Bull Run Distillery sits in Portland’s Northwest District, founded in 2010 by Lee Medoff and Patrick Bernards as Oregon’s first legal whiskey distillery since Prohibition. The operation started small in a converted warehouse space, with Medoff bringing his background in wine and spirits importing while Bernards contributed his engineering expertise to design their custom distillation setup. They named it after the historic Bull Run Watershed that supplies Portland’s famously pure water, which becomes a key ingredient in every bottle they produce. The journey wasn’t smooth—Oregon’s laws hadn’t been updated for small distilleries in decades, so they spent months working with state officials to create a framework that would allow craft distilling to flourish. Their persistence paid off, opening doors for the wave of craft distilleries that followed across the Pacific Northwest. Master distiller Lee Medoff focuses on American whiskeys, particularly bourbon and rye, using locally-sourced grains when possible and aging everything on-site in their temperature-controlled warehouse. Visitors find a working distillery that’s grown thoughtfully over the years, expanding from a single room to include a proper tasting area and retail space. You can see their custom-built hybrid pot-column still through the production area, watch the bottling process, and taste spirits that have been aging since their early years. The atmosphere feels authentic—this isn’t a tourist attraction that happens to make whiskey, but a serious distillery that welcomes curious visitors who want to understand the craft.