Ben Engler, co-founder and brewer at Occidental Brewing in northeast Portland, got into the beer biz the way a lot of people do—after working a stint at Tacoma brewpub Engine House No. 9 and getting laid off from his job in Seattle, he didn’t have much else to try. “I was bouncing around, looking for […]
Beer & Drink
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A Dog of a Different Color
Portland’s Hair of the Dog marches to its own beat
Quick! What’s the most expensive beer you can think of? Samuel Adams Utopias, maybe? No way: That’s only $200-ish for a 700-milliliter metal bottle. Even BrewDog’s The End of History—which you may remember from pics on the internet; it’s that 110-proof sucker sold in bottles made from taxidermied squirrels and such—clocked in at a mere […]
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One Year of InBev-Barrel
10 Barrel announces aggressive expansion plans
It’s a little hard to believe, considering all the news from 10 Barrel Brewing Company over the past year, that they’re still only going to produce about 25,000 barrels of beer in 2015—a tiny percentage of Deschutes Brewery’s output. If current trends continue, though, those numbers might rapidly approach each other soon. At a press […]
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A Pumpkin-Free Fall
Beers to drink if you’re all gourded out
Getting sick of pumpkin beers yet? Hate on them all you want, but—much like Taco Bell and Thursday-night football—it exists because you all secretly can’t get enough of it. Beer flavored with everyone’s favorite late-October gourd is nothing new in craft at this point. Where the Bend Whole Foods would’ve stocked Elysian’s Night Owl pumpkin […]
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Out With the Old, In With the Hoppy
Distributor churn leads to more competition
Beer, by its nature, is seasonal—not just in terms of seasonal releases, but in the natural churn of brands available across Bend’s shiny beer-shop coolers. Take Orlison Brewing, for example. Remember them? The lager-only brewery, based near Spokane, descended onto the Central Oregon scene in late 2013, offering innovative takes on the classic genre including […]
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Elevated Drinking
Colorado’s high-altitude, high-talent breweries
Cory Forster, brewmaster at The Bakers’ Brewery in Silverthorne, Colorado, is high every day of his life. It’s not an unusual state in this ski-resort town of 3,800, an hour west of Denver. But it’s not because of some debilitating drug habit. It’s because Silverthorne is 9,035 feet above sea level. Forster, who worked for […]
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The Other Beer City USA
In Fort Collins, craft grows in Bendian proportions
The northern Colorado town of Fort Collins (population: 155,000) is one of several medium-sized cities around the United States to earn the name Beer City USA from bloggers and travel magazine articles. In the past, that was almost wholly driven by two large outfits: New Belgium, they of Fat Tire and the Lips of Faith […]
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Beer Festival of the Gods
The Great American Beer Fest is like nothing else
It’s seven on a Friday night and the scene around the Deschutes Brewery pub is one of controlled chaos. People from Bend and beyond line up to try some of the new brews off the pilot system, including a smoked gose, a sour Belgian-style quadruple ale, and a variant of Black Butte Porter aged in […]
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Stop and Smell the Beer
Bend’s Bouquet of Beer, the thoughtful gift for craftheads
Like beer? Fed up with all the pesky driving around and going to the store required to purchase beer? If you live in metro Bend, your prayers have been answered. Bouquet of Beer, founded this summer by Andrew Gorman and Daniel Brewster (with a last name like that, it’d be a crime if he wasn’t […]
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When is Craft No Longer Craft?
Buyout deals at Lagunitas and elsewhere give drinkers pause
“Budweiser bought 10 Barrel Brewing in Bend, OR,” wrote Lagunitas Brewing Company founder Tony Magee on Twitter last November (spelling and grammar cleaned up for this article). “Not because they love craft. Because they wanna control craft beer. Friends of 10 Barrel cheer its owners’ ‘success’. I can’t blame them for being scared of doing […]