WIRED PONDERS whether PCs are from Mars and Macs are from Venus.

SURE ENOUGH, as soon as I’m no longer writing Obits a major passing occurs in the Northwest scene. Miller Brewing is closing the 106-year-old former Olympia Brewery, the region’s last mass-market beer factory and Thurston County’s biggest industrial employer.

It comes four years after Seattle’s Rainier Brewery came to a similar end. Both shutdowns (along with those of Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Carling/Heidelberg in Tacoma, and the Lucky Lager plant in Vancouver WA) were directly caused by the industry’s massive consolidation. Miller’s contract-brewing arrangement with Pabst meant the Oly plant made the brand names formerly produced at all five big Northwest breweries (though Pabst has been phasing out what was left of the Olympia and Rainier brands this past year).

The Oly site was once the west’s second biggest brewery after Coors, but is now the smallest of Miller’s seven facilities. Management apparently decided to surplus it rather than add a recently required wastewater-treatment facility. So, just maybe, It really was The Water.

(The 125-year tradition of sudsy manufacturing in the PacNW, of course, at dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs, whose business plans aren’t as brutally reliant on mass production and mass marketing.)