Redhook Exits the Corporeal World

Death, they say, has several stages, from the failure of the physical body to, eventually, the passing of the person’s memory. With breweries it is much the same. First goes the corporeal body, the brewery, leaving only a ghostly brand brewed … somewhere. Yesterday parent-company Tilray announced they would be closing the last brewery owned by Redhook, one of the earliest breweries founded in the craft beer era.

Paul Shipman and Gordon Bowker founded Redhook in 1981 in Ballard, a Seattle neighborhood that would eventually become one of the most densely-breweried in the world (the first beer came out in ‘82). It followed a trajectory only possible in a market with no small breweries. Redhook grew like a weed in its first decade, fueling lofty goals. They quit the transmission shop to move to the suburbs and into an architecturally-interesting new building purpose-built for a growing brewery with national ambitions. They were soon brewing the kind of volumes new breweries only dream of today.

Then Redhook made craft brewing history in 1994 when it sold a chunk of ownership to Anheuser-Busch. No microbrewery had ever “sold out” before, and it created quite a stir in the still-tiny craft brewing world. That decision would ultimately lead to the news yesterday, albeit in a slow, wandering fashion.

I spoke to Paul Shipman on background for The Widmer Way, and the decision to sell part of the company to AB still haunted him.

“The biggest mistake that I made—and this was the defining error of my career—was that I did not understand or appreciate the consequence to the brand of being associated with Budweiser. That’s number one. And I didn’t appreciate what the relationship with the Budweiser guys would entail. The Redhook brand—that was a helluva brand. But it’s dying now, and that’s very sad. I haven’t been there at the brewery for about ten years, but it pains me to see the brand go down. But it’s traceable to a single decision, and that’s the decision to associate with Budweiser and then the craftiness of my competitors to [highlight that]. Widmer followed and there was a dilutive effect by the time somebody else did it, although it hurt the Widmer brand in Portland.”

The rest of the company’s history was a series of dominoes colliding after that first merger: becoming a part of Craft Brew Alliance (CBA) with Widmer Brothers, which followed Redhook into a similar deal with AB a couple years later, full acquisition by AB InBev in 2019, and finally a sale to Tilray last year. ABI paid $221 million for CBA, mainly to get its Kona brand. It sold Redhook, Widmer Brothers and six other brands five years later for $85 million.

Most of Redhook’s production has come out of the Widmer brewery in Portland for the better part of a decade, but closing Brewlab is a significant loss. As long as Redhook still made beer in Seattle, that living, 44-year-old lineage remained intact. Soon Redhook—still a significant label—will become just another placeless brand. Tilray has made some noises about opening a new Redhook location—taproom or brewpub isn’t clear—and it would be great if this wasn’t the last call for one of the country’s first microbreweries. I’ll keep you posted if that comes to pass. As it stands today, things don’t look great.