Picture this: a legendary outdoor clothing brand walks into a brewery and says, "Let's make beer using bear poop." The brewery founder's first instinct? Check if someone's pranking him.
But Columbia Sportswear and Breakside Brewery weren't joking. Their collaboration produced Nature Calls, a limited-edition lager that sounds like a bathroom joke but operates on surprisingly solid science. The beer's secret ingredient isn't actually the droppings themselves, but rather water that's been recycled through bear scat in Montana's Bull Run watershed and then purified through a rigorous, certified reclamation process that removes pathogens at the molecular level. It's the kind of advanced water treatment that sustainable breweries around the world already use, just with a wilder origin story.
The partnership kicked off as part of Columbia's cheeky marketing campaign called Engineered for Whatever, launched around Super Bowl season. The brand's vice-president, Joe Boyle, summed up the philosophy perfectly: "If Mother Nature hurls bear poop at us, we'll ferment it into a frosty pint." When you're marketing gear designed to survive anything the wilderness throws at you, this kind of absurdist creativity makes a strange kind of sense. Like other unconventional brewery collaborations, this one blurred the line between marketing stunt and legitimate craftsmanship.
Breakside's founder Scott Lawrence admits the team was skeptical at first. Once he realized Columbia was serious, he leaned into it. Working with brewmaster Ben Edmunds, they crafted a beer that's actually approachable. The recipe combines Idaho malted barley, low-color wheat, corn, honey, and huckleberry syrup after lagering. Edmunds describes it as having "the lightness of a seltzer across the back of the palate," with pronounced minerality and low hop bitterness. The flavor profile deliberately echoes a bear's natural diet (huckleberries, plants, honey), which is where the whole concept started.
The water sourcing adds another layer to the story. Bull Run's forests teem with wildlife including reptiles, amphibians, fish, and obviously black bears. Those bears' droppings are nutrient-rich precisely because of what they eat. By harvesting and filtering this water through an advanced reclamation system, Breakside found a way to connect the beer to the actual ecosystem bears inhabit. It's unconventional, sure, but it's grounded in ecological logic rather than pure shock value.
Strange ingredient experiments aren't entirely new to the brewing world. Breweries in Finland and Iceland have played with similarly adventurous components tied to animal digestion. But few brands have marketed such an unconventional concept this boldly or tied it so directly to their brand identity. Columbia's gamble was betting that their outdoor-focused audience would appreciate the weirdness and the craftsmanship in equal measure.
The beer's actual taste, though, doesn't require you to think about its origins at all. Nature Calls reads like a straightforward, refreshing lager that happens to have one of the most memorable origin stories in recent craft brewing history. It's the kind of product that makes for great conversation whether you're at a brewpub in Portland or retelling the story at a campfire hours away from the nearest bar.
For travelers curious about craft beer culture or Portland's creative commercial scene, this collaboration captures something essential about the city. It's a place where outdoor companies, breweries, and marketing minds collide to create something completely unexpected. Whether Nature Calls becomes a permanent fixture or remains a one-time collaboration, it's already earned its place in craft beer folklore.
