I’ve always understood pairing a bold red wine with a rich beef bourguignon — classic culinary logic drilled into home cooks and sommeliers alike. But beer as a cooking ingredient? That idea had never crossed my mind. Turns out, I’m behind the curve, and I doubt I’m the only one.
Beer-infused cooking has quietly become one of the more exciting frontiers in food culture. Chefs have long used wine to build flavor — deglazing pans, reducing sauces, tenderizing meats — but beer offers something wine can’t: a huge range of flavor profiles, from bright and citrusy to dark, malty, and almost dessert-like. That versatility, paired with the farm-to-table, craft-everything ethos that’s swept American dining over the past decade, has made breweries natural laboratories for beer-forward menus. Nowhere is that more apparent than right here in Bend.
Monkless Belgian Ales Brasserie
While Monkless Belgian Ales Brasserie is best known for the beer cheese served alongside its Bavarian pretzel, that’s just the entry point into a deeper beer-infused menu. It’s situated on the Deschutes River, with views of the Old Mill, Hayden Homes Amphitheater and Mt. Bachelor — and the delicious food matches the magnificent backdrop. The Brasserie’s “Bier cheese” dish combines lardons, crispy shallots, a fried egg, beef tallow fingerling potatoes, and Sparrow sourdough toast, fitting the restaurant’s philosophy of pairing Belgian-style ales with European-inspired dishes, echoed in the sausage board and mussels steamed in beer and garlic.
Ten years ago, Todd and Robin Clement began operating Monkless as a brewery, then opened Monkless as a restaurant seven years ago. For the last two years, chef Jake Alaniz — a French culinary-trained chef — has been weaving the brewery’s in-house beers into signature dishes, including the standout Flemish beef dip.
“We also infuse our tzatziki sauce, as well as the syrup in the chicken waffles on our menu, that changes seasonally with recipes that honor the Belgian beer the same way the French celebrate fine wine,” Alaniz said. “And since France is Belgium’s next-door neighbor, I like to take a page out of French cuisine and swap it for a Belgian beer twist.”
That French training shows in how Alaniz treats beer less like a novelty and more like a flavor-building tool — akin to a reduction sauce or a stock. “If you reduce it down, it’s going to be more refined, but more complex,” he explained. “Reducing simply means boiling it down to a simmer.” Just as with wine, cooking with beer burns off the alcohol while concentrating its flavor. But not every beer earns a spot in the kitchen.
“Every beer we make is delicious, but not every beer is a good ingredient,” Alaniz added with a smile. “Beers with stronger, dark flavors caramelize beautifully when reduced; lighter, milder ones won’t add much.” The beers that make the cut tend to be rich and complex — closer to a Belgian candy syrup than a crisp pilsner.
That caramelized depth shows up in the chicken and Liège waffles, a Belgian dish turned house staple: delicately battered fried chicken tenders topped with Trinity beer butter and a maple syrup infused with the brewery’s signature Belgian-style Dubbel, known as Dubble or Nothing. “We make the chicken batter by hand, and it’s one of our most popular dishes. It really shows everything we have to offer.”
Still, Alaniz points to the Flemish beef dip as the dish that best captures what the kitchen and brewhouse can do together. “It’s really important to me that everybody gets to see the hard work that we put into creating these amazing flavors,” he said. “I learned how to cook with wine, so learning how to cook with beer has been a lot of fun. And Belgium has been doing it for a hundred years.”
Crux Fermentation Project
Less than a mile east, Crux Fermentation Project takes its own unique approach to beer-infused food with its pretzel appetizer — it comes with a spicy beer cheese made with Crux Pilz, served with two pretzel twists and a hazy honey mustard made from Bubble Wrap Hazy IPA.
Beer shows up elsewhere on the menu, too. The nachos are loaded with pulled pork, pickled jalapeño and onion, corn and black bean salsa, beer cheese, cotija, and cilantro-jalapeño crema. For something heartier, Crux serves three PCT Porter BBQ pulled pork sliders, topped with slaw and pickled jalapeño on brioche buns, with a house-made porter barbecue sauce doing the heavy lifting. For a smaller appetite, the beer-infused chili is worth a try.
A couple of years back, Crux pushed the concept even further — not by putting cheese into a dish alongside beer, but by putting cheese into the beer itself. Partnering with Rogue Creamery, the brewery released a lambic-style ale inoculated with Rogue River blue cheese in late 2023, carrying notes of caramel, dried fig, and tawny port with a tart, gently sour finish — a reminder that in Bend, the line between what’s on your plate and what’s in your glass keeps getting more interesting to cross.
Beer Reduction, Explained
For the uninitiated: cooking beer down over heat evaporates most of the water and cooks off the alcohol, but the flavor stays behind — and concentrates as it goes. Start with a cup of beer, simmer it to a few tablespoons, and you’re left with something thicker, sweeter, and more intense. The bitterness mellows, the malty or caramel notes deepen, and it starts to taste almost like a syrup — the same idea as reducing wine into a pan sauce for steak, or boiling maple sap into syrup. Chefs use it as a sauce base, a glaze, or a flavoring agent in chili, barbecue sauce, or a waffle syrup, like the Meet Your Maker beer syrup at Monkless. The darker and maltier the beer, the more it caramelizes as it reduces — which is why stouts and porters are kitchen favorites, while a light lager wouldn’t leave much flavor behind.
A Trend Worth Toasting
Whether it’s a reduction simmered to a syrupy depth or a cheese inoculated into the fermentation tank, Bend’s brewers and chefs are proving beer belongs in the kitchen just as much as the glass. For diners willing to look past the pint, there’s a whole second menu worth exploring — one dip, one waffle, and one reduction at a time.
Monkless Belgian Ales Brasserie
Daily 11:30am-10pm
803 SW Industrial Way, Ste 202, Bend
monkless.com/
Crux Fermentation Project
Mon-Fri 11am-9pm, Sat-Sun 10am-9pm
50 SW Division St, Bend
cruxfermentation.com/
This article appears in the Source July 30, 2026.
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