Great Notion Turns 10, Marking Hazy Beer’s Rise to Mainstream
Great Notion’s 10-year mark shows how quickly hazy IPA went from oddball to default. The June party will pour 40-plus beers and rare barrel-aged releases.
Great Notion Brewing’s 10th anniversary says as much about beer culture as it does about one Portland brewery. What once felt like a strange, juice-heavy outlier is now so familiar on tap lists that Jeff Alworth says Great Notion seems older than 10 years, because it helped normalize the hazy IPA era in Oregon.
That shift is baked into Great Notion’s identity. The brewery was started in Portland by three friends and neighbors, James Dugan, Andy Miller and Paul Reiter, and it built its name on hazy, fruit-forward IPAs, culinary-inspired sours and stouts. Great Notion says it launched in 2016, and its own milestone party will land Saturday, June 27 at its NW 28th location with more than 40 beers on tap, including rare barrel-aged pours, newly brewed barrel-aged stouts, special anniversary beers and throwback releases fans have been asking to see again.
The party package also shows how far the brewery’s reach has grown. Great Notion says the event will include a Beastie Boys tribute band, food, games and a dirty soda bar for kids, while ticket sales support Forest Park Conservancy. The ticket page listed VIP admission at $100, general admission at $40 and kids’ tickets at $10, with VIP already sold out. VIP buyers were set to get 10 drink tokens, while general admission came with five.
For craft beer drinkers, the bigger story is what happened to the style Great Notion helped popularize. Hazy IPA was once the kind of beer people argued about, especially in West Coast circles used to sharper, pine-led bitterness. Now the profile is built into consumer expectations: softer bitterness, sweet tropical character and the kind of opaque pour that no longer needs an explanation. That normalization has given homebrewers a clear signal. When a style stops surprising the taproom and starts showing up everywhere from neighborhood cans to brewery anniversary lineups, it has crossed from experiment to standard issue.
Great Notion’s résumé helps explain why its anniversary lands with that much weight. The brewery says it has won medals at the World Beer Cup, Great American Beer Festival and Oregon Beer Awards, and has earned recognition from Paste Magazine for its IPA. Alworth also notes the brewery is partnering with Celebrate Oregon Beer on a ticket giveaway. A decade in, Great Notion is no longer just part of the haze conversation. It has become one of the reference points for how quickly a once-disruptive style can harden into the new normal.
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