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Brian Yaeger

Brian Yaeger is a beer author (including "Oregon Breweries"), beer fest producer and beer-tasting instructor at COCC. Because he’s working on doughnut authorship, you’ll find he occasionally reviews our local doughnut scene. Yes, he absolutely floats all summer long with a beer in one hand and a doughnut in the other.

brian@beerodyssey.com
Posted inFood & Drink

Big Ed’s is Bend’s Biggest Secret Bakery

From year-round sourdough to seasonal cider doughnuts
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A couple weeks ago, I focused my quarterly doughnut roundup on fall favorites, specifically apple cider doughnuts. The only places that make them at this moment are Too Sweet Cakes and Sisters Bakery. Or so I thought, until a reader mercifully informed me that Big Ed’s Artisan Breads makes this autumnal delicacy (available only late September […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Bend Earns Reputation as Beer Mecca

More Great American Beer Fest medals return to Central Oregon than Portland
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Each year, confident American craft brewers send their beers to Denver, Colorado, to be judged at the most prestigious competition in the country, if not the world: the Great American Beer Festival, produced by the Brewers Association. For this year’s 38th annual competition, 8,836 beers were submitted covering all 50 states. As always, California came […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Bend’s Best Autumnal Doughnuts

Bonus points for offering apple cider sweet treats
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Fall calls for doughnuts that taste like, well, fall-scented candles. They often offer the allure of sweet baking spices like cinnamon and nutmeg and alternate from vanilla icing to buttermilk glaze. But while Central Oregon isn’t Vermont or even Central Washington, it’d be nice if more of our doughnut purveyors would sling sugar-crusted cake doughnuts […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Hemp Beverages Reach New Summit

Pacific Hemp Beverage Summit Explores THC drinks Friday at Silver Moon
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Just three months ago, I wrote about the three Bend beverage makers who noticed how the 2018 federal Farm Bill spelled out that products containing 0.3% dry-weight volume of THC are legal to produce, distribute and sell. It essentially translates to being able to consume drinks that boast a low-key 2 milligrams of hemp-derived (but […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Grand Craft Bend: Craft Kitchen & Brewery’s Funny Business

Come for the beer and BBQ, stay for the experimental comedy
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G rand Craft Bend podcast talks to Courtney Stevens, co-owner of Bend’s Craft Kitchen & Brewery about launching the brewpub with her husband, Mark, and hosting tons of events including open-mic stand-up comedy, where Courtney sometimes performs her own material. Listen now: Source Weekly – Bend, Oregon · Grand Craft Bend: Craft Kitchen & Brewery

Posted inFood & Drink

Radlerfest Returns to Quench Late-Summer Thirst

Five breweries in NE Bend’s Boyd Acres welcome wheeled guests with $6 pints of eponymous beer cocktails
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Summer doesn’t officially end until September 22, and with the current heat in Bend, that is patently obvious. For the second year in a row, five breweries in the so-called Brewers District — the Empire Avenue corridor east of Highway 97 — will have a radler on tap on Saturday, September 14 from 1-7 p.m. […]

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Terranaut Beer Sets Sail in Bend

New brewery moves into the tiny brewhouse that was 10 Barrel Brewing’s maiden voyage
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Terranaut Brewing is Bend’s second new brewery in the last five years (including Van Henion). If it feels like Bend already has a bunch of breweries, that’s in part because in the five years prior, nine had opened. While Terranaut is most certainly new, it comes with a vaunted pedigree in brewer and co-owner Bryon […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Love Letter to a Unique Ingredient: Tallow-Washed Whiskey

Hawkeye & Huckleberry’s beef program extends to the bar
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The new Hawkeye & Huckleberry Lounge, self-nicknamed Hawk & Huck, boasts an authentic “ranch to plate” program with beef coming straight from co-owner and native Central Oregonian Brian Malarkey’s family ranch in Tumalo. Malarkey, part of the Food Network’s corral of celebrity chefs, has entrusted the “modern cowboy” themed spot’s bar manager, Hailey Cook — […]

Posted inFood & Drink

“Cali Sober” Drinks Now at Bars

Hemp-derived, low-dose THC, with on-premise consumption
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The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission lists 27 licensed cannabis dispensaries in Bend that can sell you a can of cannabis-infused beverages ranging from 25 to 100 milligrams of THC. But if you want something far less potent but purportedly way more social, you can already find low-dose, hemp-derived THC-infused beverages around town. Tiptoeing in […]

Posted inFood & Drink

New Owners for The Ale Apothecary

Buyers of Bend’s only all-wild brewery recently closed Wolf Tree Brewery
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Shortly after launching The Ale Apothecary in 2012, founding brewmaster Paul Arney — fresh off his stint as assistant brewmaster at Deschutes Brewery — told me that his father, Ralph, didn’t see a future for him in the family business. “He saw the writing on the wall. There’s no future in running a small drug […]

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