Gordon Bowker may not be a familiar name to many of today’s craft beer fans around Seattle, but he was hugely important in the birth of the craft beer industry in Seattle and beyond. At a time when you could count the number of microbreweries in the USA on one hand, he and Paul Shipman opened Seattle’s Redhook Brewery in 1981. On August 21, 2025, Gordon Bowker died at 82 in Seattle, the city he had called home for most of his life. (Above: The historic photo above does not include Gordon.)
Long before Redhook, Bowker co-founded Starbucks Coffee in 1971 and even designed the original, iconic Starbucks mermaid logo. He also co-founded Heckler-Bowker, which became Heckler Associates, the advertising firm that created the legendary, award-winning Rainier Beer commercials of the 1970s and 80s. Those are just highlights of his professional life. He was a visionary, an entrepreneur, a writer, and a thinker. In all of his ventures, it seems he was content to be the less-visible one behind the scenes.
His accomplishments with Starbucks and Heckler-Bowker were impressive, but his role as co-founder of Redhook is most notable to the craft beer community. In 1981, there was no roadmap, no playbook. The world was thoroughly dominated by the biggest beer companies, which were growing through mergers and acquisitions. Even regional breweries like Rainier were too small to survive and were gobbled up by bigger fish, which in turn were gobbled up by even bigger fish. But a few weirdly creative fish were hatching new ideas and swimming against the current.
Opening a small, independent brewery in 1981 must have taken a lot of guts. But more than guts and determination, it took a lot of imagination. If you were going to do it, you had to imagine a world where the local bar served something other than one of the mega-huge universally recognized beer brands. Redhook’s founders envisioned a day that eventually came to be. (Not too different than opening Starbucks at a time when Folgers and Maxwell House were coffee in America.) They dreamed of the beer world we live in today. I am eternally grateful.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge. Bowker hasn’t been part of Redhook for decades. With so many high-level ownership changes over the years, it’s hard for me to say precisely when Bowker was no longer part of the picture. The Redhook brand has long since become unrecognizable to those who remember when it was made in an old garage–a former transmission shop–in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, now the center of a craft beer universe that we couldn’t even imagine back then.
Interestingly, it is said that he lost his taste for beer shortly after Redhook opened, so he no longer drank it, though he’d make an exception when attending a Mariners game. I’m going to blame it on the banana beer (IYKYK). Join me in raising a toast to Gordon Bowker for his pioneering spirit and unbridled imagination, both of which remain essential character traits in the craft beer industry.
