“We’re hoping that the high quality and affordable pricing will allow us to establish our brand as Portland’s home grown dive bar lager.” - Nate Yovu, of Oregon City’s incoming Yovu Beer Company.

After 8 years in operation, Oregon City, Oregon’s Coin Toss Brewing closed on their own terms with their last day of service on February 11th, 2024. Coin Toss is exiting gracefully, and handing the keys to their space to hungry nano startup Yovu Beer. Coin Toss was founded by former KPAM-AM radio personality and host, Tim Hohl, and cultivated a brewery that saw experienced veteran brewers like Dave Fleming of Lompoc Brewing, Lucky Lab, and Kells Brewery, and Chip Conlon of Burnside Brewing Co. and Roots Organic Ales making a solid and varied lineup of beers for the Clackamas County beer community.

Yovu Beer is off to an exciting fresh start in the Oregon City space, even after officially launching at the New School presents New Oregon Breweries Showcase in 2022 and being featured in our most anticipated new breweries story of that year, they are relatively unknown. Brewery owner and brewer Nate Yovu got started as a chef at Burnside Brewing Co., and then trained to be a brewer with head brewer Chip Conlon (many years before Coin Toss), and co-owner / brewmaster Jay McAdam. In 2014, Nate co-founded BTU Brasserie, one of the most unique Oregon breweries in the last decade as it served as not just a vehicle for approachable beers but top notch Szechuan Chinese food.

Since BTU Brasserie closed in 2017, Nate Yovu has been working for Imperial Yeast and honing his skills in the lab, mastering lager fermentations. Yovu is his family name, and the focus of the beers are American lagers, iterations of both past, current, and potential future evolutions. American lagers, also known as industrial lagers, sometimes pre-prohibition lagers, are brewed with corn or rice as an adjunct addition to barley.

“I'm shooting for what the BJCP guidelines define as American Lager and American Light Lager,” Nate Yovu told us in 2022 ahead of Yovu Beer’s debut. “The difference being Pre-Prohibition lagers have as much as double the IBUs as they tried to emulate the lagers of Europe. This is not to say I wont ever make this style, it's just not my primary focus. This leads to the future exploration of lagers where I'm looking forward to playing around with ingredients and techniques to come up with some fun stuff.”

Choosing the right yeast strains and knowing how to achieve the right results is part of the Yovu Beer challenge. “I plan to use yeast strains from some well known American lager breweries and anything else I can get my hands on to make great beers,” says Yovu, adding, “I would be foolish to think that you could run a successful brewery without making IPA, so I will definitely make a few of those.”

Yovu Beer has had success brewing house beers for neighborhood bars such as the Retro Game Arcade, and a grand opening beer for the new Mosaic Taphouse, and a 10th anniversary beer for Imperial Bottle Shop & Taproom to name a few. Their expansion into Coin Toss Brewing’s facility in Oregon City won’t change those plans, as Nate Yovu says his target market is still small dive bars and local music venue in Portland. What will change is the expanded production will power Yovu’s emerging flagship “Golden Lager” into 16oz cans and 4-packs with aims to compete with the cheap dive bar macros on draft lines and in coolers around the Portland metro-area. Coin Toss had some similar partnerships with popular local bars like Coasters, and Yovu plans to make their official Coaster IPA brewed with spruce tips harvested from the Oregon coast, and the Coaster Cream Ale. 

“We’re currently selling 1/2bbl kegs for $116.00,” says Nate Yovu. “The same price as Rainier/ PBR/ 10 Barrel Pub Beer. Our 16oz cans introductory price will be $28.50 a case, inline with macro imports. To maintain these prices we will need stay independent, self distributed and move volume.”

That is a pretty incredible price when you consider that most craft breweries average is more like $150 - $170 a 50ltr keg (_____) for a lager. The economics are hard to pencil out on this small scale, to help make it work they are contract brewing additional capacity with Occidental Brewing in St. Johns, and Nate is now a full-time one-man operation brewing and self-distributing beers himself to keep costs low. Unfortunately for the Oregon City community this comes at the cost of a public taproom, as Yovu has no current plans to have a public facing facility.

“We will do tap takeovers and other special events around the city whenever possible. We look at the great city of Portland and all the amazing things happening here as our taproom. We just want to be part of all the fun events put on by all the amazing bar owners,” says Nate Yovu. “We’re hoping that the high quality and affordable pricing will allow us to establish our brand as Portland’s home grown dive bar lager.”