Iceland’s KEX Brewing this fall plans to become the latest European craft-beer brewery to set up shop in Portland in 2019, joining Denmark’s Mikkeller, which opened earlier this month in the central eastside.
The Reykjavik-based brewery’s beers will be featured at KEX, a hotel and restaurant under construction on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard just north of Couch Street. The partners behind the project -- ChefStable and KEX Brewing’s sister company, KEX Iceland in Reykjavik -- expect KEX to open in late fall.
“Portland is a great fit for our brand,” said Olafur Agustsson, 36, who co-owns KEX Brewing with business partner Kristinn Vilbergsson, 47. “We want to be a part of this great community, be a part of what this scene is.”
ChefStable also partnered with Mikkeller to open food and bar pop-ups in the former Burnside Brewing space. The pop-ups, which feature Mikkeller beers and food by chef Shaun King, will operate through December as the partners pursue plans for a permanent home that would include a Mikkeller brewery.
Kurt Huffman, ChefStable owner, said it was a “total accident” that he became involved in bringing the two breweries to Portland. He met Mikkeller owner Mikkel Borg Bjergso through Agustsson and Vilbergsson, whom he has worked with for seven years to bring KEX to Portland. Mikkeller has a beer bar in Reykjavik, and it has partnered on various projects with KEX for years.
Mikkeller and KEX have a “similar quirky approach” to beer, Huffman said, and bring different flavor profiles, different uses of hops and nontraditional styles to Portland. “On top of it, (KEX’s) branding is hilarious. It’s just another healthy contribution to the Portland beer scene.”
Offbeat imagery and marketing approach are hallmarks of KEX, captured in its website Manifesto promoting the decline of craftsmanship and the rise of conformity.
KEX coming to Portland marks changes for Dirty Pretty Brewing, the Southeast Portland brewery Carston Haney founded in 2016 as Ross Island Brewing. In 2018, ChefStable bought a stake in Ross Island Brewing and rebranded it as Dirty Pretty, but Huffman on Monday said Dirty Pretty will itself be rebranded and produce only KEX beers.
The hotel will occupy three stories and a basement, with the lobby, bar and restaurant comprising an open ground floor. The hotel will be on the upper floors, along with a rooftop bar, and the site will include a venue for events and live music.
“It’s going to be alive, dynamic, energetic,” said Agustsson, who plans to book Icelandic and American music acts. “A lot of things happening. It’s going to be an experience.”
The 146-bed hotel will occupy the former Vivian Apartments, a 1911 building Huffman is in the process of getting placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It will have private as well as shared rooms, with some holding as many as 14 guests. Agustsson said it will be a “social hotel” with the shared rooms like a “fancy dorm.”
Huffman said the interior aesthetics are the vision of Icelandic designer Dani Pedersen, “decorated and curated with stuff that Dani found in flea markets on mainland Europe. … He drove through the country and bought furniture, brought it here and is decorating the hotel with all sorts of found objects. It’s an unusual space.”
“It’s very different than any hotel we have here in Portland,” Huffman continued. “It’s an eclectic vibe inside. Call it Bohemian art deco.”
The restaurant will offer a Northwest menu with “a Nordic-Icelandic twist, without it being too quirky,” Agustsson said. The menu, which he said will be “slightly higher level than pub food but on the cheaper end,” will include pickled, fermented and traditional dung-smoked foods.
“That doesn’t mean we’re going to do that to everything on the menu, but we’re going to do that and respect that tradition,” he said. “We’re going to go after the philosophy of locally produced, fresh in season, honest, clean, bright food.”
Sean O’Connor, formerly of Le Pigeon, is general manager of the project. Agustsson said the head chef hasn’t been named yet but likely would be soon.
KEX will pour six to eight of its beers and a half-dozen guest taps, including wine. Agustsson said KEX’s beers include a Nordic-style IPA, which he described as “easy drinking,” and in the next few weeks, the team will be developing an IPA, a hazy IPA, a sour and a pilsner, with the hope of having eight initial beers.
KEX is popular in Iceland for its Icelandic Beer Festival, which the brewery started in 2012 and last year included 32 breweries, half from America. He acknowledged KEX isn’t widely known among West Coast craft-beer drinkers, though it has done numerous collaborations with Oregon breweries, including Sugarcube New England IPA with Breakside Brewery and Atomic Jukebox milkshake IPA with Fort George Brewery.
Ben Edmunds, Breakside’s brewmaster, said he recently attended a dinner the KEX owners put together for Oregon Beer Week, and they back up showmanship with skill, craft and execution.
“In Iceland, there’s no entrenched beer culture, so their ideas about food and beer are so unburdened by any kind of preconceptions or history of, this is this style and you should do this with it,” Edmunds said.
Agustsson said he and Vilbergsson have wanted to come to Portland because it’s so similar to Reykjavik.
“We both have a bustling culinary scene, a lot of dynamic things going on in both cities,” Agustsson said. “That said, food is better here. Beer is better here. People adapt to things better here, they’re more open-minded and go out more.
“That’s a great thing for KEX to be a part of,” he said. “We’re here to give people the experience of who we are. We are confident we can do that here.”
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