ForeLand Beer, the 2021 Oregon Beer Award’s winner for Best New Brewery, is opening a Portland location to showcase their upper left coast IPA’s and Lagers in a vintage home on southeast Belmont.

Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup award-winning brewer Sean Burke had resisted opening up his own brewery until recently. Burke has had the benefit of successful creative stints and career stability as the head brewer for The Commons Brewery followed by Von Ebert Brewing. It wasn’t until just last summer of 2020 that a path to open up his own business unfurled before him.

“I started to realize that if I wanted to continue in the beer industry for any extended period of time (and I did), I needed to create a path out of the day to day brewery operations,” says Burke. “As much as I enjoy it, I need to start using my brain more” and that meant stepping into more of a career leadership role in creating his own company with a longterm plan that would bring up-and-coming brewers into the fold.

The opportunity to take over a nearly turnkey operation at the late lamented Allegory Brewing in McMinnville, Oregon wine country was too good to pass up. Partnering with The Bitter Monk owner David Sanguinetti they were able to sign a wholesale contract with Block 15 Brewing’s burgeoning distribution business before their launch in November 2020 with flagship beers LandForm Pils, Shape Creation IPA and Form Follows IPA

The ForeLand beers were warmly met by the marketplace and 16oz cans popped up in bottle shops all over the valley and metro areas. The early buzz and intrigue lead to the opening of a lowkey and mostly outdoors tasting room at the brewery last Spring as pandemic restrictions eased. But early on Burke wanted to have a tasting room in Portland when the time seemed right, and with draft beer sales returning as the bars open up now is as good time as ever.

Foreland Beer PDX (which will likely get a more eloquent name at a later date) is moving into a single family home in the Buckman neighborhood at 2511 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR 97214. The location is a small but charming slice of old Portland with a basement, attic, driveway, small front porch area and a more spacious backyard. The unassuming house is elevated slightly off the street and smashed between private residences, an open lot, and premium cannabis product retailer Serra, while nearly backing right up onto Lone Fir Cemetery. It’s a good location on a slightly quieter residential part of Belmont where bus line 15 turns onto Morrison and just a few blocks from the bustling bars and restaurants to the east.

Even though the ForeLand beer is heavily inspired by the great outdoors, an urban taproom reckons with dichotomy between industrial and terroir driven craft brewing. These beers are expressions of Oregon first and foremost, but explore other regional inspirations from New Zealand to Germany, France and Belgium to name a few. Burke has spent a lot of time in the city which he calls home, but nearly every weekend he escapes to the wilderness to get away from humanity for a few days and enjoy the stars.

“For us a lot of the inspiration for what we do in our craft is inspired by time spent in nature,” says Burke. “I like the idea of having a place even in an urban setting where people can hang out and feel inspired to want to be more in touch with the natural world, whether that be through ambiance or simply the beers that we make and how we approach them.”

Burke is a native Oregonian, with memories of so-called “Old Portland.” So finding the Craftsman-style Bungalow house on a busy urban neighborhood street that retains some of that classic PDX feel was a dream come true.

“It's an amazing building,” says Burke. “When it was last remodeled, time was taken to really enhance the character of the place. It felt like a remnant of Portland that I remember and love so much. I always enjoyed going to places like The Liberty Glass and Beech Street Parlor. I like the coziness. I like the bridge to the past.”

Built in 1913, the house on the corner of Belmont and 24th had been The Rocking Frog, an eclectic cafe and music venue that called it quits during the pandemic. Before that, it was a bookstore and many of the floor to ceiling built in shelves remain intact and will survive the transition. In an earlier career Burke worked for Powell’s Books and was attracted to the casually literary furnishings of the house and says “I would like to have a small selection of books for people to read through while they are there…I always enjoyed flipping through the books at the Tugboat Brewery years ago and I think that if we can try to capture some of the spirit in some way.”

The interior has a warm and cozy feeling like entering a family home, and Burke wants to keep that character intact even through the remodel. Notable features include vintage 70’s chandeliers, acid wash leaning bar tops, stained glass windows, a gas fireplace, and stained fir floor and paneling. The space is small, with a living room, reading room, entryway, and bedroom that will all be turned into intimate seating areas for guests while the attic and basement will be used for storage. A small kitchen will be cordoned off to construct a service bar, and a back door goes out to a relatively secluded patio space that has been taken over by bamboo in the 7+ months that Rocking Frog has been closed.

Rocking Frog was a cafe known for hosting acoustic shows and open mikes, and Burke himself plays in a local country band called Golden Promise. His hope is to clear some space on the back patio for early live music that won’t disturb the neighbors, but this will require a complete overhaul of the rickety gazebo cover, the uneven stone floor, and removal of the bamboo which threatens to turn the backyard into a forest.

The taproom will carry hand selected wine, cider and non-alcoholic options from local friends that the brewery wants to support. They don’t plan to have a kitchen, but the rumor is the neighboring lot will become a food cart pod, or at the very least there is room for a food truck in their own driveway.

As for the ForeLand beers, this will be their premiere showcase with 10-12 of their own on draft as well as crowler and growler fills, cans to-go, and even some of the mixed culture beers that Burke was famous for at The Commons and Von Ebert Glendoveer. Until recently it was difficult to find ForeLand beers on tao, the brewery was started during a pandemic and put all of their initial beers into 16oz cans. Most of those releases have been micro maltster and imported malt and hop variety focused pales and lagers, but the return of draft has allowed them to play around more with more difficult to sell styles like farmhouse ales and smoked beers.

Construction to remodel the building into a working taproom should start in the next few weeks. They want to keep most of the features intact while replanting some of the greenery and making room for more intimate seating indoors and out. Since the project does not call for a huge overhaul, Burke thinks the taproom could realistically be open by October or even sooner.

“I hope the biggest takeaway is the uniqueness of space and the curation of the beers. We set out to really narrow our focus on our beers to what we are passionate about making with the hopes that we would end up making better beer. There are a lot of breweries these days and people have a lot of choices. I hope that we can offer an experience that isn't cookie cutter and that people find that enjoyable and desirable,” says Burke…”Who knows, maybe the next location will be somewhere closer to the woods.”

ForeLand Beer is now open to visit in McMinnville and coming to Portland in Fall 2021