Her Own Wings

THE LEGEND

Oregon’s state seal bears the motto Alis Volat Propriis. She flies with her own wings. It was adopted in 1854, restored in 1957 after a brief replacement, and it has outlasted every attempt to define Oregon by someone else’s terms. The motto does not name what flies. It simply declares the manner of flight: unaided, unbeholden, alone.

Oregon has always been a place of self-determined arrival. The emigrants who walked the Oregon Trail did not come to join an existing order. They came to build one, or more accurately, to prove that one was not needed. The provisional government formed before statehood operated on the principle that authority should be local, personal, and accountable to no distant crown or capital. When Oregon entered the Union in 1859, it entered on its own terms.

That independence took root in the soil. Oregon’s Willamette Valley, one of the most fertile growing regions on earth, produces hops that belong to no other terroir. The craft brewing movement that swept the country in the late twentieth century found its most fertile ground here, in a state where doing things your own way was not rebellion but tradition. Portland became the city of independent breweries not because of a trend but because Oregon had been practicing independence for a century and a half before the first craft brewhouse opened.

Her Own Wings is an Oregon IPA at 6.5% ABV, brewed with Oregon-grown hops that carry sun-kissed strawberry, dark berry, dank cannabis, and dense pine resin. It rises on its own thermals. It borrows no mythology from distant lands because it does not need to. The "she" is Oregon herself, and she has never needed an altar, a tradition, or anyone’s permission to fly.