Cascade Brewing, 2007-2024
Ron Gansberg pouring Cascade beers at their production facility, 2016
The New School broke the sad news on Tuesday that Cascade Brewing had closed. It was a strange and developing story, but involved the death of Founder Art Larrance last month. That was odd, because he announced he’d sold the brewery four years ago. In the announcement’s fine print he described it was a “phased transition” sale, however, and it turned out that transition never quite happened. The details blur here, but Art’s daughter, who was unaware her father still owned the brewery, didn’t have the money to continue on.
It is a strangely convoluted end to a convoluted brewery that started as a side-project brand within a mostly-forgotten brewpub. In its heyday, Cascade was one of the most visible advocates for sour ales, and one of the most successful. Brewer Ron Gansberg led a team of merry pranksters who made strong, lovingly-crafted beers that were unusual, even among the field of sour beers. In a country with ten thousand breweries, it’s hard to be truly unique—but Cascade was. No one made beer the way they did, and if this is truly the end, it means the loss of a singular voice in brewing.
Art Larrance founded the Raccoon Lodge on Portland’s West Side in 1998. It was a classic Portland brewpub, with a full menu, a giant dining room, and a pretty average line of ‘90s pub ales. In the middle aughts, brewer Ron Gansberg wanted to do something more interesting than amber ales. He’d started his career in the wine industry, and in his free time began experimenting with vinous, barrel-aged beers made with fruit. Several elements of his approach were distinctive, and I think we can see connections to winemaking throughout the approach.
He started with strong base beers, not quite wine-strength, but close—tripels and strong blonds were his bread and butter. He believed in perfectly-ripe fruit, and would carefully select his produce directly from growers in Hood River and add individual pieces only when they had ripened, leaving boxes of fruit sitting around the brewery waiting their turn. Finally, his experience in wine gave him a strong and persistent mistrust of Brettanomyces. He didn’t like its unpredictable behavior, nor the flavors it produced. He only pitched Lactobacillus.
The results were often astonishing. On my first visit in 2008, I couldn’t believe how fresh the apricots tasted in his Apricot Ale. The acid preserved the aromatics and flavor perfectly, and it seemed that if you closed your eyes, you’d swear you were standing in an orchard. He and his team would go to extreme lengths for his beers. Once they’d retrieved the pits from the apricots, to take one example, they cracked them open like walnuts, one at a time. The meat inside the pits, noyaux, tasted like almonds and gave the beer its name. Cascade was a passion project for Ron, and he took no shortcuts.
Ron’s insistence on barrel-aging Lacto-cultured beer meant he courted the appearance of off-flavors like butyric acid. Moreover, he favored letting the Lactobacillus run wild, producing extremely sour beers. A Cascade beer tasted like no other beers on the market. He brewed base worts, fermented them fully, and then added Lacto in the barrel, where a beer might age for up to a couple years. Even without Brettanomyces, the process produced winners and—well, something else.
I remember judging sour ales for the Oregon Beer Awards one year. You weren’t supposed to discuss who made any given sample, so we all danced around the fact that Cascade’s were unmistakable. It was classic Cascade, too. I judged both prelim and finals rounds. One of the prelim beers was so sour we had a hard time even drinking our small sample, and two others medaled.
Art didn’t originally support Ron’s sour beer experiments. He allowed Ron to conduct them on his own time, but that was as far as his initial support went. In the late aughts, sour beers were still quite rare in the U.S., though, and Ron’s side project took off. The Raccoon Lodge was a nice little corner brewpub, but it wasn’t setting the world on fire. In 2008, Ron submitted his beers to the GABF and won a bronze, and the next year he followed up with a silver and gold. His beers quickly picked up a following, not just in Portland but internationally. Art decided to jump on this rocket ship, and renamed the brewery after the erstwhile side project, opened a central eastside taproom, and eventually acquired a large brewing and blending facility.
Cascade may have been ahead of the curve, but it was also on a path no one followed. As breweries experimented with mixed-fermentation and kettle souring, they led the market in a different direction. To Ron’s credit, Cascade stuck with their vision. I remember tasting barrels with him, probably around 2016 or ‘17 and we came to one that had Brett in it. His face darkened and he marked it, calling out to an assistant brewer. He wanted it gone by the morning.
In the two days since they announced their closure, I’ve seen an outpouring of affection for Cascade’s beers. Sour was always going to be a niche, and there’s no evidence Cascade’s version of strong, lactic-acid barrel-aged sours were any less popular than other breweries’ versions. Nevertheless, it was a small niche, and by the late teens a lot of breweries were making sour beers—way in excess of how many people were buying them. The Barrel House seemed to be busy, but volumes and margins declined. Art fired Ron in 2018–a crazy decision, it seemed like at the time. Ron wasn’t just the visionary behind the beer, but its quirky, constantly-punning showman. The brewery’s “sale” two years later seemed to confirm the misstep of firing Ron, but with Covid, it’s hard to say what ultimately led to its failure.
Cascade was a brewery of a moment. We’ve had a few of these over the years. Old-timers still talk about Saxer’s lagers, and that brewery closed a quarter century ago. Cascade will leave a hole in Portland’s beer scene, one I suspect people will remember for another quarter century. This was a sad end, not least because it’s wrapped up in Art’s death. But few breweries leave a mark as indelible as Cascade.
RIP.
Clarification. Pete Dunlop, who wrote the book on Portland’s brewing history, tries to de-convolute the “Cascade” name.
“You have the Cascade Brewing dates wrong. When Art was pushed out at Portland Brewing in 1995, he soon incorporated as Cascade Brewing. As he later told me, ‘I was always Cascade Brewing.’ The Raccoon Lodge was simply a DBA. Of course, the Cascade name was never apparent until the sour beers showed up, at which point he or they made the decision to use it.”
I’m going to leave the dates as they are because for the purposes of the entity that made sour beers, Cascade Brewing dates to 2007. Art hadn’t used the name in the nine years he’d operated the Raccoon Lodge and there’s little reason to think he ever would have, had Ron not launched the sour line.