Rogue Ales, 1988-2025

The news that Rogue had suddenly slammed shut the doors on all their pubs and breweries is growing more shocking the longer we have to consider it. As recently as last year, Rogue was still one of the largest breweries in the US—50th, according to the Brewers Association’s most recent report. It had been declining a bit in relative numbers on that list, but apparently still selling quite a bit of beer. It wasn’t a new start-up managing risky gambles, either. Rogue has been around 37 years, over three decades of them in their large brewery in Newport. They were still functioning like a healthy brewery: a year ago, they penned a deal with the Portland Trailblazers to make a “Rip City” IPA, and this spring they opened a new pub in Salem. These kinds of breweries don’t just close up in the dark of night. And the way the announcement was handled, with nary a word to the press and crudely-scrawled “closed” signs on the doors of their properties made it all the more surreal.

We still don’t have the full story, and it may be a while before we do. In the meantime, it’s worth considering Rogue’s legacy, which is suffering some recency bias. Had Rogue closed a decade ago, people would have had a very different impression of its status in the terrain of American brewing. But in the hours and days after the announcement, in addition to the usual expressions of shock and dismay, I noticed a number of dismissive criticisms: “brands that had grown stale over the years,” “even then [15 years ago], it was clear Rogue was declining,” “I can’t remember the last time I ordered one.”

These may hint at the nature of Rogue’s declining sales: they had come to be seen as a legacy brewery in all the wrong ways. Their beers seemed out of date, despite a new “Dead Guy” line, and it’s been a long time since they were making beers on the leading edge of innovation.

This is a curious coda, if this is indeed the end of the line, for a brewery that was for decades known largely for its innovation and experimentation. Well into the 21st century, Rogue was trying stuff no other brewery in the country was considering. If losing the latest incarnation of Rogue feels less like a loss than some of the other recent closures, at least in beer terms, we shouldn’t lose sight of its legacy as one of the most important breweries in the early craft era, or why people once thought it was so special.

Rogue was fundamentally an expression of two very different minds: cofounder and business leader Jack Joyce and longtime head brewer John Maier. They were in some ways contrasting figures; Joyce was a corporate lawyer who understood brands while Maier was one of those homebrewer-turned pro tinkerers who understood beer but not business. In many breweries, the impulse to market and sell the beer undermines work in the brewhouse, but Rogue achieved a strange harmony as the visions of the two men converged.

John Maier

Most articles start with Joyce, a big, boisterous presence who was always available to give a quote, but what he did for the brand was predicated on what Maier did in the brewhouse. While the branding work was critical as Rogue grew, it wouldn’t have gained a toehold if not for Maier’s beer. (Many ambitious and well-funded projects died in the 90s because breweries focused on branding instead of the beer.)

John Maier was a giant figure in brewing in the Pacific Northwest. Well into the aughts, he was revered by beer fans in a way few brewers ever are. He was a homebrewer’s brewer, a beer geek’s brewer, a pied piper for people who wanted to go deep on craft beer. “Microbrews” were a fringe product then, and Rogue was known as the weirdest and most experimental of the early American breweries. Those were the last days of the Grateful Dead, and Rogue had a similar—and overlapping—cult following. If you thought Widmer was too yuppie and Full Sail too tame, you were probably a Rogue fan. And John Maier was the brewery’s gnomic Jerry Garcia, letting his voice speak through his strong, hoppy, or flavored beers.

Dead Guy would become Rogue’s flagship, but only later—in the early days they were making beers like Shakespeare, an early oatmeal stout, the impossibly hoppy Old Crustacean Barleywine, Rogue ‘n Berry (made with marionberries), and Mexicali, a very early pepper beer—among many others. It’s also an irony that Rogue is no longer associated with hops, because in the early Maier years, pushing the envelope on bitterness was part of the brewery’s DNA. Maier’s nickname was “More Hops,” and he played a big role in developing the hoppy beers that would define the Pacific Northwest.

Today average consumers are so much more educated about beer, even if they’re just casual fans. They may not have a deep understanding of styles, but they recognize words like “lager” and “IPA.” In the late eighties and early nineties, drinkers had no concept of the beer world. In response, most breweries tried to stay within eyesight of consumer expectation, hoping to lure them into a new world with beers that weren’t too much of a departure from their expectation. Rogue went the opposite direction, making beer that no one recognized. It was a brewery for the adventuresome.

It was also a “craft” brewery in the sense that John Maier was very transparent about how he made the beer, and shared his info with homebrewers as a way of empowering them to take chances as well. This gave Rogue a grassroots cred it could never have achieved through branding. In many ways, Maier was a practitioner of outsider art, an irony given that, outside the brewhouse, Rogue had the most sophisticated marketing and branding of any brewery on the west coast. Somehow, though, the name and the branding supported rather than undermined Maier’s work.

In 2025, Rogue suffered from the impression of being lame and uncool. Thirty years ago, Maier created the beers that helped define cool in the Northwest.

Jack Joyce

While Maier was making his strange ales inside the brewhouse, the ownership team of former Nike executives were in the conference room figuring out how to sell them. Heading that effort was Jack Joyce, a 48-year-old lawyer and executive recently fired by Nike for being too outspoken and impolitic. Nike hired Joyce in 1983, during Nike’s ascent into the branding stratosphere—when Nike became Nike. Air Jordan’s came out in ‘85, turning what had been a running-focused company into a basketball shoe company. It was also the period when Reebok challenged and briefly surpassed Nike in sales, teaching the company important lessons in achieving world domination. In other words, Joyce and his Nike cofounders Bob Woodell and Rob Strasser were incredibly sophisticated about branding and marketing—vastly more so than just about anyone working in craft beer at the time.

Rogue was a member of the class of ‘88, that famous year when the not-quite founding generation that included Goose Island, Brooklyn, Deschutes, Vermont Pub & Brewery, Great Lakes and more. It was still early enough that breweries might have hoped to have some success, but none came into the world envisioning 50-state distribution or planning to get there—except Rogue. Joyce was at the forefront of creating a vehicle he could sell, perhaps like athletic shoes, to people around the country. Throughout his nearly twenty-year tenure at the head of the brewery, he was both the engine powering the company and its irascible, amusing face.

The Brand
The brewery’s name is shrouded apocrypha—I have heard at least three origin stories—but is a big part of what tied everything together. The first American craft breweries saw and sold themselves as rebels fighting the giant Borg of industrial beer, and the “Rogue” name fit right into that. It was also the bridge to Maier’s strange brews, prepping people right from the start to expect something unusual.

Rogue was also one of the pioneers of the 22-ounce bottles, which aside from retailing at premium prices allowed for their large, silk-screened images. Here again, marketing and brewing came together. In the late-80s and early-90s, a packaging brewery focused on a core line with some seasonal offerings. Because it was focused on 22s, Rogue could and did spin off what was then a dazzling line of beers.

The very earliest incarnation of the brewery didn’t add the explicit dissident themes in the brand, but that would become its hallmark. Here’s how I characterized it fifteen years ago:

Rogue shifted their design to highlight the revolution through overtly socialist/communist symbolism. The art style is socialist realism, popularized during the cold war when the Soviets used art to support the revolution. It tends to focus on the strength and glory of the worker. Rogue, using these themes, features a variety of muscular men on the labels--a nod to the steel workers and farmers the Soviets employed. But Rogue doesn't stop at allusion. They also incorporate overtly communist symbols: the red star and the upraised fist. The star appears everywhere, and if you look carefully, you'll notice that it's always the left fist that comes up--a particular Trostkyite flavor.

This dissident theme led naturally to the “Rogue Nation” concept—one of the earliest loyalty programs. Join and you became a card-carrying member of Rogue Nation, and those who engaged with the program would earn titles like “quartermaster.” On the one hand, the whole thing was deeply perverse—a large company using the symbolism and consciousness of leftist politics to support their capitalist ambitions—but with Maier’s beer, it somehow worked. It also gave them a platform for encouraging people to visit one of the pubs in their expanding chain.

Other Innovations
Rogue did other interesting things as well. It’s a little hard to give any Oregon brewery credit for opening pubs like Rogue did since the McMenamins had done that so early and with such success. But the McMenamins saw themselves more as a restaurant chain—the chain brewpub concept was popular in the early ‘90s—while Rogue was a large production brewery. Few others in that category were following suit. They were also early to diversify, investing heavily in spirits and dabbling in cider.

The barrel room for Rogue Spirits (personal photo)

One of their more interesting projects isn’t well-remembered, but it was kind of bonkers in its ambition. Starting in the mid-2000s, Rogue began growing their own hops on a 42-acre property near Independence, along with a 256-acre farm in the Tygh Valley near Maupin. A few years later, they started a floor-malting operation and later introduced beers made with their ingredients (unfortunately labeled “Chatoe”). That venture didn’t pan out commercially, and they later divested themselves from agriculture, but it demonstrates what impressive ambition the brewery possessed. Sometimes when you take a big swing, you strike out.

This post is already running long, so I’ll cut it off here, though much more could be written about Rogue’s many efforts. The brewery would, fairly quickly, manage to find distribution in fifty states and, at its peak, exported to 22 countries. Rogue was also the first brewery to export to Japan, which is one important reason the country still has such an affinity for Oregon’s craft beer. At its peak, Rogue was selling a bit more than 100,000 barrels of beer before numbers started dropping. That’s not big-big, but it’s healthy, particularly for a brewery selling high-margin 22s. By any measure, Rogue was a big success.

Epilogue

It has been very hard for once-large founding-era breweries to survive the craft era. That’s particularly true of the Pacific Northwest, where names like Pyramid, BridgePort, Portland Brewing, and Redhook are completely or functionally extinct. Each one of those breweries pursued different strategies that led them to different forms of failure. Rogue, which always remained independent, seemed like it might avoid their fate. We don’t quite know yet what were the immediate factors that caused Rogue’s collapse, but it’s almost a sure bet that it will look different than any of the others. Like families, unhappy—or failing—breweries fail in their own way.

For Oregon and especially for Newport, this lost is even a bigger deal than it is for beer fans. Oregon’s big breweries have always been distributed around the state: Deschutes (Bend), Full Sail (Hood River), and Ninkasi (Eugene). None has been more important to its home town than Rogue has been to the ten thousand people who live in Newport. It operated a large, industrial facility as well as a classic bar along the strip in the downtown area. Newport is a hard-working fishing port, and Rogue fit it perfectly. As we consider the brewery’s legacy, remember that every brewery exists as a real place in time and space, supporting real families, and providing a gathering place for uncountable memorable gatherings. It will leave a large hole in Newport.

Rogue’s failure will leave less a hole in the brewing world. But that belies its 20th-century importance in pushing breweries to be more creative in and out of the brewhouse. Thirty-five years ago most of the people making and selling beer were thinking small. Not for nothing, their businesses were called “microbreweries.” But Rogue thought big at a time when the industry needed to see ambition in order to grow. It’s importance was much greater than its absence today.

RIP