Brewer Bio
Meet Sara Atkeson, founder and brewer of Against the Grain Brewery. A 7 year Portland resident, once an explosives builder in the Navy, she is now an avid home brewer. Her “smarts” history includes a recent baccalaureate at PSU’s School of Business in Marketing Management and Food Industry Leadership. Other interests include a passion for creative design. This was fostered from growing up on a ranch, learning from her mechanic father how to fix and make things from scraps, duct tape and chicken wire. Sara also got a taste of diversity from country living by spending her teen years in Santa Cruz, California, where she skateboarded every day and went to punk rock shows seeing live: The Meatmen, Agent Orange, The Youth Brigade, Fury 66, Good Riddance, and Skankin Pickle.
Sara worked as a scooter mechanic during college and even raced her scooter cross country in the Scooter Cannonball Run, where her ability to fix things, stay calm in extreme conditions and problem solve with minimal tools, a roll of duct tape and some rope really came in handy!
Uniquely, she has been gluten free for nearly four years now. She realized the incompatibility of not being able to drink great beer, because of going gluten free, and decided to fix the matter by developing various GF brewing recipes and making her own beer to drink. Over time her friends, gluten free or not, increasingly enjoyed drinking the beer she made too. She found herself spending more time making beer as it was her favorite thing to do. After a particularly tough semester in college and an even tougher finals week she found herself not wanting to go to join her friends at the beach or parties during Spring break. Her passion and preference was to brew beer! While in the kitchen working on a GF IPA recipe it came to her, maybe she could do this for a living. She had heard the advice of following your passion and to do for a living the thing that you enjoy.
So why not this?
Why not her? Why not gluten free beer? After kicking the idea around for awhile and asking what people who knew her thought about the idea of starting a GF brewery, the consensus was that Sara is tenacious enough, resourceful, and hard working. She is the kind of person known to her peers as someone that gets things done, set’s goals and achieves them, no one seemed surprised to hear her say she wanted to start a GF brewery. Sara’s favorite quote was said by Ralph Waldo Emerson, US essayist & poet: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” and she has a lot of it!
In her free time Sara enjoys cooking GF food, roller skating, riding her 84 PX150 Vespa scooter on curvy back roads, writing Zines and making Roller Derby outfits for her friends.
