Much like Wisconsin and cheese, Louisiana and Cajun cuisine, and Alaska and Salmon, it’s hard to separate the Pacific Northwest from that one culinary topper that enters our bodies cold and crisp and leaves us feeling warm and delighted. Of course, we are talking about beer, a product that’s as rewarding to taste as it is to brew. So, with many local options, just how does Trap Door Brewing stand out amongst the rest? To learn more, we sat down with owner Bryan Shull to uncover Trap Door’s history, its future, and just what secrets lie behind, pun intended, the trap door…
“We started our brewery and taproom in Vancouver in 2015,” says Shull. “It was a complete career change event, as I transitioned from my career as an engineer in renewable energy because I just loved the beer community.”
Now, brewing a variety of beer is one challenge in and of itself, but carving out an identity that would truly encapsulate the Trap Door brand was another.
“The beer community was evolving pretty rapidly and was red hot in the Pacific Northwest around the time I wanted to get started,” says Shull. “This meant you had to differentiate yourself either geographically or by the product. We chose to focus on the product, the location, and the name. There was nothing like it in the Uptown village in Vancouver and the street itself was pretty dead. We just became the neighborhood pub for thousands of people.”
Community is certainly a way to build a brand. However, the one thing that perhaps topples the idea of community is family, a concept that Shull is fully aware of given how Trap Door brewed its first batch of products.
“I actually hired my son (Zane) out of UC Davis as our first brewer,” says Shull. “He studied in their fermentation science program with a specialty in beer. It’s one of the top rated beer schools in the nation and he was the top of the class, making it pretty clear that we were about to mix some high quality products. We actually won the best startup business award in 2015.”
The early success of Trap Door shouldn’t be surprising as beer is seemingly in the Shull family blood, with Shull and his son representing the third and fourth generation of Clark County beer in their family, as Shull’s grandfather first began working at Great Western Malt in the 1950s. By the 1970s he became the malt manager. Shull’s father also got a job at the same company out of high school and ended up working his entire career there.
So, with a product Shull was confident in as well as a formulated blueprint on how to run the business, there was only one thing missing, and that was an identity.
“At the beginning, all the cool names were seemingly taken,” says Shull. “By the time I got around to it I went through about 100 names before I finally realized the challenge ahead. Everything was taken. So, one day a friend of mine who helped build the brewery mentioned the name ‘Trap Door’ from a Pearl Jam song and I said there’s no way it’s available… It’s too cool. I was shocked when we learned it was available.”
Trap Door has done gangbusters over the years, so much so that they had to move their brewery to Washougal to accommodate the demand. “The building in Washougal used to belong to Amnesia Brewing, as well Logsdon Brewing, and the previous owner of the building owned all the equipment, so there was a full brewhouse in here already,” says Shull. “There was just so much more space so we moved the entire brewery over to Washougal just over a year ago. It was lightning in a bottle.”
Today, the Washougal location offers patrons and guests a full pub, with a bar, liquor license, and an exciting pizza menu to complement Trap Door’s best. However, worry not for those who are attached to the original location on Main street in Uptown, as the taproom is still there as well as two loyal food carts in Esan Thai and Taco City.
“They’ve been there since the beginning; good people,” says Shull.
Now, let’s get into the beer of it all.
Today, Trap Door is known for a lot of one-off beers, estimating they have brewed around 300-400 different kinds of beers since their inception. However, Trap Door does have a core line that they’ve brewed over time, with two top sellers being Lite Beam on the light lager side and Glowed Up on the hazy side, although one Trap Door brew reigns supreme amongst those loyal to the business. “Our biggest selling beer inside the taproom is hands down, both locations, all day, every day, all month, all year is Trap Door IPA,” says Shull. “We have distribution across Oregon and Washington State so there should be plenty of opportunities to check out our product.”
As busy as they are, Trap Door has no plans on slowing down their output.
“We’ve doubled production this last year, and we’re going to double again in the next couple of years,” says Shull given their new Washougal location. “We’re probably going to max out at this location at about 4,000 barrels per year. We only did 350 barrels our first year.”
It’s safe to say that Trap Door is brewing up some exciting plans for the future, given their projections as well as the fact that they were recently awarded a Bronze medal at the 2023 Great American Beer Festival, the world’s largest professional beer competition that highlights the county’s most delicious and innovative products. If this is what Trap Door can accomplish in less than a decade, we cannot wait to see what’s up their sleeve for the future.
