DailyAstorian.com // WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 2017
145TH YEAR, NO. 18
ONE DOLLAR
Neighbors
tepid over
warming
center spot
Say it’s necessary, but
waste, safety are issues
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Daily Astorian
Pilot House Distilling
Joseph Haggard of Crossroads Mobile Canning helped package 2,500 cans of Astoria Mary, a bloody mary in a can
created by Pilot House Distilling. The business is developing more canned cocktails like Moscow mules and margaritas.
COCKTAIL IN A CAN
Astoria distillery
fi rst in state to
offer vodka drink
See WARMING CENTER, Page 4A
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
ince opening Pilot House Distill-
ing three years ago, Larry Cary has
faced numerous hurdles, from the
usual permitting requirements for selling
spirits to legal threats over trademarks that
have forced the distillery to change names
twice.
But with some help from state regula-
tors and the Legislature, he and his wife,
Christina, were recently able to change
state law and begin selling the Astoria
Mary, Oregon’s fi rst commercially pro-
duced cocktail in a can.
Larry Cary said a canned cocktail was
the logical next step for the distillery, like
a brewery canning beer.
The Astoria Mary combines the
distillery’s jalapeño -lime vodka with
Bloody Knuckles Bloody Mary mix
and a tomatillo -jalapeño drinking
vinegar from Grumpy Dog Shrub Co.,
a sister company owned by Christina.
The drink, sold in four-packs of 12- ounce
cans, comes in at 10 percent alcohol by
volume.
“For us, it was like, ‘Why hasn’t any-
body in Oregon done it? There’s got to be
something,’” Christina Cary said. “But
there was nothing.”
By May, the Carys were shipping out
the fi rst batch of Astoria Mary to the Ore-
gon Liquor Control Commission’s ware-
houses to be distributed at other liquor
stores. But then the couple found out Asto-
ria Mary was not alcoholic enough to be
legal.
State law had allowed distillery license
holders to concoct blends that were 17
percent alcohol . Because Astoria Mary
had only 10 percent alcohol by volume, it
was technically illegal to sell in the state’s
liquor stores.
Barbara Balseiro’s favorite shift was from
2 a.m. to 5 a.m.
As a former nurse, the volunteer for the
Astoria Warming Center was used to late
hours. If one of the homeless people waiting
out a cold winter night at the center wanted
to talk, well she had nothing to do anyway,
but try to stay awake.
One night a man told her how he never
felt he had a home. When he was child liv-
ing on a farm in rural Oregon, his dinner
plate was set out on the back porch next to
the dog’s dish. At 6 years old, aggressive and
unmanageable, he was admitted to a treat-
ment program at Oregon State Hospital for
“the most dangerous and self-destructive
kids in the whole state,” where Balseiro her-
self had once worked. He loved the classes
he attended there, especially poetry.
As an adult, he found himself on the
streets. He stopped taking his medications.
Then he spent a number of nights at the
w arming c enter one winter. He told Bal-
seiro: “I feel like I have a home. I can make
it through the day knowing I have a place to
go.”
S
Photos by Edward Stratton/The Daily Astorian
ABOVE: Larry Cary, left, and Christina Cary received support from state liquor
regulators and the state Legislature to get their new product, the Astoria Mary
canned bloody mary, to market. BELOW: The Astoria Mary combines Pilot
House Distilling’s jalapeño -lime vodka and Grumpy Dog Shrub Co.’s jalapeño
drinking vinegar and Bloody Knuckles Bloody Mary mix.
Child care
center to
move near
the Port
Shooting Stars at old
state police location
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
and EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
An education and child care center will
rub shoulders with log trucks and fi sh pro-
cessors when it moves into a building at the
Port of Astoria this year.
Amid concerns about putting a center for
children in an industrial area, the Astoria Plan-
ning Commission approved a conditional use
request Tuesday night from Shooting Stars
Child Development Center to relocate to a
building previously used by the Oregon State
Police. The building is across the street from
Bornstein Seafoods on Gateway Avenue, near
log-handling operations at Piers 1 and 3.
Planning Commission President David
Pearson pointed out that other small busi-
nesses not industrial in nature are located
along Gateway. The Port had identifi ed the
former state police outpost as a good candi-
date for “adaptive reuse,” he said.
The Port of Astoria Commission approved
a lease to the center on Tuesday , contingent
See COCKTAIL, Page 9A
See MOVE, Page 9A
Hood to Coast runs all the way to China
Asian nation
starts version of
state’s big race
By STEVE BRANDON
Portland Tribune
Thirty-fi ve years ago, with
little fanfare, eight teams con-
sisting of 10 runners each took
off downhill from Timberline
Lodge, wound their way one at a
time through Portland and small
communities, and ended up at
a relatively quiet fi nish line in
Pacifi c City.
That was Hood to Coast
Relay I.
Who could have foreseen
that 2017 would be the year of
Hood to Coast Relay XXXVI,
and that this one race would now
be part of a series of road -run-
ning events, and that another
Hood to Coast I — in the world’s
most-populated country —
would have just been launched
successfully in partnership with
a company featuring China’s
most popular athlete, Yao Ming.
“I would never have imag-
ined this,” says Felicia Hubber,
Hood to Coast Race Series pres-
ident and the daughter of HTC
Relay founder Bob Foote. “It
feels so surreal.”
Hubber was on hand this
month for the July 8 Hood to
Coast China — the fi rst of what is
expected to be many of its kind in
the Asian country of 1.4 billion.
Yao Ming and Starz Inter-
national Sports were co-pro-
ducers of the race. The 7-foot-
6-inch, 310-pound former NBA
center doesn’t run, but his mere
involvement helped ensure the
104-mile inaugural had plenty of
support and publicity.
“The race got more media
than we get here,” Hubber says.
“It was the top -trending topic
on WeChat, the leading social
media platform in China, and it
got coverage on CCTV (China
Central Television).”
The Hood to
Coast Relay
recently
debuted in
China.
See HOOD TO COAST, Page 9A
Felicia Hubber