Alan Sprints remembered as a pioneer who shaped craft beer

Alan Sprints, the Portland brewer who built Hair of the Dog around strong, four-letter-named ales, died July 19 at 66. The American Homebrewers Association remembered him as both a homebrewer and a pioneering craft brewer, the kind of figure who showed how quickly hobby-level experimentation could become a lasting commercial force.

Sprints was born Sept. 7, 1959, and moved to Portland in 1988 to attend the Western Culinary Institute. He founded Hair of the Dog Brewing Company in 1993, then spent nearly three decades turning the brewery into a shorthand for intense, cellar-worthy beer in a market that often rewarded speed and novelty instead. His beers were the opposite of cautious: big, distinctive and built to be noticed, not blended into the background.

That approach helped define a corner of American craft beer that homebrewers still chase. The AHA’s remembrance frames Sprints as a pioneer whose work shaped modern homebrewing culture, and the image caption that shows Charlie Papazian, Sprints and his son Isaac at Homebrew Con 2018 lands like a family photo from the movement’s middle generation. Papazian represents the movement’s foundation, and Sprints represents what happened when that mindset moved from club tables and garages into a brewery with national pull.

Sprints’ standing only grew after Hair of the Dog’s closure in February 2022, after he announced his retirement and the 29-year-old Oregon brewery shut down. That ending sharpened the sense that his beers belonged to a specific era of craft brewing, one defined by strong flavors, aging potential and a willingness to ignore market-safe naming and branding conventions. In 2022, John’s Marketplace honored him alongside Teri Fahrendorf and Art Larrance in the Oregon Beer Awards Hall of Fame, recognition from peers who understood exactly how unusual his lane was.

Tributes after his death kept circling back to the same idea: Sprints made beer with attitude. One described Hair of the Dog as “punk rock” and compared it to “Mozart meets Iggy Pop” and “Bourdain meets Pépin,” a messy but fitting shorthand for a brewer who treated precision and rebellion as part of the same recipe. Another tribute noted his support for Guide Dogs for the Blind and New Avenues for Youth. That combination of craft, character and community is why Sprints still matters to brewers who learned that adventurous beer did not have to apologize for being bold.