03/16/2024
A grateful goodbye to a good neighbor, and a warm welcome to a new friend.
To our beloved Cairn Community, we appreciate you so much. It’s because of your love and support over the last eight years that Cairn was born and grew into the incredible gathering place that it is today.
The most important part of this message is to say ‘thank you” from the bottom of our hearts—thank you to our customers, our business and community partners, and most dearly to our team, the Cairn Crew.
The goal in starting Cairn was to brew great beer, yes—but it grew into so much more. The vision was to create a place where you could drink a beer with whoever is important to you—a place where you could ‘bring your life’. And bring it you did. So many newborns! So many first steps holding onto a Cairn bench. So many new furry family members. So many life partnerships. And more than a few losses of loved ones.
Thank you for letting us be a part of your lives. Every dang day.
All that said, we have news: Postdoc Brewing will be taking over operations at Cairn.
We’ve known for a while that Cairn has the potential to be more, to grow. Tom Schmidlin and the team at Postdoc can make that happen. So while the Cairn brand will fade away, its essence will continue as Postdoc.
The two breweries are so similar—a focus on high quality beer, small teams, a warm taproom, community involvement, a deep affection for dogs, shared food trucks. And we share a lot of history, too—Tom recommended the contractor that did the Cairn build out, Bill and Tom were active in the Cascade Brewers Guild many moons ago. Heck, the same farmer picks up our spent grain.
We’ve always regarded Postdoc as a well-run, community-driven brewery and taproom with award-winning beers. All things we value, too. We are confident that they are the right humans to take this little neighborhood brewery farther into the world.
It will be a couple of more months as Cairn—and then Postdoc will make our space their own. All of the Cairn Crew have the opportunity to stay on the team with Postdoc.
We’ll share more as we can. For now, come in, have a beer with us and know that great things will come. And you might see more of Bill and Jen on the fun side of the counter.
We love you guys. Cheers!