Historic Portland Breweries Map

The faded General Brewing Corporation sign on the building at 13th and Kearney got me thinking about breweries of the past in Portland. As it happens, a few years ago at Powells I picked up a book called "Brewed in the Pacific Northwest", written in 1991 by Gary and Gloria Meier. The book was written at the beginning of the modern microbrewery era, so most of its focus is actually on pre-Prohibition breweries.

It is also a pre-digital mapping book, so it didn't occur to the authors to map out the information in the book. It was interesting enough to me that I spent an evening plotting their Portland brewery entries on a Google Map. This map shows the breweries that opened in Portland between 1852 and 1934.


View Historic Portland Breweries 1852-1934 in a larger map

If you look at the map on Google's map page, there is a chronological list of the breweries in the left margin.

At first glance, the map actually looks a lot like a present-day map of Portland breweries: almost all of them are in the SE and NW quadrants. Some of the parallels are eerie: there have never been many breweries south of downtown, yet there used to be one very close to where John Harris's Full Sail outpost is today; one of the few NE breweries was located about a football field away from Breakside, which opened this year in an otherwise deserted neighborhood. Makes you wonder if some of the same geography or demographics is at work today as it was 100 or 150 years ago.

Anyone have any stories about the breweries or the buildings on the map?

General Brewing Corporation

I've been bicycling through the intersection of NW 14th and Johnson pretty regularly for the last few months, but now that the leaves are off the trees, I finally noticed this old sign painted on the top of the building at 13th and Kearney: General Brewing Corporation. Were there Brewery Blocks in this part of the Pearl before Bridgeport?

A little googling led me to this article about Lucky Lager, which was the star brand of General Brewing. At one time it was the best-selling beer on the west coast. The Lucky Labrador has been dabbling in lagers, they should definitely jump on that name (oops -- guess not: commenters point out that Labatt's still sells Lucky Lager). [Update: I took a better picture of the sign from across the street: you can see lower down some faded block letters that read "LUCKY LAGER", especially if you click on it to see it full-size.]

General Brewing was founded in San Francisco in 1933. I can't find any mention of them brewing in Portland, though they bought Vancouver's Star Brewery in 1939. They changed their name to Lucky Lager Brewing Co. in 1949, so this sign probably went up sometime between 1939 and 1949. Since they didn't brew here, maybe that building was a warehouse or sales office for them, or maybe the sign is just an advertisement.

That article on Star is an interesting read: we always think of Henry Weinhard when we think of old-timey Portland-area beer, but it looks like the Star plant was a pretty good-sized operation itself. I like the 1890 ad for Star that boasts that it's "brewed exclusively from Oregon Barley and Oregon Hops"-- even then the 'Couve had an inferiority complex.

Kind of cool that the General Brewing sign survived to see the beer renaissance in its neighborhood. I hope it can be preserved into the future.

[Later: I just stumbled on this blog Portland Building Ads that has a much better picture of the General Brewing Sign.]