Full Sail Brewing 1987-2026
This morning, The New School reported that Full Sail had closed its pub unexpectedly, and rumors swirled that the whole brewery had shut down. Later this morning, Full Sail shift brewer Bart Prouty reported that the other shoe had dropped: “It with great sadness that I inform everyone here that Full Sail Brewing Company is no more. On November 2nd, 2026 we were acquired by Sazerac and the Full Sail and Session brands officially died.”
He had yesterday off, but he got wind something was going on.
“I rushed down to the brewery to find out what the hell was going on. When I arrived, Sazerac was holding a meeting for the production staff. Even our brewmaster found out at this meeting…. We will continue our contracts making RTDs and other products while bringing on new ones. Beer will only be brewed for our existing contracts but who knows if the contracts will be renewed. We are now a 100% contract production facility.”
Full Sail was one of the first few breweries founded in Oregon, the first to put their beer in bottles, and was the beachhead that turned Hood River (population 8,400) into one of the country’s most active brewing centers. As Prouty noted, brewers at Double Mountain, pFriem, Solera, Everybody’s Brewing, and Kings and Daughters all came through Full Sail. The brewery would have been forty years old in two months.
Full Sail was founded in 1987 by five partners: Irene Firmat was the leader, and she was joined by Jerome Chicvara, Meg Roland, Joe Hill, and Roger Barry. They chose an old Diamond Fruit cannery building that had sat abandoned for a decade and a half and installed what was then a pretty large system—fifteen barrels. Full Sail made just a shade under 300 barrels its first year, but in 1988 they started bottling Golden Ale on an old Italian line that could fill six bottles a minute. That started them on a decade of growth.
Dave Logsdon, now more famous for having founded Wyeast Yeast Labs in 1985, was the first brewmaster. He was replaced by Jamie Emmerson in 1988, who served as brewmaster for the next couple decades—and who later married Firmat. Early breweries in those days staked out territory in the form of a style of beer. Widmer had Hefeweizen, BridgePort had a pale ale, and Full Sail had Amber Ale. Now we think of amber ales as simple, naive little beers for people who haven’t committed to craft beer yet. Full Sail’s was different; it was made with a stiff load of hops (for the time), which became Emmerson’s signature. Full Sail had one of the first bottled IPAs on the market, and their beers were known to favor the upper band of IBUs allowed for style.
Full Sail's Beer
Up until the sale to private equity in 2015, Full Sail was a beloved and admired brand. Full Sail Amber was a landmark beer that did a lot to turn Oregonians into hopheads. Shortly after opening, Full Sail made Wassail, which helped solidify the Northwest winter warmer (dark, hoppy, around 7% ABV) as a standard style.
In 1993, John Harris left Deschutes and founded Full Sail's Portland outpost, a test brewery that continued with the hoppy tradition. John created another classic seasonal that was basically just an uber-hoppy IPA, Wreck the Halls, and he led the state in making fresh hop beers at the RiverPlace brewery (even leading expeditions down to the hop fields during harvest).
Then there was Session Lager. In 2005, Emmerson led a project to reclaim light lager for craft breweries. Fifteen years before it would become a thing elsewhere, he created a throwback beer in little stubby bottles that recalled the long tradition of the Northwest's lager breweries (Blitz, Rainier, Oly, Lucky Lager, and Heidelberg, the last two which came in stubbies). It was a huge and unexpected gamble, and it really worked. When he released Session Dark a few years later, Emmerson was again ahead of the curve, brewing a Czech-style dark larger eons before anyone had heard the term "tmavy."
Full Sail grew incredibly quickly: by 1994, it was making 50,000 a year and embarked on a $4 million ($9.2 million in 2026 dollars), 210-barrel expansion. In the next couple years, production approached 100,000 barrels, but that’s when things turned in the market. Saddled with a lot of debt and declining sales—67,000 barrels in 1998—they put the brewery on the block. In 1998, a large Indian company made a hostile takeover bid, driving the brewery’s price down in the process. (The man who led the effort, Vijay Mallya, is now wanted in India for graft and corruption; he was a bad enemy to have.)
Irene Firmat and Jamie Emmerson, from a company publicity photo.
It was the first major story I covered for Willamette Week, and for months it looks like Full Sail would just collapse. Amazingly, they figured out a way to refinance and sell the company to the employees as an ESOP. Its own volumes would never return close to the 100,000-barrel mark, though, and the facility became a contract-brewing hub. Then, in 2015, those employee-owners decided to sell to San Francisco-based private equity firm Encore Consumer Capital.
It’s no surprise that this marked the beginning of the end for Full Sail. The mid-teens saw the explosion of breweries, and the shift in tastes to niche products sold at the brewery in expensive four-packs. From its massive facility to its industrially-efficient mash-filter technology, Full Sail had been optimized to make supermarket beer—or other beverages—at volume. In the following decade, production of its own brands collapsed so that grocery stores only carried a few SKUs and draft beer never made it out of Hood River.
After that past decade, it’s not a surprise that Full Sail’s final chapter will be a factory making canned cocktails for a Kentucky-based whiskey company. In some ways, that initial, mid-’90s expansion created a permanent fault in the foundation of the company. It set them on a course of major production, with the overhead that goes along with it. Had Firmat and Co. been able to peer into the future when they were considering expanding in 1994, they probably would have gone smaller. Having invested so much in a big production facility, however, they had committed to a course that ultimately led to today’s announcement.
It’s another sad day in the annals of the grand old Oregon craft breweries. RIP