles and put it in the cold room and the next morning it was all clear. “We realized all we gotta do is dump the hops in warm and crash it.” For good measure, in some beers they’d do a second dry-hop well after fermentation. Voila—long before hazy IPAs popularized “DDH” ales, Tyler and Shawn figured it out themselves.

Brewers do that. Having studied this profession long enough to get a sense of brewing over time and space, I’ve learned this is an iron law. If you think you’re the first brewer doing something, you’re almost certainly wrong. Indeed, I’ve encountered earlier, discrete examples of biotransformation and double dry-hopping, too. If a brewer can think of a kind of beer or a flavor they want, they’ll figure it out. And if they figure it out, someone else probably has, too.

Beyond ingenuity, a Barley Brown beer is recognizable. Thanks to my recent Oklahoma visit, I’ve been thinking about breweries with a “voice.” That is to say, if you taste one of a brewery’s beers, does it have a resemblance to the others? Do you get a sense of the brewer’s preferences and approach? Barley Brown’s flagship beer, Pallet Jack—currently totaling 80% of production—was possibly the culmination of that evolving voice. It didn’t emerge until about halfway through the brewery’s life, but it reflects a very particular approach to hoppy ales. It’s dry, moderately bitter, and very aromatic. It’s also fairly pale and in possession of a shimmer—but nothing approaching haze—and has a definite citrus quality. In its regular or fresh-hop versions, it’s won two golds, a silver, and a bronze at the GABF, starting back in 2012.

During the hazy period, I remember thinking it seemed a little old-school. A couple years later, it seems positively fresh. Trends change, and for breweries with a sense of purpose, that means being in the center of trends for a time, out of step for a time, and likely right back in the center of trends again. Barley Brown’s most recent gold at the GABF came two years ago for Moxee Water, a pale ale named for a hop-growing town in Washington. It, too, is characteristic of the brewery’s voice. With a strength just above 5%, the brewers dry it out with enzymes. The effect is a sharpness that reminds me of alcohol bitters. It combines perfectly with a lemony bouquet. It was in the 90s the day I visited, and I couldn’t imagine a more quenching beer. Or take possibly my favorite example of the Barley Brown beer—a little 4.4% golden called Very Small Guitar. It had a lovely cracker malting along with an orangey hopping that seemed to deepen as I drank. These beers were quite different, yet all had a family resemblance that marked them as Barley Brown beers.

This is perhaps the greatest advantage of remote brewing. In cities, brewers are aware of what people are doing around them. It’s almost impossible not to be influenced, to borrow techniques or discover new ingredients. In Baker City, Tyler and his current head brewer Eli Dickenson can easily drop into their own groove. Their customers know what they do and expect them to do it—and they don’t spend a lot of time at other breweries getting distracted by the trend du jour. This is not to say the folks at Barley Brown’s are unaware of the latest trends, techniques, or ingredients—they’re not. Their continued success in beer competitions speaks for how well they attend to the national marketplace. Yet it does give them a kind of freedom that I believe you can taste in the beers. If American brewing survives another hundred years, breweries like Barley Brown might come to define the American tradition like Timothy Taylor or Dupont or Budvar do in their countries. If so, some future writer may wonder if it’s not because of those three hundred miles between Baker City and Portland.