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Ancestry Brewing dropped anchor in a beer desert three years ago, and has been throwing out life preservers to parched neighborhoods ever since.
When father-and-son team Jerry and Jeremy Turner opened the flagship pub and production facility in an industrial park on the edge of a Tualatin wetland in 2016, the city was surrounded by brewery-rich towns but, up to that point, had none of its own. Then, just a few months after launching the brand in the suburbs, Ancestry moored alongside the Springwater Corridor, giving beer-bleak Sellwood a taproom.
Now the company is docked in the far reaches of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard, in a sprawling ground-floor space beneath three stories of apartments. It looks as if it had been designed by someone from one of those HGTV house-flipping shows, with crisp white accent walls adorned with the brewery's A-shaped anchor logo—a nod to the Navy careers of both the elder Turner and the brewery's cellar manager, Mel Long.
Although Ancestry has been connecting a good portion of its taps to well-executed, less-trendy styles, including an award-winning Irish red, the IPAs are the standouts. The hazy Aussie bobs ebulliently between bitterness and gushes of mango fruit, while Ancestry IPA is pine-forward followed by a splash of citrus.
But, really, why not try them all? You'll find generous pours in a sampler that arrives on a steel tray shaped like the metal flank in the logo. Take your 10-pound drink holster to the hidden patio where blue-and-white umbrellas bloom like flowers across the concrete pad. Though it might appear to be exclusively for the apartments' tenants, the space is open to anyone who's thirsty—though craft beer-adjacent living might motivate you to look into locking down a lease.
Related: Ancestry Brewing Has a Nautical Theme But Exists Only In Deserts. Discuss.
DRINK: Ancestry Brewing, 4334 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-764-9574, ancestrybrewing.com. Noon-9 pm Sunday-Wednesday, noon-10 pm Thursday, noon-10:30 pm Friday-Saturday.
