Gary Fish, a river’s name and the first brewery in town.

Deschutes Brewery began as a pub. Gary Fish opened The Deschutes Brewery & Public House, a small brewpub in downtown Bend, Oregon, in 1988, the company and English Wikipedia say. The company says it named the business after the Deschutes River, which runs through the town; the International Directory of Company Histories, in its 2004 entry on the firm, says Fish named it for Deschutes County and the river that flows through it. The company also tells readers how to say the name: “Da-Shootz.”

The directory describes Fish as a newcomer both to Oregon and to brewing, and says Deschutes was the first brewery to open in Bend. The start was not smooth. According to the same entry, in December of the first year ten batches in a row had to be dumped, because a design flaw let airborne bacteria from the grain mill reach the beer. Even so, the pub sold 310 barrels in its first year, a figure the company still quotes, and the directory says sales had reached 3,954 barrels by 1992.

Fish’s idea of the business was local from the outset. English Wikipedia, citing the directory, quotes him as saying “We want people to feel like this is, in a lot of ways, theirs.” The company still runs the Bend Public House downtown, and lists it alongside a tasting room and beer garden less than a mile away and a Portland Public House. That Portland pub opened in May 2008 in the Pearl District, in the historic G. G. Gerber Building, English Wikipedia says.

A production brewery, a porter and a pale ale.

Demand soon outgrew the pub. The International Directory of Company Histories says Deschutes broke ground on a 16,000-square-foot production brewery in 1992 and began brewing there in 1993 under brewmaster Bill Pengelly; the new site added a bottling line, which let the company sell packaged beer for the first time. By 1996 it ranked second among Oregon craft brewers behind Widmer Brothers, and in 2000 it passed Widmer to become the top-selling brewery in Oregon and Washington, the directory says.

Its best-known beer is a dark one. The directory says Black Butte Porter held about 90 percent of the Northwest porter market by 2000, and English Wikipedia, citing the Oregon Brewers Guild in 2011, calls it the best-selling craft porter in the United States. Alongside it came Mirror Pond Pale Ale, which won gold at the Great American Beer Festival in 2010, English Wikipedia says. The same article says the spring seasonal Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale was named World’s Best Beer at the World Beer Awards in 2010 and 2012, and that in April 2006 the American-style Inversion IPA replaced the English-style Quail Springs IPA as the brewery’s year-round IPA.

The list has kept growing. English Wikipedia names Fresh Squeezed IPA, Obsidian Stout, Jubelale, Hop Henge and The Abyss among its beers. For its 25th anniversary in 2013, Deschutes brewed a “Class of ’88” series of collaborations with other breweries founded the same year, beginning with a barley wine made with Rogue Ales and North Coast Brewing. Expansions in 2012 and spring 2013 added ten fermentation tanks, and in June 2013 Ernst & Young named Gary Fish a Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year. Today the company also sells non-alcoholic versions of Fresh Squeezed and Black Butte, and two organic beers made with Patagonia Provisions.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all American beer names: Busch, Natural Light, Keystone Light, Rolling Rock, Bell’s, Deschutes and Allagash. American beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from independent breweries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger brewing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a stadium bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle or can than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packaged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

An East Coast plan, a river pledge and an independent owner.

Deschutes once planned a second brewery on the other side of the country. In March 2016 it announced an East Coast production site in Roanoke, Virginia, and bought 49 acres there, the Roanoke Times reported; a tasting room opened downtown in 2017. English Wikipedia says the company paused the brewing plans in 2018, citing slowing beer sales, and in 2021 closed the tasting room and cancelled the project, citing the economic slowdown of the pandemic, as Willamette Week reported in December 2021. In 2016 Deschutes was the eighth-largest craft brewery in the United States, English Wikipedia says.

The river also figures in its environmental work. English Wikipedia says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named Deschutes a Green Power Partner in 2011, that it received the Central Oregon Environmental Center’s Sustainability Award in 2012, and that from 2012 it pledged to return one billion gallons of water a year to the Deschutes River through the Deschutes River Conservancy’s water-leasing programme. Its record on climate policy drew attention in 2019, when, The Bulletin of Bend reported, the brewery withdrew from Oregon Businesses for Climate and opposed HB 2020, a proposed state cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Unlike Bell’s, Deschutes describes itself as family and employee owned since 1988, says it sells more than 225,000 barrels a year, and says its beer is available in all 50 states and a few other countries. Its stated mission is “creating community over damn tasty beer.”

A naming note helps when searching. Deschutes is also the name of the river, of Deschutes County and of the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon, so “Deschutes Brewery” is the clearer search for the company.

For a design guide, Deschutes shows how a brewery can take its name from a river, and how a brewpub’s first porter can become the beer that carries a company. Compare Bell’s Brewery, the Kalamazoo brewery that began selling beer three years earlier, and Allagash, another American craft brewery. For this guide we use Cascade green, river blue and porter brown with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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