Oregon brewery Rogue Ales and Spirits abruptly ceased operations at all of its facilities Friday morning.
Employees learned about the closure that same morning. The company operates pubs in Astoria, Newport, Portland and Salem.
In Newport, Rogue maintained a large production brewery on land it leased from the Port of Newport. The Lincoln Chronicle reported that Rogues owes the port over $500,000 in rent and owes Lincoln County $30,000 in taxes.
According to other reports, Rogue had experienced a drop in sales and had recently shut down its distillery operations, also in Newport.
In Astoria, one of the company’s pubs has been an anchor tenant at the foot of Pier 39 for 19 years.
Pier 39 owner Floyd Holcom said Rogue also owes him money and the company missed paying their rent for the first time earlier last week. He declined to provide additional details, but said the sudden closure was a shock.
“I’m taken aback by the bad news like everyone else,” he said.
Holcom will be evaluating next steps in the coming days, but said he isn’t worried about finding a new tenant for the space Rogue currently occupies.
He said the Pier 39 administrative office had several inquiries about the space over the weekend.
Rogue has not made any statements about the closures.
Former employee Andrew Anthony was working for another business on Pier 39 Monday morning, just down from the shuttered pub, wearing a black hoodie with Rogue’s logo on it. He had been let go from his job with Rogue several months before, but his girlfriend worked at the Astoria pub until she received a text message from her manager Friday morning informing her that the pub was closing and she no longer had a job.
Anthony said that many of the people he knew at the pub, including his girlfriend, have other part-time jobs they are relying on now. For several employees, however, it was their only job and they had been with the company — at the Astoria location — for years.
Anthony came to the job at Rogue as a longtime fan of the company and its beers.
“I always feel like Rogue was — that’s part of Oregon,” he said. “Like, you go to Oregon and that’s where you go, is Rogue.”