They began showing up at Washington liquor stores in July, and at grocery stores, and convenience stores, looking like they were preparing for a beer run a la Smokey and the Bandit. One man bought 22 cases of Olympia stubbies.
The playing field isn’t nearly as level today as it was in 1950.
He didn’t get them to peddle on eBay.com after the public supply was gone. He bought them to drink. “He was adamant that he wanted his favorite beer to last another year,” said Sarah Edenstrom, wine and beer manager at Ralph’s in Tumwater, where Olympia beer was brewed and packaged until June.
The brand lives on—like Ballantine, Lone Star, Lucky Lager, Schlitz, Natty Bo and so many others that survived the death of the breweries where they were made—but with production moving to a Miller Brewing plant in Irwindale, CA, there’ll be no more stubbies. Those oddly shaped bottles would only slow the production lines. Olympia will be sold in cans and possibly long-neck bottles.
Years ago, scores of brands such as Olympia brightened the American beer landscape, together forming what was known as the “second tier” of brewing (regional breweries smaller than the country’s giants, but larger than today’s rising regionals). Their disappearance left holes in their collective communites that went beyond beer.
Tumwater was the latest victim.
There are sadder parts to the story. Until near the end, the brewery employed about 400, with an annual payroll of $26 million. Because a ripple effect created an estimated 2.4 jobs for each employee, Thurston County’s economy will take an even harder hit. Residents hope that another manufacturing company will buy the sprawling complex from Miller for the $15 million price tag, but they hold little hope that it will be another brewing operation.
Built in 1896, the plant was known nationally for producing Olympia, brewed beside waterfalls on the Deschutes River, making the slogan, “It’s the water,” famous. But it was a dinosaur that still would have been judged woefully inefficient had it approached its 4 million barrel per year capacity instead of the 1.7 million barrels brewed in 2002.
With the closing of Rainier in Seattle, Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, and the Tumwater plant, the Northwest has lost all its old regional breweries. That makes the Redhook Ale Brewery in Washington, a microbrewery started just 21 years ago and now producing 226,000 barrels a year, the largest in the region.
“A lot of capacity has been removed,” said Redhook founder Paul Shipman, talking about more than the Tumwater brewery. In fact, about 18 million barrels of brewing capacity at old-line brewers has been eliminated since 1997. “I’m sorry for the people who lost their jobs. I regret the loss of pieces of history and tradition. At the same time, there wasn’t room for them. This sets the stage for something good to happen, specifically for microbreweries.”
