Buoy Beer has stopped brewing in Astoria, Oregon, after 13 years, The Astorian reported Saturday, Nov. 14, in a feature by William Dean. According to that account, Great Frontier Beverages, the Eugene-based parent of Ninkasi Brewing, acquired the company in September and is already brewing the brand’s most popular beers. The people who built the brewery, Dean writes, will have nothing to do with what comes next. Great Frontier did not comment for the story. Co-founder and chief executive Dave Kroening and Great Frontier head Nikos Ridge both declined to be interviewed, and the terms of the sale have not been disclosed.
We are relying on that single reported feature, and a few points in it are still unsettled. The Astorian says the last beer left in Buoy Beer’s tanks and barrels will be canned or poured over the next few weeks, after which the brewhouse on the south bank of the Columbia River is expected to be mothballed, along with the canning line and lagering tanks next door. No final pour date is given. About 25 remaining workers will lose their jobs, with severance, down from more than 100 at the brewery’s peak. As of this morning, Buoy Beer’s own website still listed regular hours for the Duane Street taproom and still described the beer as brewed and canned in Astoria, with no notice of the shutdown on the pages we checked.
How Buoy Beer reached a brand-only ending
Buoy Beer was founded in 2013 by Luke Colvin, David Kroening and Dan Hamilton, who turned a former fish-processing building on the Astoria waterfront into a brewery, taproom and restaurant. Production peaked at 19,000 barrels in 2020, The Astorian says, and the company expanded into a larger brewhouse at Astor and Eighth streets in September 2021. In June 2022, aging pilings failed and destroyed much of the original waterfront building. Kroening later said the company could not afford a multimillion-dollar reconstruction. In a five-paragraph public statement quoted by The Astorian, he called the September deal a “partnership” and wrote that Buoy Beer had not been able to “regain its footing” after the collapse. Dean argues that Great Frontier now has complete control and that the arrangement is not much of a partnership. That is the newspaper’s characterization; Great Frontier has not answered it on the record.
Head brewer Matt Jones, speaking in October, shortly after the sale, told The Astorian he was sad for his coworkers and that the supermarket version of the familiar buoy logo “just won’t be the same.” Jack Harris, co-founder of Astoria’s Fort George Brewery, was blunter: “There’s no passion behind it. It’s just intellectual property now.” Amanda Lehman, an eight-year employee, said there was more sadness than shock when Kroening delivered the news, and that “a part of Astoria is going away.”
The brand-only shape of the deal will be familiar to readers who have watched other names outlive their breweries. We covered Sazerac’s purchase of Full Sail Brewing, which ended Full Sail’s beers and closed the Hood River pub, and True North Beverage’s acquisition of the Fargo Brewing brand two years after that North Dakota brewery went bankrupt. Those stories do not all end the same way. Full Sail’s beers were retired. Fargo’s name is being prepared for a return under a new operator. This Oregon deal, as The Astorian tells it, is the version in which the cans stay on shelves while the Astoria brewhouse goes quiet. It also sits in the same contraction we have been tracking in our roundup of California craft brewery closings, even though Buoy Beer’s plant is in Oregon: the brand survives, the production floor does not.
Pilot House Distilling, described as Buoy Beer’s sister company, and a downtown taproom-bar were not part of the Great Frontier deal and are expected to keep operating. The Astorian says initial plans call for the current Duane Street taproom, in the former Reach Break Brewing space at 1343 Duane St., to become a pub that still pours Buoy Beer. That is a plan, not a confirmed conversion, and no date has been announced. Until Great Frontier or Kroening says more, the firm public points are the ones in Dean’s report: brewing in Astoria has stopped, the remaining beer has a few weeks left, and the brand is already being brewed somewhere else.
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