Right now, through December 14, Amazon.com is offering 25% off any one book! That means you can get Bend Beer at Amazon for the stunning low price of $10.33! Just use the coupon code “25OFFBOOK” when you are checking out.
This is the perfect time time buy Bend Beer for yourself or better yet, as a Christmas gift for the beer and/or history lover in your life! What are you waiting for?
This Saturday, December 12, is the 3rd annual Central Oregon Winter Beer Festival, being held from 1 to 9pm at GoodLife Brewing in their Biergarden. I’ll be there, enjoying many a tasty winter beer and signing and selling books!
We are happy to announce Bigfoot Beverages as our Title Sponsor for 2015.
COWBF is a showcase for seasonal and specialty beers brewed in celebration of the holiday season. Admission to COWBF will be $10.00 and attendees will receive a commemorative COWBF glass, as well as 4 drink tickets. Each additional ticket will cost $1.00. The festival will be in a heated tent, and there will be food carts available on-site.
Breweries slated to be pouring include:
It should be a fun event, so make sure to come by, drink some great winter libations and buy the book—it’s the perfect Christmas present for the beer or history lover in your life!
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving yesterday, and it’s time to start thinking about shopping for Christmas. Since today is Black Friday, and Monday is Cyber Monday, I figured it’s time to recap where you buy your copy of Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon!
First, you can buy the book online at History Press, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s Books, but if you’re shopping around town here in Central Oregon, you should also be able to find the book at the following places:
If you can’t find it at one of those locations, please let me know!
Happy holidays!
This Friday, November 20, Bend’s Silver Moon Brewing is holding the grand opening party for their new Redmond production brewery (in conjunction with their annual One Beard to Rule Them All fundraising event) starting at 6pm, and I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be there as well, with books to sign and sell!
You can learn more about Silver Moon’s expansion and plans in a post on my Brew Site blog here; it’s great to see the effort being put into revitalizing the brewery by James Watts and Matt Barrett, who bought Silver Moon in 2013, paying off! It’s also interesting to watch the “rise” of Redmond in the local beer and brewing scene, which now has four established breweries with Silver Moon becoming the fifth, as well as a growing focus on beer with pubs like The Pig and Pound and restaurants like Jersey Boys Pizza.
Come on out on Friday the 20th, party with Silver Moon and let’s talk books and beer history! See you there!
One year ago today, October 21st, was the official publish date of Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon! Over the course of the past year there have been many events and signings where I have been able to talk about the book, beer, and Bend’s history, and the book itself has been successful and sold very well. A big “Thank You!” to all of the folks who have bought the book, attended an event, and/or have supported Bend Beer along the way!
Of course the Central Oregon beer scene has not been static over this past year, so I thought it would be interesting to review the various changes that have occurred over the past year from where the book leaves off (which was “current” as of about June, 2014).
10 Barrel Brewing sold to Anheuser-Busch. The news broke on this the week after Bend Beer came out—talk about timing! The owners of 10 Barrel had quietly been in talks with ABInBev for about seven months prior to the announcement of the sale, the terms of which have not been disclosed. There was a temporary backlash in the community but 10 Barrel bounced back and is currently in the process of expansion.
Monkless Belgian Ales becomes the region’s 26th brewery. This tiny one-barrel nanobrewery wasn’t even on my radar prior to the book release, but became official shortly thereafter. They exclusively brew Belgian-styled ales and are currently only on tap at Humm Kombucha.
Old Mill Brew Works closes its doors. The OMBW pub closed down—but in its place, Craft Kitchen and Brewery opened up in the same location. Interestingly enough, Brew Werks Brewing, which had been a separate entity from OMBW at that point, did not close, and instead rebranded as Fresh Tracks Brewing.
Bridge 99 Brewery opened up its tasting room and new brewery space. Located behind Wubba’s BBQ Shack on Bend’s north side, the larger space will ultimately house the seven-barrel brewing system that are in Bridge 99’s plans.
Immersion Brewing announced. The people behind Immersion Brewing, to be located in the Old Mill District down the road from Crux Fermentation Project, plan to offer a “U-Brew” model for customers to brew up their own batches of beer from a pre-determined selection of recipes, as well as having their own in-house 10-barrel brewhouse and brewpub.
Prineville’s Solstice Brewing renamed to Ochoco Brewing. In a nod to the city’s history, Solstice, which was the first brewery in Prineville since 1906, renamed itself after the region’s first-ever brewery, Ochoco, which operated from 1882 to 1890.
Deschutes Brewery is searching out an East Coast location. From humble origins in downtown Bend in 1988 to one of the largest craft breweries today, Deschutes will be opening a brewery on the East Coast by 2019. Currently the final location is yet to be determined, though it sounds like it’s between Asheville, North Carolina, and Roanoke, Virginia. Definitely an exciting chapter for the region’s oldest brewery!
This upcoming Friday, September 18, I’ll be participating in downtown Redmond’s Third Friday Stroll, with Paulina Springs Books once again for signing and selling copies of the book from 5 to 8pm.
This is the last “Stroll” of the year for downtown Redmond, and the theme is “Central Oregon Spirits” so I am going to be in good company! Here’s the description that Paulina Springs has posted:
Get ready for a fun night on the town with this month’s Third Friday Stroll! The theme is spirits, and many of the downtown buisinesses will be participating. We will be welcoming back Jon Abernathy, the author of Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon. You can enjoy some spirits from Bend Distillery at the Shabbie Attic, and then head over to Redmond Craft Brewing [the homebrew supply shop] to check out home brewing supplies and sample a recently brewed beer. The Greater Historical Society Museum of Redmond will be displaying an antique distillery, as well as antique beer bottles and cans. It’s going to be a great evening! As you wander between the participating businesses, you can enjoy the music of the two bands, Hat Trick and Mosely Wotta, that will be playing downtown.
It’s going to be a good night all over downtown Redmond, so come on out to enjoy the Stroll, and be sure to come by to say “Hi!” and chat about Central Oregon’s beer history!
See you there!
Father’s Day is this Sunday and I can’t think of a better gift for Dad than a copy of Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon! Fortunately I’ve got you covered—in addition to being able to buy the book online (you can find it at History Press, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s Books), you can also find the book around the area at the following places:
(If you can’t find it at one of those locations, please let me know!)
And don’t forget to pair the book with a beer! Happy Father’s Day!
It’s no secret that Deschutes Brewery has been eyeing the East Coast for expansion for a while now. The 27-year-old brewery is #7 on the Brewers Association’s list of Top 50 craft breweries, and they are shipping beer to something like 28 states and two Canadian provinces, so it makes sense—shipping and refrigeration of liquids is expensive, not to mention environmentally costly from a carbon footprint viewpoint.
So it was interesting this weekend to see an article come out of Asheville, North Carolina—itself quite a beer town, not unlike Bend—highlighting that as a possible destination for a new Deschutes production facility. Here are some quotes:
Representatives from Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon, the sixth-largest craft brewer in the country, visited Asheville in December and plan a second trip in late May, according to company president Michael LaLonde, who spoke highly of the mountain region.
Among the sites company officials visited was the 137-acre parcel Buncombe County recently bought from Henderson County for $6.8 million to entice an undisclosed economic development prospect.
“We’re looking at a number of locations in a number of states,” LaLonde said. “We’re looking in North Carolina, we’ve looked in Virginia, we’ve looked in Tennessee, as well as South Carolina.”
The brewery also looked at sites in the Greenville and Charleston, South Carolina, areas, LaLonde said. The company was impressed with Greenville.
The company plans to open an East Coast operation by 2019, LaLonde said, “so we have a little time, but not much.” He said the search and securing land would likely take about a year, with construction taking another year.
Plans call for a brewery that could produce about 200,000 barrels of beer annually, with the capability for growth. That would require about 100 employees for the brewery and packaging operation, and another 100 or so if it adds a brewpub on site.
Deschutes would be joining a small-but-growing number of regional craft brewers who have expanded east, including New Belgium, Sierra Nevada, and Oskar Blues (also in the Asheville area), Lagunitas (Chicago) and Stone (building a brewery in Virginia). And from an historic standpoint (since this is a blog about Bend’s beer history, after all!) it’s amazing to watch the continued success of a brewery that almost didn’t make it way back in 1988 when they opened in the economically-depressed milltown-in-transition of Bend.
It will certainly make an interesting addition to a future edition of the book!
Happy National Beer Day! It was on this day, April 7, in 1933 that the Cullen–Harrison Act went into effect—the legislation that legalized the sale of beer with an alcohol content of 3.2% by weight (or 4% by volume), which heralded the end of Prohibition.
Since this blog is about Bend’s beer history, I looked up the issue of the Bend Bulletin for April 7, 1933, and thought it would be fun to reprint the local article on the day here. Enjoy!
Bend’s Beer Supply Disappears Quickly
Bars Are Busy Places For Short Time Today
One “Free Lunch” Appears When Customer Brings It From Own Pocket
Beer, clear as liquid amber and capped with white foam, made its appearance in Bend shortly before 11 o’clock this morning and for the first time in 17 years local residents publicly, uafriad ad in groups quaffed an alcoholic beverage. But the quaffing did not last long. In less than two hours the half-barrel allotments to local pool halls had disappeared and the bars, minus their brass rails, were again deserted. [Illegible] early hour this afternoon, Bend was again “dry”, so far as beer on draught was concerned.
Only five kegs, each holding 16 gallons, reached Bend in the first shipment, and one of the five was sent to Prineville. At one pool hall the beer supply was exhausted in 40 minutes, with three “bar tenders” sliding out the foam-capped glasses just as fast as an open space appeared.
One of the highlights of the morning was the appearance of Fred Gotchey at a bar with a lunch. He ordered a glass of beer, his first in 20 years, pulled out his lunch and sipped and ate.
Bottled goods were being distributed this afternoon and it was expected that another shipment of kegs would reach the town sometime tonight or early tomorrow.
Opinions were varied as to the “kick” of the percentage beer and it appeared to be the general opinion that America will never be known as a nation of drunkards as long as the alcoholic content of drinks is kept at 3.2 per cent. However, some persons whose taste had not been dulled by high-content home brew maintained that the 3.2 per cent stuff is just as good as the beer of the old days.
Legalized beer has its advantage, one very thirsty man said. For instance, a person can enjoy a drink from a bottle without paying any attention to the bottom or fearing that the beverage will be discolored by yeast sediment.
One man who drank enough glasses of the beverage to get himself into a reminiscent mood said he recalled that back some 17 years ago prohibitionists said it would be a “cold day” when beer returned. This reminiscent individual, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, added that the prohibitionists were right.
This Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4, I’m pleased to be the guest of honor for a book event and signing at both Paulina Springs Books locations in Sisters and Redmond! I’ll be in Sisters on Friday the 3rd, and in Redmond on Saturday the 4th. Both events start at 6:30pm.
And there will be beer sampling at both events as well! Friday in Sisters, Sisters’ own Three Creeks Brewing will be on hand pouring samples of their terrific beers, and the following evening in Redmond, Juniper Brewing of Redmond will likewise be pouring samples of their own fine beers. Books and beer—it doesn’t get much better!
Paulina Springs Books is a great local bookseller (at both locations) with a wide selection of books to offer—I’ve seen titles that aren’t stocked elsewhere which always provides unexpected delight. They also do a great job of hosting authors and events, although I believe these books-and-beer ones are the first of this kind they’ve hosted!
So please come on out either or both days, say “Hi!” and buy a book so I can sign it for you! I should also be doing a talk and/or reading and that should pair well with the local brews being poured. The events officially start at 6:30 though I will likely be there by 6:00 and will be more than happy to answer any questions, sign books, and chat about our local history and beer.
See you there! Cheers!