USA, OR: Mt Tabor Brewing ceases operations

Mt Tabor Brewing, a Southeast Portland brewery known for making classic pub-style beers for 13 years along with running a pizza-focused pub in Clark County, has ceased operations, the brewery announced on August 7 on social media.

Reached by phone, founder Eric Surface told The Oregonian/OregonLive that issues with the lease of the Vancouver Pub, in the Felida neighborhood of Clark County, were among the contributing factors in his decision.

He also said the cost of running a business in the current economic climate has been a significant challenge since the pandemic.

“Market trends, cost of labor, Portland utilities being significantly higher than they were just a few years ago — the cost of running a brewery is just brutal right now,” he said.

He said legal and financial considerations prevent him from closing the pub and simply making beer to distribute to Mt Tabor’s numerous retail accounts.

“The whole restaurant industry has never recovered post-COVID,” he said. “Recovery to where you were before is nonexistent. Everybody’s habits are so different now.”

Surface said he is stepping away from the Vancouver lease and is unsure what will replace the pub there, which opened in 2016. He said all of his employees were notified ahead of time and have been “paid and taken care of.”

He is looking to sell the brewhouse, and his Portland landlord is willing to work with a new tenant, Surface said.

Surface got his start as a homebrewer in a Mount Tabor warehouse in the early 2000s, making beer with a buddy whose family owned a restaurant. They supplied the restaurant with its beer, and soon their accounts began to accumulate.

But family needs took his partner out of the growing business in 2010, and the operation was losing its warehouse space, so Surface, still working full time in sales with frequent travel, in 2011 hauled the small brewery across the Columbia River closer to his Felida home. He opened a small brewhouse and tasting room in downtown Vancouver while continuing the hunt to find a suitable space for a production brewery.

He eventually found it in the Buckman neighborhood, at Southeast Ash Street and 11th Avenue. There, in a former Darigold ice cream warehouse, he built a 15-barrel brewhouse, doing much of the plumbing and fitting work himself. The pizza pub followed a few years later.

He said it’s painful to close the business.

“Obviously yeah it hurts,” he said. “We grew it into a piece of the community in Vancouver and brought classic styles into Portland by making regular beer-drinker beers and not foo-foo beers with weird stuff in it. That’s what we’ve always done. Normal beers for normal beer drinkers who like to drink good beer.

“I’m sad to see it go, but it’s been a fun 13-year run of making beer and doing what we enjoyed,” he said. “It’s allowed me time to spend with my kids when they were young. It was a great opportunity and experience.”

Surface said he’s sure what’s next for him but he has some opportunities, though not in the beer industry.

“Now I can actually be a normal person again,” he said. “Go fishing after work and do all the things I haven’t had time to do over the past eight years since the restaurant opened.”

And there’s one more benefit he’s looking forward to.

“It’ll be nice to not be judged,” he said, “when people see me drinking something other than my own beers from time to time.”

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