Portrait of a Pacific NW Brewery with Full Sail's Irene Firmat

Portrait of a Pacific NW Brewery with Full Sail's Irene Firmat:

Full Sail's Irene Firmat and Jamie Emmerson

On Monday with the news that Henry Weinhard's beers would no longer be produced in Oregon as parent company Miller is not renewing their brewing contract with Full Sail Brewing got me talking to co-Founder and CEO Irene Firmat and her story alone warrants an entirely separate article.

Full Sail Brewing is one of Oregon's biggest and best craft brewers, one of our proudest achievements really because it's a company like few others. In addition to being employee owned they have also helped to pioneer Barrel-Aged beers with their Black Gold and Top Sail series and fresh hop beers with the Lupulin series. They operated 2 brewpubs and a test brewery that let world famous brewer John Harris play with his own devices. Lastly they reaped profits from contract brewing Henry Weinhard's beers and their own popular brands that they invested into energy, time and cost saving sustainable features like the incredible Mash Filtration System they installed that processes water more efficiently and creates less waste.

However over the last 2 years I feel like I have seen and heard less from Full Sail than ever before. One blow was news earlier this year that Brewmaster John Harris was leaving the company after 10 years to start his own brewery. Before that Full Sail had axed most of the Brewmasters series of beers that often put out their most interesting brews. Recently I was disappointed to learn they would not be brewing any of the Lupulin series of fresh hop beers this year. Now top that all off with the news that MillerCoors is pulling the plug on contracting out to Full Sail and it makes me wonder what is up. Happily, Irene's Firmat is happy to talk about these things and is one of the easiest top 25 brewery CEO's to get ahold of.
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