Rogue Ales started their “small revolution,” as the company likes to describe it, in Ashland, Oregon, in 1988. Between June and October of that year, Jack Joyce, Bob Woodell, and Rob Strasser worked with Jeff Schultz, an avid homebrewer (and Bob’s accountant), to install a 10-barrel brewing system and a 60-seat pub in a commercial space on Lithia Creek. Roughly 18 months later, in May 1989, Rogue opened the much larger Bay Front Brew Pub in Newport, Oregon’s old Front and Case Building on Southwest Bay Boulevard. By this point, John Maier, formerly of Alaska Brewing, had joined the company as brewmaster.

Rogue now owns and operates 10 multitap meeting halls or bars in Oregon, Washington, and California and brews approximately 86,000 barrels of beer annually. It produces Issaquah Frog beers at the namesake brewhouse in Issaquah, Washington, and has sold beers created at the Eugene City Brewery under the Track Town Ales name since October 2004. They also raise seven varieties of hops on a 42-acre property in Independence, Oregon, and harvest barley at their 256-acre farm in the Tygh Valley. The 34 aggressively hopped beers sold under the Rogue Ales brand are fermented with PacMan, their proprietary yeast, and are never pasteurized. Many have won national awards. Since the early days of brewing their American amber (originally Ashland amber) in a basement facility for a local market, Rogue has grown into an international business that distributes its beers to 19 different countries along with all 50 states. In 2003 Rogue also began distilling its own rum, whiskey, and gin.