Saturday, June 27, 2015

Vancouver Brewery History mural

The next stop on today's VanWa mural tour is Brewery History, on a wall at Main St. & Evergreen Blvd. This was created by local artist Tamra Davisson for Vancouver's 2012 Summer of Murals event. The mural shows a few historic beer bottles from the city's erstwhile branch of the Lucky Lager empire and its various local predecessors. The mural's info page goes into this history further than I care to, and tracks all the corporate mergers and renamings over the years, up to 1985 when the Vancouver brewery closed its doors. The one interesting bit is that Star Brewing (one of the predecessor companies) briefly employed brewer Henry Weinhard before he moved on and started his own operation in Portland. During the 1990s there was a short-lived revival of the "Star Brewing" name, but that company was unrelated to the original one other than the name. I imagine I would have tried their products once or twice, but I have no specific memory of it. I've never heard anyone claim to miss them, or even remember them. At last report, circa 1996, they'd concluded they were done for in Portland, and were pulling up stakes to move to Phoenix where beer drinkers didn't know any better, I guess.

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