Rogue Ales Has Apparently Closed

Shocking news out of Newport this morning:

Rogue Ales & Spirits, which has seen its beer sales drop and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent and back taxes, abruptly shut its massive Newport operations and all of its restaurants Friday, the Lincoln Chronicle has learned…. Rogue is drastically behind on rent and taxes – owing $545,000 to the Port of Newport and up to $30,000 in taxes to Lincoln County.

I and a bunch of reporters have been trying to track down more information on the company’s status, so far without a lot of luck. The Chronicle story has the most information on the web. (I just tried to boot up the piece on my computer and their site goes to a warning about too many requests to load.)

I will post more about this brewery and its legacy if we start to piece together the story. It is obviously a bad time in the brewing industry, and closures have become common since the start of Covid. The most vulnerable category of brewery is Rogue—packaging companies who sell a lot of product at grocery stores with narrow margins. Once a national brewery, Rogue has been shrinking for quite a few years. It hasn’t helped that its flagship Dead Guy Ale is pretty far from the place craft brewing landed.

As a result, I suppose this news falls into that “shocking but not surprising” category—but in a way it is also surprising. The brewery opened its latest pub in Salem this year, reversing a trend of closures and seemingly auguring better times. After decades pursuing growth and a national strategy, it looked to me like they were settling into a more comfortable Oregon-first approach. Still, sales were way down recently, which was perhaps one blow too many. If this is end of the road, it will mark another milestone in Oregon brewery passages, following BridgePort and Portland Brewing as major breweries of the founding era to close.

More to come—