Portland’s Away Days Brewing Co. is turning to its community to help the growing brewery expand with a new production facility and taproom in Troutdale.
The company is selling small business bonds on the online platform SMBX. It aims to raise $350,000 that will be used to open a 10,000 square foot facility in the Troutdale Old City Hall building, said brewery co-founder Niki Diamond. The company's current facility is 1,500 square feet.
The bonds carry a 10.5% interest rate and are payable over 60 months following the closing of the offering.
The company is expanding in Troutdale, but it is not leaving the city of Portland and will continue to have a Portland outpost, said Diamond.
Away Days focuses on European-style beer styles, the kinds founders Diamond and Peter Hoppins favor. The couple moved to Portland in 2009 from the U.K. and founded the brewery in 2019, which at the time was an offshoot of their pub, the Toffee Club.
Diamond and Hoppins built a community around Toffee Club that has extended to Away Days.
“In the pandemic, Toffee Club closed and our incredible community at Toffee Club asked how to help and how to support us,” Diamond said. “We said buy our beer.”
And they did.
The business was able to survive the pandemic due to the team hand canning beer and making home deliveries, she said. The taproom reopened in September 2020 and has been open ever since. After some starts and stops the two pulled the plug on Toffee Club and they are now all in on Away Days.
The small brewery in Southeast Portland is at capacity with four brewing tanks, and the building’s infrastructure is stretched to its limits. Expansion was needed and the team started to look both inside and outside of Portland.
Business and personal connections led them to Troutdale, where the city was looking for a brewery or other destination business to take over the long-empty Old City Hall, Diamond said.
Away Days is working with developer Carbon Group to renovate the building to the brewery’s specifications. Carbon Group owns the building and Away Days will be the tenant with an option to buy, Diamond said.
“We weren’t looking specifically outside Portland,” said Diamond. “We really wanted to be somewhere where we could be someone's local or go-to (place) and feel more embedded in the community. When Troutdale came up we liked the opportunity out there. It feels beyond anything we could imagine in Portland.”
Diamond added that the brewery will still have a Portland taproom but the new flagship location will also allow the brewery to fill a cap in a less concentrated area.
Until now the company has been self-funded. Diamond said they have been mindful to grow incrementally and not overwhelm the businesses capacity. However, the scope of this project is such they need the outside help.
“We started planning (an expansion) two years ago. The world has changed but it’s also proved to us that we have to do this. We see the potential,” she said. “We are at the moment where we can’t make enough beer to fulfill the potential we see in this business and this brand. We sold out of our fresh hops inventory in four days.”
In 2021 the company had revenue of $362,397 and profit of $18,898. Last year it had revenue of $417,474 and lost $12,149, according to the bond filings. The team consists of Diamond, Hoppins and Head Brewer Marshall Kunz.
The team talked to banks about traditional lending, but nothing clicked, said Diamond. The couple were aware of the SMBX platform through their friendship with the founders of Culmination Brewing, which raised $400,000 on the platform.
In fact, Hoppins bought Culmination bonds and has seen how the platform works from the consumer perspective. The community aspect about the bond sale also appealed to Diamond and Hoppins.
SMBX has emerged as a popular platform for Portland-area entrepreneurs to tap into their communities and fans for further support.
Since 2020, more than 1,300 investors have put roughly $1.3 million into about a dozen local companies through SMBX. Portland has emerged as one of the more active cities on the platform, according to SMBX.
