Wayfinder Beer’s new Brewmaster Natalie Baldwin
After their first 5 years in operation Wayfinder Beer has a new brewmaster; young but seasoned GABF gold medal winning brewer Natalie Rose Baldwin is leaving her position as Breakside Brewing’s R & D brewer to step into the Wayfinder role.
The famously metal and lager centric, almost Reinheitsgebot brewery founded by Rodney Muirhead of Podnah’s Pit, Charlie Devereux of Double Mountain, and Matt Jacobson of Sizzle Pie and Relapse Records has been led by brewmaster Kevin Davey since inception. Davey has stepped down for a soon to be announced new project, Baldwin’s more than capable hands will be the next guiding force. For the past 5 years, she has been the lead R & D brewer from her homebase at the original Breakside Brewery location on NE Dekum where she has specialized in lagers and more innovative and esoteric beers.
Natalie Baldwin grew up outside of Vail, Colorado to a family of ski instructors and outdoor enthusiasts.
“I could ski before I could walk,” she says. “I grew up biking, skiing, hiking and camping, super outdoorsy kayaking and rafting, anything you can do outside we did it.”
She went to school at the University of Colorado for Bio Chem and Fine Arts because she wanted to be a veterinarian, but while working at a clinic she began questioning that path. Similar to human hospitals, she found a lot of pet owners with a lot of debt and an industry that makes them face tough choices. She was a workaholic even then, living in Denver and going to school three days a week and working as a barista. On weekends commuting back to Vail to work brunch service at a restaurant. She was burning the fuse on both ends.
One morning she got up at 4am from her Denver apartment to make the drive to Vail for her 6am brunch shift, she was tired and pulled over to get a coffee at McDonald’s that she was sipping when she fell asleep at the wheel. “We always joke that I’m narcoleptic,” says Natalie. “I’ve fallen asleep standing up at concerts. My friends always have pictures of me sleeping in random places, I just pass out.”
This time wasn’t so humorous. As she was just about to get off the exit next to a bridge she passed out and careened down a hill and into a roundabout, barely missing driving off the bridge. She swerved to the side and down a hill where she hit a lamp post that flipped over and totaled her car. Luckily, she escaped with only minor bruises and a burn from the airbag, but the lamp could have easily went her windshield and killed her. The incident was traumatic and life trajectory changing, “It was like slow the fuck down. I was pretty freaked out to be in cars for awhile, and would have dreams of the sound of car accidents.”
Her boyfriend at the time was a bit of a beer nerd, he and his friends would go out to beer release parties for the latest hyped Firestone Walker release or other buzzy breweries. But they didn’t make her feel welcome. “They knew just enough to know more than me, which felt intimidating….they were assholes to me about it because they would act like it was a dudes club that I couldn’t be involved in.”
To celebrate her and her best friends 21st birthday they went out to Denver institution City, O’ City and she drank a Full Sail Brewing Session blue label and thought about moving to Oregon. The next day she went back to the bar and ordered the classic Flanders Red style beer Duchesse De Bourgogne and felt enamored. After that she would go to the big Argonaut Liquor Store on Colfax and browse the selection of 22oz bombers. She would buy Rogue Dead Guy Ale because she liked the label and enjoyed witchy and spiritual things. When she wanted something sweet it would be a Lindemans fruited lambic, and Great Divide’s Yeti Imperial Stout blew her mind.
“I used to go to the Great Divide Brewing taproom in 2011,” she recalls. “I would sit there and talk to the bartender, I remember the first time I had Colette, I never had a farmhouse beer before. And he explained to me the whole idea of saison and what it’s supposed to taste like and smell like, and what ingredients are in there. And I was like ‘oh that’s fuckin’ cool’”
Natalie’s path to becoming a professional brewer was never a straight line, becoming a brewer had never occurred to her. She was always into creation and studying fine arts built up an interest in colors and hair, “The whole chemistry/science side of color was super cool and that’s what I wanted to do,” she says. So she decided to try out something new and moved to Portland, Oregon to attend the Paul Mitchell School of Beauty.
For work, she transitioned from a valet to bartending at a local brewery and dabbled in learning to homebrew. The creativity of it piqued her interest, but she was a self-described terrible homebrewer.
“It’s sort of unfair to anyone that homebrews to say that I homebrewed,” she says with a laugh. “One time I started homebrewing after work at like 8pm, and we all know how dumb that is. It’s miserable and it’s not fun, I ran out of ice and everything was closed, and I used popsicles to cool down…! It was a nightmare. So yeah I think it’s unfair to say I was a homebrewer. I think I homebrewed like 2 or 3 times very poorly.”
But she met veteran brewer about town Dave “Chowdah” Fleming and told him she wanted to learn to brew professionally. Dave in turn alerted the boys at Burnside Brewing Co., and one day their young assistant brewer Sam Pecoraro (now brewmaster of Von Ebert Brewing) showed up to see Natalie and have a beer. With his recommendation she was hired as a part-timer learning the ropes at Burnside Brewing starting with keg washing and transferring beers. When Sam got a new job as brewer at The Commons they offered Natalie a full-time brewing position under head brewer Chip Conlon. Over the course of 2 years she worked her way up to lead brewer, with Sam playing a pivotal role in her progress.
“Sam was sort of like my brewing school,” she says. “I credit my whole career to the way Sam introduced me to the industry in the first year or two I was brewing. He brought me to events and introduced me to people as a brewer, it was like’ no give her some credit, be nice to her and respect her’. I think that sort of paved the way for me to how I want to be treated now. He not only gave me space in the industry to be who I wanted to be and made sure I was included, and suggested me to be apart of things, and taught me most of the things I know. I didn’t really know how to make a beer, I would just look at beersmith and look at recipes we already had.”
Natalie would scribble her own recipes onto a legal pad and show them to Sam, Travis, Sean and the team at Commons for notes, then sample them on the beer after it was made. Through their constant back and forth and unwavering support might have kept her in the industry pushing forward.
Sam Pecoraro and Natalie
“I’m convinced Natalie would be excellent at creating anything. She has this vigorous objectivity and a willingness to ask questions that other people won’t. I don’t think any of that comes naturally, she’s just worked harder at it than anyone else I know. I’ve always been drawn to that and have tried to be like her in those ways”
With a few years of experience at Burnside Brewing under her belt, Natalie was itching to learn more. “I felt like I was spinning a bit and just wanted some structure and a challenge. I didn’t have the nerdy beer upbringing. It was chill, and I’m not super chill. I need more structure and I want to know why things are the way that they are.”
“I wanted to work with other people who were super nerdy, then I got a job at Breakside with the biggest beer nerd there ever was – Benjamin Edmunds,” says Natalie with a smile.
Natalie first met Ben Edmunds at the Portland Fruit Beer Festival around 2015, but they didn’t really know each other until she got the job at Breakside a few years later. It was right when Breakside was expanding into their Milwaukie production facility and they needed someone who could step up during their intense growth phase from 2015-2018. It was a big learning curve for everyone.
At Breakside Natalie got the full beer school practical education she craved, from learning to record everything, making spreadsheets, and adjusting IBUs, to the ins and outs and why every single choice is made. “I got the full dive in that I really really wanted, and was fortunate to have that safety net of people who have had so much success and I can reference anything.”
“She’s evolved as a brewer in a lot of different ways. One thing that stands out to me is that I think she’s learned how to balance her personal vision for a new beer with how a beer is perceived by her peers and customers. This is a tricky balance to strike— knowing when to subsume your vision to others’ feedback and ideas about it and when to fight for your ideas about what you’ve created. It’s a skill that helps foster awesome conversations around beer and has helped us improve many, many of our brands, not just the ones that Natalie herself designed.”
In 2018 Natalie was a recipient of a Pink Boots Society travel scholarship for cultural exchange in Germany. After the program was completed, Breakside covered her expenses to travel around the country. In Leipzig she learned about traditional gose beer, and when she got back to Oregon, she designed her own which went on to win a GOLD medal at the 2020 Great American Beer Festival.
“That’s my beer baby,” she says of her Breakside Gose. “Sorry if I start crying again, that’s the last beer I brewed at Breakside and when people are like ‘you should put some blackberry in it’ I am like ‘I will burn the building down, you are not putting anything in my gose!’ I mean I will get weird, I will put crazy stuff in beers like oyster stout, like we made a dashi broth out of wort, but don’t fuck with my beers.”
Early on in her brewing career Natalie began developing a passion for lower alcohol beers like gose, petite saison, and lagers. One of her first ever pro-recipes was a cute little pilsner brewed at Burnside Brewing inspired by Hallertau Blanc hops and their super melony attributes.
When she started at Breakside she started digging through their lager recipe books to learn more about them. When she and Ben [Edmunds] both went to Germany in 2018 they got inspired to refresh some of Breakside’s lager recipes. Natalie was blown away by how hoppy the real German Augustiner Pils was, and at how sweet and full-bodied the authentic Helles were. “It just morphed into fixating on a lot of those beers and brewing them over and over and over again. I got really into smoked beers, then got obsessed with Dark Czech lager,” she says. It became her mission.
“I feel like it’s this little secret that lagers are what I have been focusing on. It’s a big part of what I have been working on for a long time,” says Natalie, who says she first got the runway to delve deeply into the wide swath of them when she became head of R & D. If you look at the record of award-winning beers from Natalie’s Breakside Dekum brewery it’s the lower abv stuff like gose, pale ale, jaromir lager, czech pils, white tea lager, and phantasmagoria smoked helles that were the most lauded. Little beers that the mainstream aren’t as familiar with as Breakside’s hoppier side.
The decision to leave Breakside Brewery for Wayfinder Beer wasn’t an easy one, it wasn’t a job that she was looking for. It was an opportunity to grow that fell into her lap and she couldn’t pass up. It was the hardest decision she has had to make in her brewing career thus far.
“I feel like I’m breaking up with someone I really like,” she says. “I have an extreme emotional attachment to Breakside. Ben might not agree because he loves Breakside so much, but I don’t know that anyone will appreciate…sorry if I cry… as much as I do, because it was both the safest and most challenging environment I have been in. I was physically and emotionally safe at Breakside and I think most women don’t have that at work. It was something that I valued more than I can ever really say. I can use my brain and be creative when you are not so worried about being unsafe at work. It’s like you don’t want to leave that beautiful wonderful place, but when you know these opportunities happen it’s like why wouldn’t you, you’d be kicking yourself.”
Dylan Norby has been overseeing the NW Slabtown brewery since 2019 and will now become the new Brewing Innovation Manager. Norby’s Disco Queen red lager won a bronze at the 2021 Great American Beer Festival and he has loads of experience. “Dylan is such a smart, caring and driven individual and we have become such good friends even though we joke that we have nothing in common. I value his opinion and talent so so much. He is super smart and he is science based in a way I am not.” Brandon Whalen and Jesse Shue will become the new brewers at Breakside’s pubs in NW Slabtown and Dekum. “Brandon Whalen is just a tall dork that I like so much, and Jesse has so much experience at Hair of the Dog and Golden Valley that I can’t wait to see what he does,” says Natalie with a smile. “One of the great parts about change is to see the natural shuffle of roles within the company and people getting new opportunities like I did.”
As sad as Natalie is about leaving Breakside, she is excited to translate her skills to a new adventure and cultivate a similar supportive work culture at Wayfinder. “I am really excited to work with lead brewer Matt Speck. There is a lot of stuff to learn and it feels like opportunity and momentum. And it’s going to be a 50% female leadership team. It feels like a cool fit for me.”
“When Natalie started in her R&D role at Breakside, she inherited a huge number of recipes and systems from the brewers who had helped build both Dekum and Milwaukie— and this is similar to what’s about to happen as she moves across town, albeit on a much larger scale than the Dekum pub. She knows how to adjust and adapt good beers and systems and make them great. She’s a tinkerer, and she does her homework and is eager to learn. I think that she’s bringing a formidable skill set that will allow her to take the successes of Wayfinder’s beer and build on them, while also spicing it up down the road with some fresh ideas of her own.”
“I’m ecstatic for her and for Wayfinder, but I’m just as excited for my opportunity to keep watching and learning from my friend.”
Natalie started her new chapter at Wayfinder this week. They plan to keep Wayfinder’s production roughly 50/50 lager and hoppy beer styles, never losing the focus on being lager centric.
“Part of the way I feel about certain styles is very much in alignment with the whole ethos of Wayfinder Beer,” adds Natalie. “I really like the brand they have created, and I am excited to take a spin off of the lager program that Kevin has created at Wayfinder and keep the things that need to be - in that realm, and also another side that’s a little bit more esoteric and with the background that I have. It feeds my soul so much to be around people who like making stuff.”
