One of Eugene’s newest breweries, Manifest Beer Co., celebrated its first anniversary and label release party on Friday, March 29. Head brewer Brandon Woodruff accomplished his first year at the current location, perhaps due to his unorthodox motto: “We don’t necessarily want you to like our beer. We want you to remember our beer.”
With concoctions such as a berliner weisses made with ginger and peach, and another made with passion fruit and lychee, it’s apparent that he steps out of bounds with ingredient choices. A berliner weisse is a tart German wheat beer frequently found with fruit added to supply unique flavors.
At $5 for 11 ounces, the passion fruit and lychee berliner is tropical, sweet, citrusy and tart — not too tart that every sip was a pucker punch, but just enough that it’s juicy and refreshing. The peach ginger berliner is sweet and tart, and more like a peach fizz than a beer — it would be palatable for someone who swears off beer. It’s possible to imagine ginger in the taste, and if it’s in there, it just adds a delicate bite to the slight tartness.
On the anniversary, Woodruff touted two Brett beers — beer fermented with less common brettanomyces yeast that can impart tropical flavors.
Woodruff had been homebrewing for years before he opened his first brewery, Mancave Brewing Company. When he and his former business partner split, Woodruff took his brewing equipment to Elk Horn Brewery and used their space to start up Manifest.
From Mancave to Manifest, one thing Woodruff wouldn’t let go was the initial “M” in each name. “It’s top secret, almost like a family heirloom,” he said. “There’s some secretive stuff behind that ‘M,’ and I didn’t want to let go of it.” Woodruff said the secret is something he wanted to keep for himself and not tell the press.
The only beer that moved from brewery to brewery was his Exalted IPA, a recipe he had been homebrewing for over a decade. On his brewery’s anniversary day, the Exalted Double IPA was on tap, which was, as it should be, very hoppy. It has a fresh, herbal, forest aroma with a slightly tinted head from the dark orange, almost rust hue of the beer and was not for the faint of heart when in comes to IBU — international bitterness units, which is associated with hoppiness. It’s incredibly refreshing and, despite the hops, still balanced and just too drinkable. A couple pints would knock a lightweight out, but it’d still be worth it.
“I love that beer so much,” Woodruff said, “and there’s nothing that really speaks to that beer except that it is exalted. It’s really fucking good.”
After about a year working in the Elk Horn space, Woodruff teamed up with Gary Miller, the owner of Doc’s Pad, a sports bar in Eugene. Attached to Doc’s was once a bar called The Green Room. But now in that space is Manifest’s makeshift brewery. It’s a tight space with two walls and two all-glass garage doors opening into an alley. It’s Built under a parking garage and guards multiple giant brewing tanks, which Woodruff has now moved three times — not an easy feat.
The biggest moment for Woodruff this year was meeting his distributor. He said that at the 2018 Nano beer fest in Portland, a representative from Day One Distribution came up to Woodruff and said, “Out of the hundred breweries that are there, your beer is the best.” Woodruff had been sleeping in his truck for the three days he was at the festival. “I didn’t really have the money for a hotel, so I felt like a rock star,” he said. A couple of nights in the truck seem to have paid off.
“It was pretty neat the first time we had a distributor pick up a good order. We had our beer in Astoria, Eugene, Springfield, Corvallis, Bend and Ashland all in one day,” Woodruff said. Just the night before the anniversary gathering, a distributor came to pick up 80 cases of beer. “My total sales that I used to be at with Elk Horn was maybe about 15 barrels a month. Now getting 15 barrels picked up in a day is pretty cool,” he said. “That’s a special feeling.”
The special day was also the first time the public could get their hands on uniquely labeled cans of specific beer varieties. Woodruff used to have a generic label he would hand write the name of the beer on, but now the berliner weisses and a Northeast IPA have their own labels, which he designed himself. The two berliners feature the “M” rising like a sun over a mountain range and a short history of the berliner weisse on the side. The Northeast IPA design is much different, displaying cartoony and humorous clip art-style text boxes and shapes — a tongue-in-cheek congruence with the beer’s name: “highly recommended.”
Coming up at Manifest will be a hazy beer named “Brenda’s got a hazy,” a play on Tupac’s “Brenda’s got a baby” and a testament to Woodruff’s love for old-school rap. He’ll also be releasing a barrel-aged, fresh-hopped pumpkin sour.
He pours for customers on Fridays from 4 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. to whenever customers stop drinking at the open-air, literal hole-in-a-wall brewery, and Manifest usually has two to four taps running at Doc’s.
