The Oregon Brewers Festival Begins in Portland

In July 1988, the first Oregon Brewers Festival was held at Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland. Art Larrance, cofounder of Portland Brewing Company, helped create the event after drawing inspiration from Munich’s Oktoberfest. Organizers invited twenty-two emerging breweries from Oregon and elsewhere in the western United States to present their beers beneath large festival tents. Approximately 15,000 people attended, far exceeding the organizers’ expectations. At a time when Oregon had only a small number of operating microbreweries, the outdoor festival gave the public a highly visible opportunity to compare independently brewed beers. It grew into one of the United States’ longest-running major craft beer festivals and helped establish Portland and Oregon as prominent centers of modern American beer culture.