At Beervana, Jeff Alworth has a great article about the current evolution of Oregon’s Rogue Ales & Spirits, which prompts my recollections: Rogue’s Slow, Deliberate Reinvention.
Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, Rogue was a very forward-looking company that anticipated most of the trends that would pass through craft beer. It was early to embrace strong and flavored beers, and Rogue was one of the first to recognize that novelty drove sales. The company gamified the drinking experience and introduced a very early membership program. Finally, Rogue saw that pubs were important for the bottom line and branding, and started planting them around the Northwest. The brewery is 36 years old, however, and time eventually changes everything. Rogue has become a legacy brand with a flagship older (32 years) than many of the drinkers it wants to attract. Inevitably, Rogue’s heritage became more central to the company than looking around the next corner with a new batch of experimental beers.
In April of 2006, my pal Graham and I left town on an old-fashioned Great American Road Trip, all the way to the Left Coast.
Along with a few changes of clothing, we packed the trunk of his late model Crown Vic with barter ballast: Two pony kegs of NABC beer (high gravity Hoptimus and ThunderFoot) along with a 5-lb CO2 tank and “keg thief” faucet, and two cases of empty growlers.
Illegal? Not at all, seeing as we kept that C02 tank bungeed securely the entire way.
Charting a merry pathway across the country, parts of it paralleling Route 66, we passed through Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock and Oklahoma City, then Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Flagstaff and the Mojave Desert. When we hit the Pacific Ocean at San Luis Obispo, the Crown Vic abruptly veered northward for three delightful days of coastal California sightseeing before crossing the Oregon state line.
Whenever possible, our daily meals, evening watering sessions and overnight stopping points were carefully calibrated to coincide with the presence of locally brewed beer, and this is where the empty growlers proved their merit—when filled.
As topped off with Thunderfoot or Hoptimus fresh from our secret trunk tap, we’d negotiate in brewpubs with the wait staff or off-duty bottling line attendants, and usually swap comparable delicacies.
Just try managing deals like that at Outback or Applebee’s.
In due time we arrived in Newport, Oregon at Rogue Ales Bayfront Public House, at the time a spiritual epicenter of Rogue Nation, having served as the original brewing site in Newport. It had been arranged for us to inhabit free of charge one of the Airbnb-style suites on the second floor, known then as Rogue’s House of Bed & Beer.
Rogue began life in 1988 in Ashland, Oregon, an inland town close by the namesake Rogue River and Pacific Crest hiking trail. The second location in Newport came the following year. With an eye toward expansion, Rogue purchased a cavernous building across the Yaquina Bay from the Public House in 1991, originally a boat storage and repair facility. The brewing system was upgraded and moved to the larger building.
Then came a setback in the form of a catastrophic flood that destroyed the original Ashland brewpub in 1997, shifting the emphasis to the company’s sites in Newport. In 1998, Rogue scavenged a 50-barrel brew house from a lapsed fellow brewer, and in 2006 it was the 36th largest brewery in America.
Of course, much has changed since then, and by 2023 Rogue had fallen – all the way to 41st. To me, still placing in the top 50 is no mean achievement given almost 20 years of craft biz pyrotechnics.
Did anyone ask: “And why the freebie rooms?” I didn’t ask for them, but I suppose it came about because we had a history.
The transformation of Rich O’s Public House from a tiny one-room barbecue café into a serious beer bar began in 1992, and within two years, Rogue was distributing in Indiana through Bloomington’s Best Beers wholesaler. We started seeing bottles here and there, though not so much draft.
Even in those early days of rising Hoosier beer consciousness, our hardy band of zealots recognized Rogue as one of the pioneers of the American beer renaissance (resistance?) and an exemplar of the attitude we ourselves keenly felt toward beer, and were only just learning to articulate.
One day I received a call from an employee of North Vernon Beverage, the upshot of which was that I’d soon be contacted by Rogue about purchasing kegs. Best Beers and North Vernon had some sort of partner wholesaler arrangement, and an unknown party had thought to convey to Rogue that I might be interested in upping the game with the brewery’s ales.
Was I ever! Granted, we only possessed four spare “rotating” taps in addition to the fixed Pilsner Urquell and Guinness lines, but I was down for designating one of them as a permanent revolving Rogue.
A short time later I found myself on the phone with Rogue’s Jim Cline; if I ever knew his exact job title, it has been long since forgotten. He became my contact for building periodic keg orders of mix-and-match pallets, usually including selections from the core of draft Rogues, and supplementing these with new, different or experimental brands drawn from Rogue’s huge portfolio of styles.
Later in the early 2000s we enrolled in the brewery’s John’s Locker Stock program, named for the since-retired head brewer John Maier, in which a limited number of pubs nationwide received monthly allotments of small batch, revival and one-off Rogue beers. In 2006 I took a stab at listing the beers we’d sold on draft during the previous dozen years, and came up with this. Asterisks mark those mid-1990 kegs that we seem to have purchased most often, and which I remember most fondly.
Rogue American Amber
Rogue Artisan Lager
Rogue Brew 5000 OBF 2001 Belgian Dubbel
*Rogue Brutal Bitter
Rogue Buckwheat Ale
*Rogue Chocolate Stout
*Rogue Dead Guy Ale
*Rogue Shakespeare Stout
*Rogue Dry-Hopped Red
Rogue Festive Ale
Rogue Half-e-Weizen (formerly Mo Ale)
*Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
*Rogue Honey Cream Ale
Rogue Imperial Pilsner
Rogue Incinerator (smoked doppelbock)
Rogue John’s Locker Stock (JLS) Alt Bier
Rogue JLS Brewer
Rogue JLS Frosty Frog
Rogue JLS Glen
Rogue JLS Hop Heaven
Rogue JLS Imperial Porter
Rogue JLS Integrity IPA
Rogue JLS Love & Hoppiness
Rogue JLS Monk Madness
Rogue JLS SchwartzBier
Rogue JLS Skull Splitter
Rogue Jubilee Ale (Horse Brass Pub’s 25th anniversary Ale)
*Rogue McRogue Scotch Ale
Rogue Mexicali Ale (later Rogue Chipotle)
*Rogue Mocha Porter
*Rogue Mogul Madness
Rogue Morimoto Black Obi Soba Ale
Rogue Morimoto Imperial Pilsner
Rogue Morimoto Soba Ale
Rogue Oregon Brewers Festival 2002 “Charlie” (IPA)
Rogue Oregon Golden Ale
Rogue Roguetoberfest
Rogue Rose Festival Ale
*Rogue Santa’s Private Reserve
*Rogue Smoke
Rogue Uber-Pils
*Rogue XS I2PA
*Rogue XS Imperial Stout
*Rogue XS Old Crustacean Barley Wine Vintage 1996
Rogue Yellow Snow (later Juniper Ale)
Rogue Younger’s Special Bitter
It helps to recall that a central plank of our business plan at the Public House was consuming the profits. I haven’t consumed some of these beers for 25 or more years, but the ones I drank often still register in my flavor memory.
And: Some of those XS series Old Crusty and Imperial Stout kegs came to us in multiple vintages over time. It’s likely we purchased three or four 1996 barley wines and bled them out at Gravity Head over several years’ time.
Jim packed many wonderful kegs onto those pallets, such that I’d never be able to thank him. But I tried when we finally met in Newport in 2006.
Membership in Rogue Nation has its privileges, as Graham and I learned within an hour of taking our seats at the Rogue Public House bar.
Early afternoon hours always seem best for visiting fine pubs, as the lunch crowds have abated and the regulars started to trickle through the portals for quiet libations and conversation. So it was as we sat and ordered a first round from the two-dozen house brews on tap (and a few more well-chosen guest selections).
Almost immediately we were engrossed in discussion with a handful of patrons, without exception locals who maintained a strong loyalty toward Rogue and a welcoming attitude toward strangers seeking their tastes of the grail.
One of them was Bruce, a former Rogue Public House chef, who was introduced to us as the go-to seafood guru in Newport, with an establishment called Local Ocean just down the street from our grateful barstools.
It is still open, 18 years later.
We promised Bruce that we’d come see him on Thursday, and another beer lover seated nearby asked if we were card-carrying members of Rogue Nation, and as we were not, he told us with a laugh not to worry – President Ed would be there soon enough, and he’d take care of everything. Sure enough, the chief executive came strolling through the door, was briefed about our presence, and later produced Rogue Nation membership cards.
The first pint had melted away, and a second was being poured. We may have driven almost three thousand miles to savor the fruits of Rogues, but as we learned, our story wasn’t at all unusual. It seems that a few years before, three young men on bicycles pulled up to the Public House, dismounted, and began their tour of the taps. Asked by attentive regulars where they had come from, the three responded in unison, “Maryland.”
In fact, they’d cycled most of the way from America’s East Coast to Newport, a months-long trek undertaken for no other stated reason than to visit Rogue.
Apprised of the situation by the pub’s amazed customers, Rogue’s management swung immediately into gear and transferred the long-haul Rogue beer cyclists into the guest rooms for a stay with beer and food on the brewery’s tab. Sated after a couple of nights, the aficionados rented a van for the drive to Portland, where they bought airline tickets home – their missions (and legends) truly accomplished.
It’s been a long time since this journey, and while Rogue isn’t as much on my radar nowadays, that’s okay. All these many aspects of beer enthusiasm that have intrigued me for so long remain in place, even today, although their shape and dimensions change. I have not been to Newport since 2006, but when I return some day, it will be time to reactivate that Rogue passport and become reacquainted with one of my favorite American breweries ever.
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Previously at Hip Hops:
Hip Hops: How does George Orwell’s favorite pub The Moon Under Water look today?
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 42 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
