Portland’s Antifa Hang Out Cider Riot! Goes Out of Business

The NE Portland Cidery that served as an unofficial HQ of Portland’s Antifa professional protesters is going out of business on November 10th.

The owner, self-styled “anti-fascist” owner, Abram Goldman-Armstrong, told Willamette Week in September that he was looking for a buyer, claiming that cider distribution was piddling out and that he was more than $800,000 in debt.

But he wouldn’t sell to just anyone:

“We’re not going to sell to racist scumbags, and I don’t think the other investors would feel comfortable selling to someone who doesn’t believe in equal rights for all humans. Political views don’t usually play a part in business, so we’re not ruling out anyone unless they’re really terrible.”

Since people like Goldman-Armstrong think that everyone to the right of Mao is a “racist scumbag,” you can imagine that it would be hard to find a buyer. And, guess what? He didn’t.

Cider Riot! unabashedly supported Antifa by allowing their customers to saturate members of Patriot Prayer anti antifa group with bear spray as they stood on the public sidewalk outside the cidery. Patriot Prayer leader, Joey Gibson, was charged in the May Day 2018 incident.

The group also produced a “black bloc” line of pro-Antifa ciders, which featured the group’s logos.

The Iron Front Flag, an Antifa logo, was temporarily banned from Portland Timbers’ games. Goldman-Armstrong made the drink to protest the ban.

KOIN News straightfacedly reported that the cider’s antisocial, anti-free-speech, antifa connections had nothing to do with the closure.

But as Willamette Week reported, the connections didn’t help.

On Sept. 18, Goldman-Armstrong put Cider Riot up for sale. He says he’s strapped for cash because of overly ambitious expansion efforts. But he says political clashes, branding Cider Riot in the public imagination as “the Antifa Pub,” haven’t helped.

[…]

“I think it’s ridiculous that we get called the antifa bar all the time. … Being an antifascist is just a normal state of being. I shouldn’t be getting credit for being against the fascists. That should just be the normal attitude of any decent-minded human.”

He said that being called out by the pro free-speech-anti-Antifa Patriot Prayer group hasn’t helped either. A May Day fight between a Patriot Prayer person and an Antifa belligerent ended with the prosecution of Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson for riot.

Goldman-Armstrong told Willamette Week that Gibson is the reason fewer people have come into the pub. He claims customers are afraid “these fascists” will come back. He is suing Gibson for $1,000,000.00.

His loss of business couldn’t be that there are anti-Antifa Portlanders who are sick and tired of the group’s violence and intolerance. Couldn’t be that.

Nor could it be the violence that started at Cider Riot and spilled out into the streets, leading to the murder of an Antifa member by an apparent SUV driving trio of friendlies.

Antifa members ordered witnesses and other allies not to speak to the “pigs” about it. No one has been arrested.

Cider Riot has been under investigation by the Oregon Liquor Control Board and, according to The Oregonian, the agency concluded in September that:

The owner of Cider Riot knowingly allowed his patrons to use “illegal weapons” against right-wing agitators during a May Day brawl and refused to remove unruly customers from his property, an investigation by state regulators alleges.

Abram Goldman-Armstrong and a licensed security guard who was working at his Northeast Portland cidery that day also are accused of providing misleading statements to state authorities during the investigation, documents claim.

The Cider Riot! owner says there will always be a place for the far Left communistas to meet.

For now, his place is going the way of the former Red and Black cafe, whose anarchist-communist (no, really) ‘workers’ refused to serve cops, (which we fixed a few years back).