In 1984, two brothers from Portland, Rob and Kurt Widmer, quit their day jobs and made one of the riskiest gambles they could imagine — opening Widmer Brothers, one of Oregon’s first microbreweries. If you’d asked either of them whether or not they’d still be brewing 25 years later, they’d have thought you were crazy.

“I never expected it,” Rob Widmer said recently. “In our wildest dreams we didn’t think it would work.”

The first year was tough going.

“We dumped the first 12 batches,” remembers Rob, who’d taken Microbiology 101 in college, which made him “the lab guy” in the early years.

Both Rob and older brother Kurt had been home brewers, so they did everything else together, including brewing, sales and delivering their own product.

“At that time, we thought if we could get 20 pubs to carry our beer, we could make it.”

After launching the business April 2, they built a brew house and began brewing that December, in the same location they’re still at today.

German inspiration

Their first beer was an alt, a relatively obscure German style of ale, whereas most German beers are lagers. In German, “alt” means “old,” since the style is one of the oldest made in Germany. Everyone else was brewing English-style ales, so the Widmers felt it was an appropriate beer for them at the time, as it immediately differentiated them. Plus, the Widmers’ mother was from Düsseldorf, where alt beer was very popular, and Kurt Widmer had traveled through Germany after college.

 

Their big break came two years later, in 1986, when a local pub owner asked them for a third beer. They were already making a filtered wheat beer, similar to a kristalweizen, and they only had two fermenting tanks at their disposal. The brothers knew about hefeweizens, an unfiltered wheat beer that used a particular kind of yeast that gives the beer aromas of bananas and cloves, but they had only one yeast strain. So they created a new style, which today is known as American hefeweizen. It’s similar to the German style, but with a milder yeast that gives it cleaner aromas and refreshing flavors.

Cloudy beer a hit

Initially, they worried that customers would balk at a cloudy beer, which was very unusual at the time. Luckily, the Dublin Pub did a great job presenting the new murky Widmer Hefeweizen, using tall German hefeweizen glasses. As another lucky coincidence, the pub was one frequented by many local bar managers and bartenders from Portland. Soon every bar in town had the unique Widmer Hefeweizen on tap. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Widmer Hefeweizen is the best-selling hefeweizen in America, including the Bay Area, where it accounts for nearly half of all hefeweizens sold in chain stores (the nearest competitor is about 38 percent). In bars, Widmer accounts for about 60 percent of all hefeweizens sold. Thanks to an alliance with Anheuser-Busch in 1997, Widmer Brothers beer is today available in all of the lower forty-eight states.

Widmer also gives back to the brewing community, as it has from the beginning.

“We started as (home brewers), members of the Oregon Brew Crew,” Rob explains, “so it’s in our blood.”

They helped found the Oregon Brewers Festival, now in its 22nd year, and host an annual home-brewing competition that allows the winner to brew his or her own beer at their commercial brewery.

For its 25th anniversary, Widmer is releasing a Double Alt, an homage to their first beer, which will be called 84/09. It will be released this month in a number of select West Coast markets in 22-ounce bottles.

As for the brothers themselves, they’re still involved every day at the brewery and plan to be there for the foreseeable future, Rob told me.

“It’s a fun business. We’d like to be able to say the same thing in another 25 years.”

Reach Jay R. Brooks at brooksonbeer@yahoo.com. Read more by at www.iba buzz.com/bottomsup.

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