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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

Bend’s Best Pumpkin Spice Doughnuts

Whereas a beer writer moonlights — again — as a doughnut reviewer
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—Beer and/or cannabis will be back on the menu next week here in Craft, but for now, beer writer-slash-avowed-doughnut-lover Brian Yaeger spins another yarn about one popular seasonal flavor. Seattle’s jolly green giant of a coffee chain has weathered years of derision for its pumpkin spice latte to the point where it’s celebrating two decades […]

Posted inFood & Drink

One of the World’s Most Obscure Beers Comes to Bend

The Ale Apothecary made a Gotlandsdricka inspired by smoked Swedish farmhouse ales
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When Paul Arney launched The Ale Apothecary in 2011, he deigned to create beers that were more art than industry. One of his first recipes was an interpretation of a Finnish farmhouse ale known as sahti. But he was clear to point out, “This is not a farmhouse brewery. This is a mountain brewery.” A […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Roll Out the Barrels; It’s Time for Oktoberfests

From bratwursts to weiner dogs, a roundup of stein-hoisting events this season
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It’s been 213 years since the marriage of Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. While you weren’t invited to the wedding, the anniversary is better known today as Oktoberfest. Some 6 million people will fill the tents and bierhalls of Munich from mid-September through early October. Somewhat confusingly, the primary beer style for the […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Deschutes’ New Brown Ale is its Old Brown Ale

Oud Bruin, aka Flanders Brown, is worth discovering, or re-discovering
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In 2008, craft breweries were still on the verge of tapping into beer’s wild and wooly past. Historical styles were truly all the rage. You literally (not figuratively) weren’t guaranteed to find an “India Pale Ale” on taplists! So-called sour beers were on the cusp of becoming A Thing. Allagash Brewing in Portland, Maine, built […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Pairing Burgers with Beers

Breweries cater to customers’ demand. And customers demand burgers.
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Although Bend lacks the food diversity of larger cities, it’s hard to argue that the greatest meal isn’t a burger with a cold beer. And that’s something decidedly not lacking locally. For this round-up of Bend’s burgerific brewpubs, note that tasting rooms hosting smashburger trucks are omitted, so this exclusively focuses on pubs with burger-slinging […]

Posted inNews

State of the Brewnion

The people who make our beer discuss the state of our beer
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I was already halfway done with the first draft of this story when the news broke that AB-InBev, the brewing conglomerate that makes Budweiser, sold off 10 Barrel Brewing, less than a decade after buying the Bend-based brewery. The deal included a slate of craft brewery acquisitions including Portland’s Widmer Bros. Brewing (after just three years […]

Posted inBest Of Central Oregon

Best Specialty Cocktail

The Botanist, Five Fusion
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There are probably some people who don’t like the word verdant, but it’s an apt descriptor for this cocktail. Not only is it a joyous shade of green, dare I say chartreuse, but it smacks of many a garden’s delights, or at least well-stocked bar’s garnish station. Gin, already the most botanical of all spirits, […]

Posted inBest Of Central Oregon

Best Light Beer

Sweet As Pacific Ale, GoodLife Brewing
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When GoodLife’s Sweet As won “People’s Choice” at the Bend Brewfest — in the brewery’s first year out of the gate, no less — it showed that this brewery knew it was onto something from the drop. A dozen years later, Sweet As is still undeniably and indelibly a Bend favorite. “We’re making classic, clean […]

Posted inFood & Drink

Is the World Ready for an A.I.P.A?

Machine learning not yet impacting human drinking
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My young son is so freaked out from all the stories about AI that he overhears on NPR while I’m chauffeuring him around, he’s having nightmares about the robots obliterating the human race. While self-driving Tesla crashes (273 last year!) and chatbots that use machine learning to learn to act like Nazis and deepfake videos […]

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