Cooper Mountain Ale Works opening in Sherwood, Oregon
Recently closed Smockville Brewhouse (pictured) to become new Cooper Mountain Aleworks
In Oregon when one brewery closes another is often right there to take its space, which is a sign of a continually thriving but competitive craft beer industry. Beaverton, Oregon’s nano operation Cooper Mountain Ale Works did just that when they snapped up Max’s Fanno Creek Brewpub in Tigard in June 2020 and became their own full-fledged brewpub. Now they are doing the same with one of 2022’s long list of recent Oregon closures in Sherwood, Oregon’s Smockville Brewhouse.
Smockville Brewhouse was an off-shoot of Tree’s Restaurant (also in Sherwood) that opened in 2017, the brewpub had a small in-house brewery which supplied the popular taproom. Their building is owned by the city, who opted not to renew their lease and forced their closure this past August 2022.
Cooper Mountain Aleworks brewpub in Tigard, Oregon (formerly Max’s Fanno Creek)
Cooper Mountain was licensed as a nano brewery in 2016 and their beers appeared on tap at local Beaverton taprooms. In 2020 a group of Cooper Mountain tech pros by day Dan Antal, Chris Sjolin, Aaron Fastenow, Miriam Pike and Christine Sjolin partnered up with operations manager Eli Smith to take over Max’s Fanno Creek Brewpub in Tigard which had been a fixture since 2007. The new ownership group continued to operate it as Max’s Fanno Creek for a time but slowly transitioned it into the Cooper Mountain brewpub over the following year.
Co-owner Chris Sjolin says the Cooper Mountain ownership group has been restructured and streamlined, and are taking the opportunity to expand by moving into Sherwood. Sjolin has been brewing on the 10bbl brewhouse previously installed at Max’s Fanno Creek, while keeping their original nano brewery alive for small batches but this will change all that.
“We will no longer be brewing in Beaverton once this site opens, and Binary can have their 'only brewery in Beaverton' mantle for good,” says Sjolin. The brewing operations will continue in Tigard, but a new 3 barrel pilot system will be installed in Sherwood he says. “There are a ton of beers that I really love to make that just don't need to be made at the 7-10bbl size. If I brewed all of the 20 beers I keep on tap on the big system it would take at least double the cold storage space we have to store the kegs.”
The Sherwood brewery will be give Sjolin the opportunity to experiment with water additives, different malt sources, yeast pitch rates and alternative vendors for comparing leaf vs pellet hops, and presumably extracts and oils. The beers will be featured on the brewpub taplist for customers to leave their feedback.
The former Smockville Brewhouse location was mostly gutted after closure according to Sjolin. But the bones, including kitchen hood are still there and provide a relatively blank canvas for the new tenants as they develop a new floor plan and flow. The work begins with ripping out the old bar and installing a new one, putting in a brand new cold box that was improperly torn out, and running glycol chilled draft lines. A new kitchen will lean into pizza as the primary food specialty, and Sjolin plans to run a "Learning and Experimentation School" for brewers looking to get their own brewery started, with training on brewhouse cleaning procedures, recipe scaling, OLCC reporting and more.
“Like our Tigard location, this is right in the heart of a downtown that we believe is a prime location for expanding our local footprint with suburban families,” added Sjolin. Who says the brewery has signed up for the OBRC reusable bottle program and purchased a bottling line so they can expand off-premise distribution and offer higher quality to-go beers from their two taprooms.
Cooper Mountain plans to start work on the space this week, but because of various permits and custom build-out the process may push opening the Sherwood, Oregon brewpub into late spring or early summer 2023.
