Chris Nemlowill began the summer of 2003 as a new graduate with degrees in marketing and computer science from Southern Oregon University in Ashland. He had an internship lined up at Intel and a likely path forward.

A few days after graduating, Nemlowill volunteered to help his grandmother after he learned that she’d broken her hip. While she rested, he bought and read six books on how to home-brew beer.

“I called my mom about a week later and said, ‘Can I just move back into your basement this summer? I just, I want to brew a bunch of beer,’” Nemlowill recalled, arms folded over a table on the upstairs brewpub deck at Fort George Brewery in Astoria.

“I just couldn’t see myself working in a cubicle, or wearing a suit to work.”

That decision would lead him on a path to meeting Jack Harris, then head brewer at Bill’s Tavern & Brewhouse in Cannon Beach, and eventually to opening the doors of Fort George, taking a risk at a time when craft brewing was still relatively small.

“Coming out of the ’70s and ’80s, there were still only 30 breweries in the United States,” Nemlowill said. “When we opened Fort George, there were 1,400 breweries in the United States. Now, there’s about 10,000.”

The risk paid off. “In two years, we passed our 10-year business plan,” he said, “and that was the point where we needed more space.”

Now with three facilities that span a downtown block and a repurposed cannery along Astoria’s waterfront, Nemlowill estimated that last year, Fort George produced about 32,000 barrels — or just under 1 million gallons — of beer. The brewery now employs about 160 people.

Through it all, building out from the historic site of Fort Astoria, or Fort George, an early 19th-century fur trading post, has kept the brewery grounded in history.

Brewing ‘on the cusp’

“This is me when I was in third grade here, growing up in Astoria,” Nemlowill said.

He showed an image scanned from newsprint, from a page of The Astorian. In it, a young Nemlowill leaned over a classroom table, hovering near a cardboard model of the Astor Building. He recalled crafting the model from part of a refrigerator box and a set of toothpicks.

“We were all tasked with making our favorite building downtown,” he said, glancing at the eight-story tower across from the brewery.

Nemlowill’s family had moved to Astoria shortly after he was born in 1979. He remembers a year filled with showings of “The Goonies” at the Columbian Theater after its 1985 release and reflects on watching as new development brought changes to the city.

After graduating from Astoria High School in 1997, Nemlowill picked up an associate degree at Clatsop Community College before transferring to Southern Oregon University.

Between that time, a trip to Cologne, Germany, in his late teens offered a glimpse of a culture centered around beer, where Kölsch breweries offered gathering places for families and communities. That was something he didn’t see back home.

“It seemed like it was on the cusp at the time,” he said, adding that breweries had once been much more common in the U.S. before Prohibition.

At the end of that summer spent brewing in his parents’ basement, Nemlowill went back to Europe, this time to the Netherlands as part of a study abroad program. After that, his goal was to start a brewery.

“I just kind of had an epiphany, like, ‘If I could do anything, it’d be so cool to be able to brew beer and give it to my friends,’ or … if I could make beer good enough that somebody wanted to pay for it, I just thought there could not be a cooler job,” he said.

Returning home and looking to learn more about the craft, Nemlowill approached Harris in Cannon Beach, home brew sample in hand. Soon enough, he was hired.

From disrepair to a new purpose

In the fall of 2005, Nemlowill found the Fort George building in disrepair.

“It was in pretty rough shape, which a lot of Astoria was,” he said. “Half the windows were broken out. There were pigeons living in there, water coming through the walls.”

But on a walkthrough of the 1924 building with its owner, developer Robert Stricklin, Nemlowill was struck by the sight of old-growth Douglas fir ceiling beams. He also met the founders of the Blue Scorcher Bakery & Cafe, who would soon open up next door.

So Nemlowill called up Harris.

“He walked in, he’s like, ‘What do you want to show me?’ and I said, ‘I think we should start a brewery here. Wouldn’t that be really cool?’ And he’s like, ‘Man, you are nuts,’” Nemlowill recalled.

But it didn’t take long before Harris was interested.

Soon, the two had located an 8.5-barrel Saaz brewing system from a brewery in Virginia Beach, Virginia. “We flew out there, we dismantled it, we drove it back 3,100 miles,” Nemlowill said, “we had a tornado drop down on us in Nebraska.”

Fortunately, the damage was minimal. The tanks made it back to Fort George, and the tornado offered some unlikely inspiration for the name of what was to become one of the brewery’s signature beers: Vortex IPA.

Another brew, Cavatica Stout, took its name from a species of spider, in a nod to lore about the relationship between spiders and breweries.

Restoring the Fort George building brought challenges, but also a spirit of repurposing. Bars were created from windfallen, reclaimed wood. Booths were made from Alaskan yellow cedar that was found in a float shack near Brownsmead.

“We didn’t have a whole lot of money, so everything was very ‘us,’” Nemlowill recalled. “We pulled 25,000 pounds of concrete out of the building, ran a lot of the plumbing and just helped our friends, who were contractors at the time, do a lot of the work — and then we opened in March 2007.”

‘A canning town’

Within a few years, the brewery had outgrown its space.

Nemlowill and Harris purchased the Fort George building, along with most of the surrounding block, for $1.65 million. That included the adjacent Lovell building, which had once housed an auto dealership, and provided space for a 30-barrel production brewery and a small canning line.

“We felt like Astoria was a canning town, and that we should can our beer,” Nemlowill said. One of those beers was the 1811 Lager, made in celebration of the city’s bicentennial.

Some years later, a further $8 million expansion into a former salmon canning facility saw most of Fort George’s production move to the Astoria waterfront.

“That building was built for just punching cans for the cannery that was out front, and the floors are extremely thick reinforced concrete, so in a lot of the areas, we were able to just drop our fermenters right on the ground without doing any reinforcement — and there’s loading docks,” he said.

Another legacy of the city’s canning past is its watershed, which Nemlowill credited as a benefit to craft breweries.

“The canneries on the waterfront used to use a whole bunch of water,” he said, “now we have this tremendous resource — it takes a lot of water to brew beer, it takes about 4 to 7 gallons of water per gallon of beer.”

As Fort George expanded, more local breweries opened their doors. Nemlowill welcomes the company, with an eye toward Astoria as a brewing destination, but the growth of the industry hasn’t come without challenges. The strain placed on the city’s wastewater system from brewing byproducts, for example, has prompted an ongoing search for solutions.

But Nemlowill is looking forward, with new systems aimed at waste from the waterfront facility and plans for the addition of a roof-mounted solar panel. That project could see more than two-thirds of the energy Fort George uses for brewing operations replaced by renewable electricity.

Those operations include the brewery’s distribution wing, with a portfolio that now includes dozens of craft beer, cider, wine and kombucha brands across the Northwest. Nemlowill said distribution has also recently expanded into the San Francisco Bay Area.

But when talking about further expansion, he’s quick to return to the brewery’s roots, to that sense of community he envisioned for his hometown.

Finding a niche

That sense appears in nods to the local landscape, with beer names like Short Sands Lager and Cathedral Tree. It appears, too, in the crowd that lingers in the Lovell Showroom during the annual FisherPoets Gathering, and on the nights that locals share their work through makers markets and lectures.

“We decided having Sunday Night Music would be a lot of fun because, for people in the hospitality industry in Astoria, Sunday was their Friday,” Nemlowill said.

A sense of community is even found in the buildings themselves, whether in a repurposed cannery or a set of spiral stairs that once belonged to the Astoria Column.

And it begins with the brewery’s people.

“Almost everybody in management at Fort George started off either in the kitchen, behind the line, washing dishes or serving,” Nemlowill said. A few examples: Brian Bovenizer, the brewery’s marketing director, and Michal Frankowicz, the head brewer.

Then there’s Will Elias, Fort George’s in-house artist who designs labels for cans, and Kirsten Pierce, who started as a server before moving on to writing beer descriptions and crafting a witty newsletter.

“People see an opportunity. They see a niche that Fort George needs to fill, and quite often they will educate themselves in the way that is needed to be in that spot,” Nemlowill said.

When asked about his plans for the brewery’s future, he remained grounded.

“Most of the places that you’ll find our beer are within one day of driving,” he said. “It’s really better for the environment to ship out grain and hops to a region, use a regional water supply and make beer, and it’s fun to have it be different.”

He has no plans to distribute nationwide.

“What was so inspiring about starting a brewery is — beer was boring. It was all the same. It all looked the same, it all tasted the same. So it’s fun to have craft breweries have their own local flair,” he said.

The brewery’s next steps, according to Nemlowill, will be driven by the people who work there. But Fort George remains committed to a sense of place, to the history that it’s named for and to an idea.

“We believe in regional breweries,” Nemlowill said.