Portland Magazine
April 25, 2024
Steve Waters ’10 is back on The Bluff brewing beer and business.
Story by Danielle Centoni
IT WAS Steve Waters’ last year on campus and business professor Sam Holloway’s first. By some stroke of luck, fate, or Providence, their paths crossed in a singular class before Steve ’10 graduated with his degree in accounting. Of all the lessons he learned that semester, there’s one that really stuck: Sam Holloway is a beer nerd.
Steve is a beer nerd, too, raised among the kegs and kettles of his homebrewer dad, Jim. So he never forgot about his former professor, who now travels the world lecturing on the business of craft brewing. In 2016, when Steve’s family tapped him to help get their fledgling brewery on solid financial ground, Sam was the first person Steve called.
“A lot of our focus on opening pubs came from discussions between me and Sam,” Steve says.
Almost overnight, Steve went from a predictable job in public accounting to CFO of his family’s start-up, Backwoods Brewing in Carson, WA. Three years later he’d add CEO to his roster of titles, as he helped grow the business from a side project to a thriving (and growing) company. They now have three pubs—the Portland Pearl District hotspot, the brand-new Hillsboro outpost, and the original Carson location in the Columbia River Gorge, plus newly opened luxury cabins just a short walk away.
When Steve first started, the ins and outs of running a company in the beer industry were totally new to him, but, he says, “I had resources at UP I could go back to—and I still do.”
These days, Steve is finding himself back on The Bluff a lot more than usual. This fall, Backwoods Brewing became the signature beer of the Portland Trail Blazers’ new G-League development team, the Rip City Remix, which plays its home games at UP’s Chiles Center. Once again, it seems a special kind of Pilot luck had worked its magic. Over the summer, a Trail Blazers executive, who is a regular at the Pearl District pub, got to talking with Steve about the new team. Once they both connected the UP dots, a new partnership—and beer—were born.
Backwoods Brewing’s Rip City Remix IPA sold out within the first 10 minutes of the first home game in November. Everyone wanted the quaffable craft brew in the cool can. With a backbone of citrusy Mosaic and Amarillo hops, it features an as-yet-unnamed experimental hop called HBC536, which adds notes of tropical fruit and cherries. As seasons come and go, they’ll “remix” the brew and swap out HBC536 for something else, always with the goal, Steve says, of producing an “easy drinking on the sidelines kind of beer.”
Supply quickly scaled up, as did interest in other Backwoods partnerships. UP Athletics Director Scott Leykam approached Steve about producing a signature beer for Pilots home games. By January, Pilot Lager had its own debut. All kitted out in vibrant purple with the UP anchor, it’s nothing less than Pilot Pride in a flip-top can.
New beers, new pubs, new ventures—2023 was a big year for Backwoods Brewing and earning those successes alongside his family (his mom, dad, brother Tom, and wife, Michelle ’10, are all actively involved in the company) just makes them that much sweeter. “You get to celebrate each other a lot,” says Steve. “We’ve been crushing it and it’s great that we get to enjoy those wins together.”
Of course, things don’t always work out perfectly. He credits the strength of his family, his Catholic faith, and lessons learned at UP for keeping him motivated through the tough times. “It’s hard to find things that can prepare you for what you get into in this line of work,” he says. “But the expertise from my classes that I needed to bring, my teachers, the softer skills that UP was so good at developing—things like empathy and doing good and leading a business right—those have served me well. And getting to be back on campus feels like coming home.”
DANIELLE CENTONI is a James Beard Award-winning writer and UP’s marketing communications specialist.
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