To the crew at Santiam Brewing, Thursday night “choir practice” was always rich in notes. Well, at least those of the tasting variety.
Before beer production began in 2012, nine friends and beer lovers saw their sipping as a weekly pastime under said musical guise. Eventually, it became a daily way of life for the business partners at the Salem, Oregon, brewery.
“A couple of the guys were into homebrewing and we used to drink their beer,” Brian Kelly, the brewery corporate president, explains. “We decided that the stuff they were making was just as good as any other beer.” Today, patrons of the brewery might argue that it’s better.
In the true fashion of entrepreneurship, Santiam has tackled beer making through a brave approach: giving the people what they need, even if they don’t realize they want it at first. “We’re one of very few breweries that specializes in cask ales, traditional ales,” Kelly says. “It’s kind of a lost art.”
Unlike most beers produced in today’s industry, cask ales undergo a secondary fermentation process in the cask they are served from, allowing natural carbonation to occur. This uncommon process increases flavor potential, as both artificial carbonation and colder serving temperatures can mask flavor. Santiam finds themselves revealing the cold—apparently too cold—hard truth that many beer drinkers don’t realize they are being deprived of.
“Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is slowly bringing back a grassroots movement for people to try cask ale and really feel what real beer tastes like,” says Kelly of the English movement. Santiam Brewing decided it was time for Oregon to be cask ale-clad as well, thus introducing the concept to Salem.
The day Santiam opened its doors to the public, they were welcomed by such an eager cask-craving crowd that “we were terrified we might run out of beer,” Kelly recounts. But no complaints were uttered from the brewers. Even at the smallest stage in production—when the brewery inhabited a mere 1,000 square-foot space—the crew was already thinking of ways to satisfy Salem’s beer drinkers. Even at that size, “we made it so that people could come in and have a beer or fill a growler,” he says.
Eventually, empty growlers and even empty, growling stomachs were no more, as the brewery partnered with food carts and later, next-door Black Sheep Catering to provide food for hungry guests, who could text their order to Black Sheep and have their food delivered straight to the tasting room. “We’ve always encouraged our guests to order food or even bring a sack lunch,” says Kelly, striving to host a comfortable environment.
And with such an expansive brew list, customers don’t have to choose just one beverage to wash that meal down. “We’ve got a family of core beers that we really like,” he says, listing a range of alluring titles including the rum barrel-aged coconut-infused Pirate Stout, the hoppy Bohemian-style Infiltrator and the Extra Special Premium English Pale Ale Spitfire Amber, one of their cask ales. Additionally, the Abbey Porter, fermented with a Trappist-style yeast, made the brewery’s first bottling run at the beginning of December.
Adding to such successes, Kelly is proud to share news of Santiam’s upcoming production room expansion featuring double the tanks and a higher number of fermenters and brite tanks, plus the formation of a business cooperative.
“There are now four craft breweries in Salem, and we’ve formed the Salem Brewery Association,” says Kelly. “The goal is to make Salem a drinking destination.”
With double the beer on the rise and quadruple the drinking partners locked down, Santiam Brewing and its palate-developing hometown of Salem may just be the lost art the town and beyond have been searching for.
