Twenty-First Century Village Brewer

Jamie Floyd started Ninkasi 4 years ago, and calls purchasing the Ninkasi building in the Whiteaker one of the happiest days of his life.

When Jamie Floyd of Ninkasi Brewing repeats the mantra that hangs above the bar of their new tasting room in the Whiteaker, he means it: Beer is Love.

In addition to being a professional brewer, Floyd, a laid-back 30-something with bleached blond hair and a passion for his craft, is a certified home brew judge and president of the Oregon Brewer’s Guild .

“Once I put it all together that I had an opportunity to be the village brewer, which is a very old sort of profession that goes back to the Sumerians, it’s just the model that I really wanted to do,” Floyd says. “I’m a very civic-minded person, and I saw the opportunity to be impactful in other people’s lives through the work that we did at Ninkasi.”

Floyd’s first exposure to beer was in college. He came to Eugene from Livermore, CA, in the early ‘90s to study sociology, with an emphasis in community studies and bioregionalism.

While living in the Campbell Club student co-op, he was introduced to beer making, brewing up stouts, porters and IPAs for fun with members of the Lorax Manner co-op.

He was and is attracted to the brewing process because it allows him to use multiple parts of his personality in one job, rather than focusing on one element of it.

“Brewing is just amazingly well-balanced,” Floyd says. “It’s mental and physical; it’s social, and also sort of solitary. It’s [also] creative and scientific. So it’s just a really balanced sort of job.”

How it became his profession, he says, is a case of being in the right place at the right time. Before starting Ninkasi, he worked in food service, including 11 years at Eugene’s Steelhead Brewery. While he was night kitchen manager at Steelhead, one of the brewers offered him a job as an assistant.

He took it and soon found himself working 70-80 hours a week at Steelhead doing both jobs. He knew he wanted to own his own business, but didn’t know what it would be, or with whom.

The right person was Nikos Ridge, a Eugene native who graduated from New York University in Economics, and previously worked on the floor of the Stock Exchange in New York. While Floyd had been honing his skills as a beer maker, Ridge was training himself to run a business. Where their skills met, Ninkasi was born.

Taking the name from the Sumerian goddess of fermentation, the two men leased equipment at what is now Hop Valley Brewing in Springfield in 2006. The first beer they produced was a batch of their signature Total Domination India Pale Ale. Today Ninkasi produces three mainstays: Total Domination IPA, Tricerahops Double IPA and Believer Double Red Ale, along with seasonal crafts like Sleigh’r (winter), Radiant (summer) and Spring Reign (take a guess).

They looked at several locations around Eugene before deciding on the Whiteaker as the home of their new brewery, which Floyd says is very much a part of their identity. Floyd and Ridge contribute time, resources and beer to events like the Whiteaker Block Party. They also act as their own distributor in Eugene and rely on local businesses for their operational needs.

Additionally, through what Floyd calls the “Whiteaker program,” employees create their own Ninkasi creation to be featured in the Ninkasi tasting room, located next door to the brewery. His most recent work in progress is an imperial stout infused with lavender and tarragon.

In his spare time, which he says he used to have a lot more of, he is an avid reader who loves swimming, outdoor activities and arts; especially music. He’s currently working on a comic book about Ninkasi with a Whiteaker-based comic artist, and expects the book to be out within a year.

Floyd’s best piece of advice for budding home brewers: Don’t be afraid to share your beers with other people, and ask for suggestions. Community has been a part of brewing since the beginning, he says.

“It’s definitely part of our message to remind people that beer has nourished and been food for humanity since the beginning of civilization,” he says. “People stopped hunting and gathering to grow barley to make bread and beer with, and as a result we’re forced to do things like create written language, and schools, and laws and art, and creativity – really the foundations of modern civilization. Beer helped free people to do that.”

Lane County Unemployment Strains Whiteaker Community

Amid claims of an economic turn around, Lane County’s unemployment rate hovers at 12.6 percent. This is higher than Oregon’s 11.5 percent jobless rate – the fourth highest in the country – and the national average of 9.8 percent.

While its rates aren’t as high as neighboring Douglas County (15.6 percent), or Crook County (16.9 percent), Lane County is home to more than three times the amount of unemployed people as Douglas despite being similarly sized. This is due to its higher population density and bigger labor force.

Eugene’s Whiteaker neighborhood is no stranger to unemployment. Along with being a famed anarchist hotbed, it is also home to the Eugene Mission. Much of the community is also made up of artists, musicians and students.

In addition to unemployment, the rate of mortgage defaults is also high in Lane County, with an estimated 1 in 682 homes in foreclosure. This manifests in new faces on the streets, and new burdens on local support programs like the mission.

“I see them. I don’t know them by name, but I hear about it on the street,” said Joe Oatman of the Egan Warming Center, near Autzen Stadium.

Oatman estimates there are four times as many people on the streets as last year. The center, named after retired Army veteran Thomas Egan who died of hypothermia last winter, was previously forced to close due to lack of funding. It has since started operating again. This time, however, the center plans to use four churches in Eugene and Springfield as facilities to keep up with the growing need for their services, which include food, heat and shelter.

Oregon is also high in its unemployment exhaustion rate, or those who have used up their unemployment insurance, which is currently at 35.8 percent. This may change due to a congressional extension of benefits for states with an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent.

Unemployment figures do not include those who have worked at all within the past four weeks, such as those partially or seasonally employed who do not make enough money to live on*. It also excludes those who work any more than fifteen hours a week in a family business.

“The economy isn’t as good as a lot of people think it is,” self-employed house painter and 20-year Whiteaker resident Steve Lewis said. “One month you might have a grand in your pocket – the next, you’re broke.”

Lewis says he’s noticed more people using programs such as FOOD For Lane County in the past year. And it’s not just homeless. The biggest change he sees is the number of people driving expensive cars to the food bank, unable to make ends meet.

Similar patterns have appeared in the Eugene Mission, says Myron McMurren, who has stayed at the mission for three years.

“The biggest difference I see now is a lot of people who have never been homeless before and have had good jobs are now homeless,” McMurren said. “It’s not just guys now – it’s families. Women. Children.”

McMurren is part of work programs run by the Mission. Doing so allows him access to better conditions, and a $25-a-week stipend. This comes with disadvantages, though. The program has to be his first priority or else he gets sent to the non-working side of the Mission, he said, which makes looking for additional work difficult.

But when the alternative is living on the street, the choice is obvious for him. McMurren said he is concerned for those living on the street because in the past year three homeless people have been killed in Eugene. A fourth was recently set on fire, but sustained only minor burns. Two of the attacks happened in the Whiteaker.

Edit (11/7/09): *Maybe this is more of a footnote than a true edit, but here’s a link with one estimate of the adjusted national unemployment to include underemployed and discouraged workers: 17.5%.

A Walk in the Whit

Residents of the Whiteaker, also sometimes called “the Whit,” have seen a lot of changes in their neighborhood. There has been an influx of new businesses to the area, and old ones are more robust.

Inhabitants’ stories about the history of the Whit reflect on a time in which hard drugs and violence were more of a visible problem for the neighborhood.

Among those businesses recently relocated to the neighborhood are the Pizza Research Institute and the newly opened One Cup Café, whose new neighbors include Sam Bond’s Garage, Tiny Tavern and organic grocery store the Red Barn.

The rest of the blocks are made up of a mixture of restaurants, residences and unmarked warehouses. Most of these mundane warehouses are art studios inside, said Whiteaker-dwelling musician and artist Jeremy “John” Mueller.

“If you walk into the [Wandering] Goat, two-thirds of the people there work with visual art or music to some extent, [but] most haven’t gone to school for it,” Mueller said. “People here understand music because it’s a part of their lives.”

At the Wandering Goat Coffee Company – and many other spots in the Whit – local art decorates the walls, and live music is an evening staple of nightlife as it is at many other local favorites such as Sam Bonds Garage. The Whit is also the home of the Last Friday Art Walk, in which local art galleries and studios are opened for free to the public.

There is also a vibrant music scene in what Mueller calls the “communal party houses” in the area, which are often showcases for hyper-local acts with names that match, like the Blair Street Mugwumps.

Mueller found his home in the Whiteaker after a stint as a world traveler left him living the life of a struggling artist, he said, adding that his story is a common one.

“There’s a lot of people passing through,” he said. “A lot of people have been here for a while, but ‘a while’ could be five years. If you hop off the trains here, you pretty much walk right up Blair into town.”

When he got to Eugene, he hadn’t planned on staying long – but he quickly found home in the Whiteaker and with St. John the Wonderworker, a Serbian Orthodox Church next to the One Cup Café. Through the community outreach programs the church had been involved in he found that the Whiteaker was the kind of place he had been looking for.

“The Whit has its own kind of culture,” he said. “There’s such an absence of mainstream culture … Why would you sit in front of a TV programmed by corporations when you can plant a garden and ride a bike?”

Welcome to the Whiteaker

Just northwest of downtown Eugene, sandwiched between Seventh Ave. and the Willamette River lies the (in)famous Whiteaker neighborhood. Named after Oregon’s first Governor, John Whiteaker, it is best known by some for its history of environmental activism. But beyond the surface lies what can only be described as a community all its own.

The remaining fluorescent-orange leaves of the many trees shade the streets, and the houses take on strange psychedelic color schemes in this remarkably quiet neighborhood. Despite the peaceful residential areas, it also boasts an eclectic range of top-notch local businesses. Within a few blocks, one can find the Wandering Goat Coffee Company, Ninkasi Brewery, Pizza Research Institute, Sam Bond’s Garage, and the World Café, to name a few; all of which are easily accessible by foot, car or bike. It is also the home of the Center for Appropriate Transport, a bike-centric non-profit community center.

For those who prefer their entertainment outdoors (when the weather permits), there is the Owen Memorial Rose Garden, as well as multiple other parks and a multi-purpose trail, which runs along with Willamette River. The friendly residents seem eager to stop and say what’s on their mind, which will be helpful in finding out what’s going on behind the scenes in this neighborhood.