It's the Water: The Olympia Brewing Company

In the summer of eighteen ninety-five, a German-born brewer named Leopold Schmidt drove out to the banks of the lower Deschutes River at a place called Tumwater, just south of the capital. He was looking for water. Specifically, he was looking for the kind of water that German brewing tradition insisted a great lager required, cold and mineral-clean, rising from below ground at consistent temperature. What he found at Tumwater were artesian springs feeding directly into the river, springs whose water tested so precisely right that Schmidt sent samples to a laboratory in Chicago called the Wahl-Henius Institute and received back a report that, in his words, convinced him he could brew better beer there than anywhere he had ever been.

Schmidt established the Capital Brewing Company at Tumwater in October of eighteen ninety-six. The first beer, a pale lager called Olympia Pale Export, went on the market that fall. The brewery was renamed the Olympia Brewing Company in nineteen oh two.

The slogan came later. A man named Frank Kenney proposed the phrase "It's the Water" to advertise what made Olympia Beer different from competitors. The tagline outlasted the artesian wells, the Schmidt family, two world wars, Prohibition, a corporate acquisition by Pabst, and finally by Miller Brewing Company.

On June twentieth, two thousand three, Miller ran the last batch off the Tumwater line and closed the plant. Miller cited excess capacity and the higher cost of running a small brewery. The brewery buildings still stand south of Olympia. They have been the subject of redevelopment discussions for years.

At its peak in the nineteen seventies, Olympia Brewing was the sixth-largest brewery in the United States. The water is still there. The brewery is not.