Hey folks. I was out of the country when a couple of big Oregon announcements dropped. They're worth talking about because they point to something I think we'll see a lot more of: small breweries banding together.
We're six years into what I'd call the time of troubles—Covid, then a contracting market. These two moves suggest a shared strategy is emerging. Here's what's going on.
Two Announcements, One Theme
First, from The New School: Adam Milne (Old Town Brewing) launched Go Self Distro, a self-distribution collective in Oregon with plans to take it nationwide. With distribution options shrinking for craft breweries, cideries, and beverage suppliers, the collective gives smaller producers a way to reach retailers without going through traditional wholesalers.
Second, from Bend's KTVZ: The Rhine family, owners of Cascade Lakes Brewing, purchased Crux Fermentation Project from Paul Evers and Larry Sidor. That acquisition is part of a larger move—the Oregon Beverage Collective (OBC), a coalition of five Central Oregon brands: Cascade Lakes, Crux, Silver Moon, GoodLife, and Tumalo Cider.
Both announcements share a theme: collectivize. What's notable is that it's happening among smaller breweries, not just the mid-sized players who've been experimenting with shared models for years.
The Oregon Beverage Collective: Merger Plus Collaboration
The OBC is an interesting hybrid. On one side, you have a straightforward acquisition: the Rhines buy out Evers and Sidor and own Crux. Legally, Cascade Lakes and Crux remain separate breweries under the same ownership. On the other side, you have the collective—a separate entity that includes all five companies.
Four of the five remain independent. But they're pooling certain shared costs. Production is the big one. Andy Rhine told KTVZ: "Almost all brewing will be transitioning to Crux Fermentation Project's facility. What's important to emphasize is that each brand will continue to create its own distinct beers—the recipes, styles, and personalities aren't changing. We're simply bringing production into a shared, state-of-the-art space."
The details are still under wraps, but Rhine hinted at savings on bulk purchases and efficiencies on the wholesale side. That's the logic: share the expensive stuff, keep the brands distinct.
Why This Makes Sense
Brewing is capital-intensive. A brewhouse, cellar, packaging line, labor, and real estate add up fast. If you're making something truly bespoke—De Garde, or local Bend favorites like Funk Fauna—a dedicated facility matters. But for standard ales and lagers that most systems can handle? With all the excess capacity in the industry, buying a small, inefficient facility when you could brew down the street on a bigger, better system is hard to justify.
A lot has changed over the decades. Breweries used to be exotic. Customers were drawn to them. That romance was part of building a "craft" consciousness. And if you wanted to make a thousand barrels a year, you needed your own brewery—there wasn't another option.
That shifted, in my view, when taprooms started severing the connection between "beer" and "where it's made" in consumers' minds. People paid more attention to the beer than the brewhouse. Often there wasn't a brewery onsite. With dozens of taprooms in a city, the physical brewery lost its mystique. By the mid-teens, "brewery" meant anywhere you could buy a company's beer. The taproom was the anchor, not the attached brewhouse.
A decade ago, the OBC announcement might have sparked pushback. Can GoodLife and Silver Moon really call themselves breweries if Crux is making their beer? Reddit would have had opinions. Today, almost nobody cares. Shared production is just another operational choice.
Distribution: A Different Challenge
Distribution is its own beast. I'm planning to dig into GoSelfDistro with some actual reporting, so more on that later. But it fits the same theme: banding together, even loosely, can make sense.
For small breweries, distribution is tough. Wholesale through a distributor costs around a third of your margin. Self-distribution avoids that, but it's like running two businesses—sales calls, ordering, inventory, delivery. None of that has much to do with making beer.
There's also a numbers problem. Most cities have dozens of breweries and a handful of distributors. Getting noticed in a wholesaler's portfolio of hundreds of brands and countless SKUs is difficult.
GoSelfDistro is a tech hack for one piece of that puzzle: it creates a central database for retailers who want to order beer. It doesn't handle inventory or delivery, but it does connect retailers directly to breweries. The logic is obvious—and breweries are voting with their feet. When Milne announced the launch to The New School, four breweries were listed. Yesterday it was 16. Today it's 19.
What to Watch
Collectivization isn't new. Mid-sized breweries have been testing shared production and distribution for years. What does seem new is seeing it at a smaller scale—and in such quick succession. I expect we'll see more of this. It's a development worth bookmarking.
Operational discipline matters more than ever in a market like this. BrewLedger is built to support it—see how it works when you're ready.