Heater Allen Brewing & Gold Dot Beer partner with Day One Distribution
Oregon’s first craft lager brewery Heater Allen, and their premium side project Gold Dot Beer, have partnered with Day One Distribution for wholesale outside of Portland-metro and Yamhill County.
McMinnville, Oregon’s Heater Allen Brewing was created by winemaker Rick Allen in 2007. From the back of his garage, Rick Allen would sling bottles of hand labeled German-style lagers to people hitting the local wineries as the vino tourism took off in the valley. Before long Rick was selling kegs and bottles to Portland craft beer connoisseurs during the lead up to the renaissance period of 2010. At the time, no one around here was brewing lagers as the industry was still in it’s nascent stages and focused on ales and extreme flavors. But Heater Allen found their fans, developing a cult-like following and slow but steady growth that left them well positioned for the resurgence of craft lagers in the last decade.
Rick’s daughter Lisa Allen started helping out in the brewery in 2009 and as of 2017 took over as the full-time head brewer. Heater Allen has only become more accomplished winning medals like a World Beer Cul Gold medal and Oregon Beer Awards Silver medal for their flagship Pilsner. Heater Allen was already considered one of the premiere lager breweries in the country before Lisa’s partner Kevin Davey joined the company in 2022 as a part owner.
Davey, the founding Brewmaster of Wayfinder Beer, and before that with stints at Gordon-Biersch, Firestone Walker, and Chuckanut Brewing, already had his lager bonafides. At the same time announcing the new ownership/management team behind Heater Allen, came the new of new off-shoot brand Gold Dot Beer. Since officially launching in 2023, Gold Dot has specialized in premium lagers and IPAs, winning the competitive Bitburger Pilsner Challenge in 2024 for their ‘Pils de Pils’ and a silver medal for ‘Helles’ in the 2025 Oregon Beer Awards.
In 2023 the brewery was able to take over their entire building after a neighborhing winery moved out. Thus began the process of a large cellar remodel to build a new beer garden, bring in a food truck, remodel the taproom, and greatly increase brewing capacity by 400 barrels annually, a number they hope to keep up and grow even further.
“The idea was always to find a way to get more beer out in the state at some point. We really only have one full time sales guy and he also does pretty much all of the deliveries, so we just have never had a huge capacity to accommodate every place that wanted to carry our beer,” says Lisa Allen.
The new Heater Allen/Gold Dot taproom is a work-in-progress, but already looking far more comfortable and stylish with a German Bier hall meets 70’s dive bar vibe. The brewing space has been moved out of the main taproom space, making room for a long vinyl banquette bench with matching tables and chairs. The walls have been painted and lined with wainscotting and decorated with vintage beer memorabilia. Matching tables and chairs, new bar stools, and 90’s light fixtures set the tone. Outside in the beer garden sits Brassi’s, a 1983 carnival cart repurposed into a wood-fired Italian food truck developing a following.
As of this week, Heater Allen and Gold Dot Beers are now available via Day One Distribution outside of the Portland-metro area. This will help get their beers more regularly to all parts of the state, especially central and southern Oregon. For a premiere lager brewery like Heater Allen, they had options for wholesale but ultimately Lisa said they had “heard really good things about Day One from many of our mutual accounts as well as other breweries that they carry. They are also getting beer out to the far reaches of the state more frequently than any other distributor.”
Heater Allen Pils and Gold Dot Helles are the year-round selections on draft and in cans with a constantly rotating Gold Dot IPA and a list of seasonally appropriate flavors, collabs, and one-offs.
“We don't have a set seasonal calendar, we like to give ourselves a bit of wiggle room to play it by ear, but we do have a few beers we release every year such as Heater Allen Bobtoberfest in the late summer and HA Sandy Paws before Thanksgiving. We also have a batch of Gold Dot Pils de Pils that we will be releasing at the end of the month, we've been trying to release that at least quarterly,” says Lisa.
Heater Allen and Gold Dot Beer now via Day One Distribution anywhere outside of Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas & Yamhill Counties.
