Alan Sprints — the founder, brewmaster, and singular creative force behind Portland’s Hair of the Dog Brewing — passed away on July 19, following a battle with cancer he’d announced publicly back in April. He was 66.
I’ve written many headlines and stories about the beer industry. Openings. Closings. Anniversaries. Memorials. This one is tough. Although I did not know Alan personally (I only met him a couple of times), I knew his beer. He and Hair of the Dog Brewing gifted the world with beers of exceptional character. Beers that you had to wait for. Beers that waited for you.
Exploding like spiders across the stars
Hair of the Dog wasn’t just a brewery. It was an argument. It was an emphatic statement made in liquid form that beer could be bottle-conditioned, high-gravity, and worth the wait. Even if that meant waiting years as a bottle of Fred crept toward perfection.
Back in the mid-90s, when Hair of the Dog was born, craft breweries built their reputations on unleaded gasoline: pale ales, porters, ambers, golden ales, and… you get the point. Alan set out to brew rocket fuel. His beers were crazy. High-spirited. Mad for life. Yellow, gold, and amber Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars.
There are precious few beer-focused experiences that stand out so profoundly in my psyche. Forever carved in stone is the memory of sitting down at the Hair of the Dog taproom in Portland with a flight of Alan’s beers in front of me. It was moving. Emotional. The beers were so intensely expressive that you could not help but feel something. Like standing and staring in silent, breathless awe at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: whatever Alan was feeling at the moment, at that creative spark, you now felt it too. Joy.
Easier access to his art
Alan was born in Southern California and came up to Portland in the late ’80s for culinary school. The plan was simple: get the degree, go somewhere else. Portland had other ideas. The Rose City wrapped its thorny vines around him and refused to let go. For that, beer lovers in the Pacific Northwest should be forever grateful. His reputation was widespread, but we enjoyed easier access to his art.
It’s easy to put people on pedestals. It’s easy to lose sight of their true humanity when admiration tilts our vision, but Alan was a real human being. A family man. Though he expressed himself to me through his beer, I am aware that his life was rich with other things. He was a husband, father, and brother. Those things are more important than my personal infatuation with his beer. On behalf of the Washington Beer Blog and the many others who only knew Alan through his creative brewing endeavors, I extend my deepest sympathy to his family and to everyone who knew and loved the man.
