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.
By my best guesstimate, each of Central Oregon’s 27 breweries released, on average, at least a dozen beers in the past year, meaning we had no fewer than 350 local beers to choose from. I confess, nay, lament, I did not try them all. (That said, drinking a new beer each day in 2023 is […]
From butterfly pea flowers that turn beers purple to Carolina reaper chili peppers that turn beers spicy AF, Funky Fauna Artisan Ales technically is a brewery, but it’s more like an idea factory. Funky Fauna is now celebrating one successful year of ideation. A full year into its existence it likely remains Central Oregon’s smallest […]
If you grow anything at home—tomatoes?—did you notice your bumper crop this season? Maragas Winery owner Doug Maragas sure did. Not just with the tomatoes, as well as garlic, pumpkins and more, but chiefly in this year’s harvest of Vitis vinifera. European wine grapes. It isn’t just that he had a banner harvest in terms […]
Getting modern craft brewers to brew a brown ale is like getting the kids on my son’s Parks and Rec basketball team to practice lay-ups instead of chunking three-point and half-court shots. There’s so much interest and emphasis on trickery that the fundamentals get overlooked. In today’s world of double-dry-hopped hazy IPAs, the once-elemental brown […]
While whiskey is essentially a distillate of beer, the primary difference in the contents of your last glass of beer and what goes into whiskey is hops. You have to search high and low to find a hopped whiskey—but otherwise, the mash used for each is quite similar. In the case of Black Butte Whiskey, […]
When Cascade Lakes Brewing opened in 1994 it was the second most profitable brewery in Central Oregon. The Redmond-based brewery was the area’s second brewery, and the Rhine Family became the brewery’s third set of owners in 2018. General Manager Andy Rhine announced that Cascade Lakes is now joining the ranks of Patagonia, which announced […]
Mercurial. That may be the most defining aspect of fresh hop beers that are not one specific beer or flavor but are a shapeshifting target. When a beer features fresh (aka “wet”) hops (as opposed to the kiln-dried, typically pelletized hops all breweries rely on year-round) it isn’t defined by its brewery or style but […]
If you’re the type of craft beer drinker who casually peruses tap lists but really, you’re just searching for the IPAs, you’ve possibly come across something called a cold IPA. Instead of that being something darker and maltier in the vein of a Winter IPA, it’s actually lighter and drier. In short, it’s an India […]
In Eugene, brewmaster Matt Van Wyk along with brothers Brian and Doug Coombs are the composers behind Alesong Brewing and Blending. They create a wide range of barrel-matured beers from earthy saisons to viscous imperial stouts and, increasingly, vinous, wild ales that are music to sour beer lovers’ ears. Among Alesong’s six-years-running slate of nine […]
When beseeched to write the consummate list of the world’s best doughnut styles for TheTakeOut.com, The Onion’s non-satirical foodie blog, I unintentionally struck a nerve. I awarded buttermilk bars the bronze, but described them as “the augmented version of an old-fashioned…ameliorated by the use of buttermilk in the cake batter in lieu of regular milk […]
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