In January of this year, ColdFire Brewing entered into a distribution agreement with Bigfoot Beverages, a Eugene-based company that serves Southwestern and Central Oregon. It was a giant step for the Dan and Stephen Hughes, the brothers who launched the brewery in 2016. This year, ColdFire will move the bulk of its operations to a 20-barrel production brewery in Junction City, about 15 miles north of Eugene. They’ve also added long-time Willamette Valley brewer Dave Marliave to the team.

“We were the third largest self-distributing brewery in Oregon,” says Dan. “We hit this tipping point, we hit 2,000 barrels, and you have to make decisions about how you’re going to sell it. You can’t sell at Safeway-Albertsons without a merchandiser. So your options are to sell farther away, and it’s logistically more challenging.”

They considered starting their own distribution company, which has ample precedent in the country, but the tradeoff of control over their product and the immense amount of work just didn’t pencil out. The Hughes both prioritize time with their families, and are already stretched thin during the transition to the production facility.

To that end, hiring Dave Marliave is a boon for ColdFire. Marliave founded Flat Tail Brewing in Corvallis in 2010; it closed in 2020, and he brewed at Yachats brewing before starting his New Spring Beer brand at Calapooia Brewing in Albany in 2021. Now, he’s winding that down to step into this new opportunity.

“I’m very excited for the challenge ahead, and couldn’t be much more thrilled to work with Dan and Stephen and the whole CF crew. Definitely feel like this will be a change for the positive in more than one way.” Marliave will be working with Head Brewer Shawn Grover and Fermentation Specialist Marc Smith at the Junction City brewery.

The new facility will more than double ColdFire’s output in the next couple years. Dan Hughes expects to hit 5,000 barrels in 2025. Right now, the 3-vessel steam-heated brew system, built by Metalcraft and purchased from Buoy Brewing in Astoria, is operational, but there are still glycol lines and other liquid and gas plumbing to be done, as well as more tanks to install.

A particular, and pretty major, quirk of brewing in Junction City is the water quality. Unlike Eugene and Springfield, which get their water from the McKenzie and Willamette Rivers, JC uses ground water drawn from cisterns. That water contains high levels of iron and other minerals; not ideal for brewing beer.

Though that came as a surprise to the Hughes, they decided to make lemonade by installing a high output carbon filter and reverse osmosis system, which strips the water of nearly all minerals and supplies 100% of the water used in the brewery.

“It comes out like mountain spring water, between 1-2ppm total dissolved solids,” says Stephen.

“We built our own water supply so our tanks are being washed with RO water,” says Dan. The system can push up to 11,000 gallons of water per day. A 2,500 gallon tank stores the filtered water and feeds it to hot- and cold-liquor tanks (liquor is the technical term for water used during brewing… it’s just water.).

Starting with mineral-free water will allow the brewers to tailor the water to each batch of beer using mineral “salts” such as gypsum (calcium sulfate), calcium chloride, and magnesium sulfate. Without getting to technical, the mineral content of brewing water affects the perception of bitterness, fullness of body, hop aromas, and pH of the beer, and provides essential nutrients for fermentation.

So, where will all of this new beer go? “Right now, Lane County takes 60% of our beer. The endgame is to see how deep in Oregon we can be,” says Dan. The decision to expand did not come lightly, but was made with consideration for the employees and based on demand for ColdFire beer.

“We sell well in Oregon, and routinely run out of product. Our choices were to shrink and let people go, or grow and keep them on.” Dan cites direct requests from accounts as another reason for expansion. “I think there’s room for us to make 5,000 barrels.”

For some scale, a busy brewpub that sells most of its beer over the counter may produce 400-800 barrels per year; that’s a small craft brewery (one barrel is 31 gallons; there are 124 pints in a full size keg). But 5,000 barrels is on the low end of “medium-sized.” In 2019, Boneyard produced around 24,000 barrels; Ninkasi around 53,000 (according to an OLCC report).

As 5,000 barrels is a lot to manage, enter the distributor. As the middlemen in the three-tier distribution system, their basic function is to receive beer from the producer and, you guessed it, distribute it to retailers.

Distributing beer in the U.S. is remarkably complicated, with both state and federal regulations to abide by. For a brewery, signing on with a distributor has its benefits and pitfalls, and requires the continued support of a brewery-employed sales team in order to be successful. Not all distributors are alike; some have enormous catalogs of alcoholic beverages from around the world, and others focus on a more curated set of breweries and limit their clientele to select outlets. A contract with a distributor in Oregon is exclusive, so the brewery or other distributors may not sell beer to retailers in the contracted distributor’s territory.

Bigfoot Beverages is somewhat centralized, leaning toward the larger side in terms of their catalog, with a broad selection of Oregon beverage producers, some national accounts, and a couple of importers.

“We have a strong relationship with Eric [Forrest] and Andy [Moore], who started Bigfoot, and we admire how they’ve run it, their craft beverage program, their fairness and the way they work.” Dan also acknowledged the added layers of challenge; ColdFire needs to maintain its marketing in addition to being top-of-mind for distributor representatives, who sell draught and packaged product to accounts ranging from grocery stores to bars and restaurants.

ColdFire is in its third year of having a production calendar, which is an important milestone for a small brewery and a key component of the brewery-distributor relationship. This helps with ordering, stock rotation, and keeping grocery store slots—precious real estate—occupied.

Staying relevant in a saturated market is a complicated effort. “You look at people who are setting the bar for quality in the industry, see what they’re doing form the top down – from branding to staff and quality of beverage, winning awards. It’s a recipe for success,” says Stephen.

Dan gave some specific examples. “People drink beer of a remarkably better quality [than a decade ago], and I think you’ll see brands fall off because they just got caught up in the rising tide. Before the pandemic, it still felt like the wild west of the brewing world, and now it feels more like a scalpel as opposed to a blunt object. I was in Southern Oregon at a brewery, and they were still naming their beers with misogynistic names, and there’s just no place for that. The industry is rapidly maturing, so if you’re not doubling down on quality, you’re not gonna make it.”

During this transition, the 20-barrel tanks from Coldfire’s taproom will move to Junction City, but the 10-barrel brewhouse will stay. This will ultimately be Stephen’s site for R&D and barrel-aged beers. He is excited at the prospect of devoting more of his time to wild ales, which have won awards at the Great American Beer Festival, World Beer Cup, and Oregon Beer Awards. “I’ve had to dump a lot of barrel-aged beers because we just haven’t had time for it. The projects that make it out are the reflection of a lot of patience and work. It’ll be nice not to be tripping over myself to make a barrel-aged project.”