Portland Syrups started in 2012 when Chris Onstad and Dan McLaughlin got tired of what they found on store shelves. The drink mixers available were too sweet, full of artificial ingredients, and packaged in ways that created waste they didn't want to contribute to. So they started brewing syrups in their kitchen.
The company has grown since then, but not in the way most food businesses grow. Chris and Dan still make everything the same way, just in slightly larger batches.
The process starts with whole ingredients — fresh fruit purées, whole herbs, spices, and botanicals. They sift, sort, and weigh everything before processing begins, and then start chopping, crushing, juicing, or toasting.
A prime example of their process is their Pomegranate Cherry syrup. Grenadine has been around for centuries, but most commercial versions bear little resemblance to pomegranate. Chris and Dan use pure pomegranate purée and combine it with locally sourced cherries. The result tastes tart and sweet at once, the way pomegranate actually tastes, not the candy-red sweetness most people associate with grenadine.
After steeping, they remove the spent ingredients and compost them. The remaining liquid gets sweetened with organic, fair-trade regenerative cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. They heat the sweetened brew to a specific temperature and hot-fill the bottles one at a time.
The heating matters more than you'd think. Their simple syrup demonstrates this. It's just organic cane sugar and purified water, but the temperature has to be precise. Too cool and sugar granules stay in suspension. Too hot and you burn the sugars, creating caramel flavor instead of clean sweetness. Getting it right means the syrup adds balanced sweetness to cold or hot drinks without changing what those drinks are supposed to taste like.
They think about where ingredients come from. They buy local and organic when available, sourcing as close to home as possible. When they make their coffee syrups (which include vanilla, hazelnut, and caramel) they're building flavors that work with coffee instead of overwhelming it. Premium ingredients mean you can taste the difference between a vanilla latte made with their syrup and one made with the standard coffee shop version.
The syrups work in cocktails, mocktails, and sodas, too. You can make a Cherry Bomb Soda with the pomegranate cherry syrup or use the vanilla in a cold brew. The versatility comes from the concentration and the quality of the ingredients. You're adding real fruit, herbs, and spices.
After more than a decade, they're still in Southeast Portland, still touching every bottle, still composting the spent ingredients, still choosing glass over plastic. The kitchen pots from 2012 are long gone, replaced by equipment that can handle bigger batches. But the approach hasn't changed. Whole ingredients, sweetened with cane sugar, hot-filled into glass bottles, labeled by hand. It's labor-intensive and deliberate, and that's the point.
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