Water & Soil

Most of Portland's drinking water comes from the Bull Run Watershed in Mount Hood National Forest, about 42 kilometers from the city. It's rain and snowmelt from the Cascades, collected in a protected catchment area, and it's unusually soft.

How hard is Portland's water? Soft means that very few minerals are dissolved in it. Total hardness typically runs between 7 and 11 milligrams per liter, roughly 0.4 to 0.6 degrees of German hardness. In Germany, water is already considered soft up to 8.4 degrees, so Bull Run water is far below that.

For brewers, that's a blank canvas. Starting from such soft water, you can build almost any profile: adding a bit of gypsum, chemically calcium sulfate, makes the hops in a Pale Ale or IPA taste sharper and drier, while other additions keep a Porter or Hefeweizen rounder.

West of the Cascades lies the Willamette Valley, with mild winters and plenty of rain. The rain that falls here is what later comes out of the tap as soft water, and that same moist soil supports the region's hop fields. Towering above it all is Mount Hood, at over 3,400 meters. Anyone who has driven through the valley on a rainy day understands why plants, rivers, and brewers here rarely know what it's like to lack water.

East of the Cascades, everything changes. Bend sits at roughly 1,100 meters along the Deschutes River, where the air is dry and the winters are cold. Deschutes Brewery got its start here in 1988; its Mirror Pond Pale Ale is named after Mirror Pond, a calm stretch of the river right in the middle of town.