Pulse Check on Bend’s Brewery Scene

Last month, the married owners of Funky Fauna Artisan Ales, Michael Frith and Danielle Burns, shared on Instagram that after four years in business, they’re having a rough go even during summer’s high season in Bend’s hospitality industry.

“We’ve experienced the slowest stretch in our li’l brewery’s history, including our slowest day on record.” To put a fine point on the record-low number of pints sold, the post specified one day’s receipts totaled $33. “All while our COGS (cost of goods sold) from ingredients to supplies have steadily increased week by week.”

Alas, Funky Fauna is located on scarcely trafficked NE Second Street, and its beers are predominantly in the obscure saison style, made more so with ingredient cameos such as spruce tips or sarsaparilla root. (They do make an IPA.) But for our community that prides ourselves on enjoying artisanal and experimental foods and beverages, you’d be hard pressed to find beers more deserving of exploration than Funky Fauna’s.

Things are happier and hoppier over at Sunriver Brewing where, over a pint, Director of Brewery Operations Brett Thomas proclaimed they’re having “a banner year” despite a downturn of 5% in volume and 1% in sales in 2025. Central Oregon’s second largest beer maker after Deschutes remains dually focused on making great beer — when it comes to prestigious awards, it’s one of the most decorated breweries in the entire country over the last 14 years since its inception — as well as selling it both through distribution channels and from the four pubs it currently runs around Oregon.

There were five, but Sunriver closed its Galveston pub last year. Not so much sales were down, to hear Thomas tell it, but because rent, plus those COGS, keeps going up. “Beef prices are way up, and we’re not gonna put a $28 cheeseburger on our menu. And we would’ve had to charge $9 for a pint. Our customers wouldn’t pay that.”

Salacious Stats and Societal Shifts

Using stats to illustrate the state of the beer industry is an ignoble task, but it still paints a picture. Craft beer sales topped $29 billion in 2019, accounting for over a quarter of the total American beer market, according to the Brewers Association. The organization’s numbers for 2025 show a decline in everything from production volume to sales to overall brewery population and, by extension, the number of employees in the industry. Statistically, these numbers are generally down in the low single digit percentages, and year-end craft beer sales managed to hit $28 billion.

On the whole, sales aren’t hemorrhaging, but the sanguinary news feels like death by a thousand cuts. Virtually everything has fizzled since the pandemic: the economy is bordering on a recession, a segment of adults has reduced alcohol intake, with some people pointing the finger at so-called health influencers and/or neo-prohibitionists advocating for entire months of sobriety, or simply a large number of individuals discovering that they don’t feel great after consuming alcohol, even in moderate formats. It’s also no secret how many drinkers are now former drinkers thanks to cannabis, with a large boost in Americans who enjoyed weed in 2025 — up to over 40% by some findings — while marijuana’s botanical cousin, hops, were consumed by barely over half of Americans of legal drinking age, down from a pre-pandemic high of 60%.

The Brewers Association’s staff economist, Matt Gacioch, just released its mid-year report which found that just over half of all American craft brewery owners are reporting moderate growth, with some 43% reporting declining sales and just 3% remaining flat, which, in this climate, must feel like a win.

In this writer’s far-from-scientific study, I blame the pandemic for the booze bust of the last five or six years; we are increasingly less social creatures. For all the understandable and applaudable reasons for diminishing or outright ditching imbibing alcohol, the more we merely interact with others on social media and other comment sections, and the more we have food delivered to our front doors, the less we engage with real life humans. By extension, that leads to less engagement in pubs and taverns. In trading corn hole for keyboard troll, we are collectively rearing the “loneliness epidemic.”

“Covid f___ed us up,” Thomas agreed. “Now people are stuck on their phones.” And whether they’re doom scrolling or gambling on Draft Kings or Kalshi, they’re not leaving offices or apartments or parents’ basements and spending time in a “third place.”

While Thomas understands beer’s potentially deleterious, intoxicating effects, when asked about what we’re collectively missing out on without so-called social lubricants, he said, “We don’t shun that term.”

Non-alc Beers and Beyond

The brewery that turned Bend into the beer destination that it is — Deschutes Brewery — has been attracting beer lovers since its establishment in 1988. Since then, Central Oregon has become home to 26 breweries. We’ve lost a couple over the years. (Remember Geist Brewing — its flagship brand called Hookers & Blow — that flamed out in 2020 after just a couple years? And you can’t forget Riverbend Brewing, because despite closing in 2021, that delivery truck is spotted everywhere! And while Crux, Cascade Lakes Brewing, GoodLife Brewing and Silver Moon Brewing survive as individual brands, one brewhouse produces all the liquid as evidence that the downturn hasn’t left Bend beer untouched.) But Bendites and visitors support local beer like nowhere else, because everywhere else, especially Oregon’s larger markets of Portland and Eugene, have witnessed a substantial percentage of its respective brewery populations shutter.

Brewers are keenly aware of all the reasons their beloved industry is suffering. Several have responded with non-alcoholic options. Deschutes’s top seller is, unsurprisingly, Fresh Squeezed IPA. It’s next-best selling SKU is N/A Fresh Squeezed (followed by N/A Black Butte Porter).

Deschutes CEO Peter Skrbek sheds an interesting light on the growing dominance of non-alc beer. “I’m drinking more beer today than I have in my entire life, but I’m drinking less alcohol than I ever have.”

One explainer for how he and others achieve this is a phenomenon the bev-alc industry calls “zebra striping.” After consuming an alcoholic beverage, the next elixir is zero proof and so on. In fact, Skrbek noted a study that most people who drink non-alcoholic beer, some 93%, haven’t gone dry; they simply drink vacillate or double-dip depending on the occasion. It’s an interesting term when considering Deschutes’s newest offering that, despite debuting earlier this year, has rapidly grown, joining the ranks of the company’s top ten: Partybomb, which comes in a variety of fruit flavors reminiscent of Fruit Stripes gum with the zebra mascot. What’s more, the line of non-alc beers and organic fruit-flavored malt beverages is interwoven beyond where they’re canned. In a proprietary process, the alcohol reverse-osmosis filtered out of Fresh Squeezed to create dealcoholized Fresh Squeezed IPA becomes the foundation of Partybomb. It is already Deschutes’s most widely-distributed product nationwide.

Danielle Burns of Funky Fauna. Credit: Brian Yaeger

For all the humdrum news about flat beer sales, there remains tremendous optimism about the community of brewers. In the same breath that Burns mentioned not taking a paycheck or PTO at Funky Fauna, her post mentioned still being more excited about owning and operating a small brewery, releasing excellent beers, and actually increasing brewing capacity and production. This past weekend, UPP Liquids celebrated its first anniversary with a block party that attracted several hundreds as a testament to the passion that UPP’s team of brewers continues to exude, despite being the collateral damage of the sales slump at their former brewery employer. Meanwhile, Skrbek said Deschutes’s core offerings are all up, ranging from an 8% increase in sales for Fresh Squeezed and a 26% jump for N/A Fresh Squeezed. That means that the N/A version isn’t cutting into the full-alc version’s sale, but the opposite.

“We’re seeing tremendous growth in Fresh Squeezed,” observed Skrbek, because consumers are just now discovering the 15-year-old flagship brand “through the non-alc (version). If you’d told me that three years ago, I would’ve been, like, ‘no way!’”

In the end, while brewers naturally long for the heyday of the craft beer boom a decade ago, they are remarkably even-keeled regarding the current landscape. America’s been through worse (see: Prohibition). Fifty years ago, the American brewery population was sub-one-hundred, and for all intents and purposes, the sole style of beer available was light adjunct lager. There are over 8,000 breweries in operation in the country today, and more than 200 of those exist to slake Oregonians’ thirst for the good stuff.

“I’m super bullish on alcohol-containing beers,” noted Skrbek. “Adaptation needs to happen,” he said regarding the mania that took hold in grocery stores with “100-yard cold boxes” of every available microbrew. “And we got a little bit ‘pinkies out’ that we lost the plot on the occasions that beer is largely designed for.” I once heard a brewery owner refer to a segment of consumers, this writer included, as “beer sniffers.” But as Skrbek concluded, “Oregonians are very discerning about beer. Over fifty percent of dollars spent on beer are craft beer where, nationally, that’s closer to twenty percent. Nobody is even close to Oregon, so we’re in an extremely sophisticated environment.”

Considering Bend has held the honor of supporting more breweries per capita of any U.S. city with a population over 100,000 people, the Bend Ale Trail is still chugging.

This article appears in the Source July 30, 2026.