Oak Grove

THE LEGEND

Not every mythology comes from ancient texts. Some of it grows in your own neighborhood.

Oak Grove is an unincorporated community in Clackamas County, Oregon, nestled between Milwaukie and Gladstone along the eastern bank of the Willamette River. It has no city hall, no official mayor, no grand monument. What it has are Oregon white oaks. They line the bluffs above the river, their branches spreading wide and low in the way oaks do when they have had a century or two to settle into a place without being disturbed. The community took its name from these trees, and the trees, in turn, gave the community its quiet, unpretentious character.

Oak Grove is the kind of place that rarely makes the news. Its streets are residential and unhurried. Its parks slope down toward the Willamette, where great blue herons stand motionless in the shallows. It is not Portland, though Portland is close. It is not rural, though the farmland is not far. It exists in the comfortable middle ground that most of Oregon actually occupies: a place where people live, raise families, and know their neighbors by name rather than by Instagram handle.

This is where Oak Union Brewing puts its roots down. Not in a mythology borrowed from another continent, but in the community we call home. The oaks along the Willamette are not sacred in the druidic sense. They are sacred in the local sense: they were here before us, they will outlast us, and the neighborhood would not be the same without them.

Oak Grove is brewed as an homage to that place. An American Wheat Ale at 5.0% ABV, it carries soft wheat and gentle citrus, nothing more and nothing less. It is simple, local, and honest, like the community it is named for. No ancient gods. No epic sagas. Just a good beer from the place where the oaks grow.