To reopen their tasting room Hair of the Dog Brewing had nothing but time
They say time passes faster as you get older, but for Portland, Oregon’ss 28-year-old Hair of the Dog Brewing things have always moved a bit slower. Hair of the Dog (HOTD) owner/brewmaster Alan Sprints likes to take his time, his acclaimed and world famous beers are known for being time intensive vintages and Sprints himself has bottles dating back to his first ever brews. That may explain why he didn’t bother trying to reopen, then close, then reopen again his inner southeast Portland taproom until now.
Sprints, a trained chef, worked in catering for 4 years before becoming a brewer at Widmer Brothers Brewing in 1992. A year later with inspiration from the Oregon Brew Crew and beer historian Fred Eckhardt he opened Hair of the Dog in a secluded building near the Brooklyn railyard in industrial inner southeast Portland. His first beer was a recreation of an extinct historical-style of ale called “Adambier” that is strong, dark, hoppy, woody and a little bit smoky and tart. Influential beer journalists Michael Jackson and Portland native Fred Eckhardt became huge advocates for Sprints eccentric beers that are often aged for multiple years before release. HOTD was one of the first to reintroduce barrel-aging to beer in 1994. The brewery’s strong golden beer “Fred” was named after Fred Eckhardt, and though Fred passed away in 2015 the brewery still holds a charity beer festival for his birthday each year known as Fred Fest.
In the days before extreme brewing became synonymous with craft beer, Hair of the Dog was making 10%+ abv barrel-aged beers and Double IPA’s with whole leaf hops. In the early to mid 2000's a Hair of the Dog dock sale beer release would draw hundreds of beer fans from across the country lining up as early as 6am for a chance to score a bottle of Barrel-Aged Adam or the ever elusive variants. Hair of the Dog was one of the early hype breweries, before weekly can drops of barrel-aged pastry stouts and triple IPA’s were even a thing.
In 2010 Sprints moved Hair of the Dog to a new location near the old produce packing district closer to the waterfront. The brewery is still in inner southeast Portland, and still by the train tracks, but in a more accessible location with a real taproom and kitchen to let Sprints do what he does best. To this day HOTD inspires beer fans worldwide, which has sustained the company through the pandemic with online auctions and home shipping for some of Sprints rarest and most difficult to find vintage beers. Which may be the biggest change for the tiny brewery that still produces less than 600 barrels of beer a year. To stay in business through a pandemic the brewery needed to start spending all that time they have accumulated, luckily they have accumulated more than most.
“We are selling all, or a lot of, the vintage beers that I had always planned on keeping forever,” says Sprints. “But the reality is I am not going to be around forever. So that’s changed, I decided everything can go. I am not really saving stuff.”
He relates this to a time when if he made three kegs of a special beer he would hoard atleast 2 of them for years, and keep 1 keg forever and never pour it. “Now I could drink all of that stuff. The next one is we are putting on tap is Putin [barrel-aged Russian Imperial Stout], we made that in 2016 or something like that and I still have a keg of it.”
Hair of the Dog has always kept a vintage beer selection on-hand at the taproom, mostly for in-house consumption only. Sprints has always kept a tight grip on his own cellar, the back area of the brewery resembles an episode of Storage Wars. Letting go of some of those bottles was something he never thought he would do, like sending a child out into the world. Though the experience of the worse parts of the pandemic were painful, the clearing out of the cellar was also liberating.
“I was surprised that people were that interested in old beers,” says Sprints of his relative success raising funds to keep the brewery afloat through the pandemic. Some of those beers included the original batches of Adam bier and other 20+ year old bottles. “They are not all winners but they are interesting to taste something that old, and some of them are surprisingly good.”
The next batch of cellar beers that HOTD is going to put up for sale will be a mystery. These are bottles that Sprints mistakenly stored on his concrete basement floor and the boxes around the cases disintegrated which melted and peeled the labels off many of the bottles making them nearly unreadable. So when they become available it will be at a steep discount because you don’t know what you are going to get. “It could be a 28 year old beer, it could be great, it could be shit, but it’s cheap,” says Sprints, who likenes the experience of attempted salvage to “an archeological dig of bottles stacked on top of bottles. I don’t leave things on concrete anymore.”
Alan Sprints at his newly reopened Hair of the Dog Brewing tasting room
Clearing out the ages old beers like cobwebs from the rafters doesn’t mean that HOTD will be abandoning strong and cellared beers anytime soon.
“I tried making lighter beers and while they do well in the tasting room, they don’t do well in the market. When people are looking for Hair of the Dog they are looking for something stronger. No matter how many times I tried making lighter beers for less money, it never worked. And I still don’t learn, years ago I tried Ruth and I thought it would be the biggest beer. Then it was Polka Dot IPA and Lila.”
Right now the lightest beer on at the tasting room is GREG, a completely un-hopped winter squash beer that the brewery makes each year exclusively for Higgins Restaurant. This current “fresh” batch is from 2019 and is marvelously devoid of pumpkin pie spices, instead leaving a lightly sweet and starchy squash flavor that is easy drinking.
And there are other new beers on tap like HÄGE, an 8% ABV Doppelbock brewed in honor of Hans-Göran "Håge" Viktorsson, founder of the famous Swedish brewery Närke Kulturbryggeri and maker of the once highest rated beer in the world Stormakts Porter who passed away in 2020.
The biggest change at the reopened tasting room is the food menu. Just like everyone else, HOTD is having trouble finding staff and that’s put Sprints himself, and his son, back in the kitchen. The pandemic has made him re-evaluate the menu just as he has the cellar and come to the conclusion that freshness matters and labor time intensive is not always the best option for food service. Before times they would have cooks sitting around to make elaborately prepared items that took a long time to prepare and that they didn’t make any money on. This means they needed to find a way to spend less time.
“When I originally created the menu I wanted to make things that I enjoyed eating. But this menu is more based around things that can be made quickly, that can be tasty and go well with beer,” says Sprints. “These days we can’t afford to lose money anymore. We have to be smarter on the way we do things. The new menu can be easy to prepare, fresher, and one person can do it.”
These are items like housemade Candied, Curried and Chili bar nuts, fresh salads, and meat, cheese, and pickle plates that can all require no cooking. The Pesto Twist and best-selling Za’atar Twist are probably the signature new items on the menu. Sprints makes 10 or so at a time with his own house pizza dough from a Levain starter culture in tiny batches, “that natural fermentation wild yeast is a natural extension of the brewery in a way.” He plans to introduce a sausage and mama lil’s twist in the near future.
Past tasting room regulars are already upset that there is no longer brisket, mac n’ cheese, brussel sprouts or duck wings on the menu. But Sprints hopes to bring them back on very limited basis as “pop-up” items that may last for a weekend or only a single day, like a burger and fries where everything from the buns to the sliced potatoes are made in-house.
Aesthetically and functionally little has changed at Hair of the Dog, connoisseurs still line up around either sides of the bar while Sprints and longtime bartenders have returned to hold court with familiar faces. There is a new television above the bar that displays the taplist and food menu, and if you grab a seat you can now look up the draft and bottle selections from a QR code on your phone.
“Hopefully people are familiar when they come back, it doesn’t seem too new, the beers are pretty much the same,” says Sprints “the plants are bigger now, keeping them alive was one of my pandemic goals.”
Hair of the Dog Brewing
61 SE Yamhill Street Portland Oregon 97214
OPEN: Wednesday - Thursday 2 - 8pm, Saturday 11:30 - 10pm, and Sunday 11:30 - 7:00pm
