Bend Oregon Breweries and Beers

ALL HOPPED UP

Central Oregon brewmasters produce a lot of fine beer each year—and use a lot of hops and yeast

LARRY SIDOR IS PASSIONATE ABOUT HOPS. At the moment, he is surrounded by them. The brewmaster for the Deschutes Brewery stands in a garage-sized cooler that houses about 80,000 pounds of the fluffy green buds. The aroma is fresh, floral and intoxicating.

Sidor is hardly alone in his affection for hops. “In the Northwest, we have an abundance of hops, so we go hop crazy,” the 56- year-old brewmaster says. The hoppiest beers in town—Deschutes Brewery’s Inversion Ale and Bend Brewing Company’s Hop Head—use three and six pounds of hops per barrel, respectively. A barrel equals 31 gallons, and Central Oregon’s fi ve local breweries—which also include Cascade Lakes, McMenamins and Silver Moon—produce more than 177,000 barrels each year. It takes a lot of hops to brew more than 5 million gallons of beer.

Deschutes Brewery

Sidor is up to the task. He studied hops with farmers and brewers for seven years in the Yakima Valley before joining the Deschutes Brewery in 2004. Before that, he worked for the Olympia Brewing Company long enough that he can recall when cleaning out a beer fermenter meant climbing inside with a shovel.

Today, he makes world-class beer without breaking a sweat, thanks to modern brewing equipment, three decades of experience—and a lot of hops Sidor’s brewing process begins in the state-of-the-art Brew haus, where malted grains are combined with water in an enormous metal vat called a mash tun. The resulting mash is then sparged (infused) with hot water in another giant vat, known as the lauter tun, which works, Sidor says “like a coffee fi lter.” The result, called wort, is transferred to a very large container called a kettle and boiled, usually with hops, then moved to a third vat—a hop back—where it is strained through up to 100 pounds of whole hops.

Fermentation comes next, in tall, shiny tanks housed in a separate part of the building. Once the wort has cooled, the brewer adds the yeast. Then the magic happens: The yeast converts the sugar into alcohol, producing delicious, nutritious beer. When the yeast has exhausted its sugar supply, it settles to the cone-shaped bottom of the fermentation tank, ready to be harvested for the next batch. At this point, the beer is transferred to another tank or barrel, where it ages until it is bottled or kegged. Sometimes Sidor will dry-hop the beer in the bright tank by hanging a mesh bag filled with hops inside the door.

“We live, breathe and die hops, every day,” says Sidor. “Deschutes is the second-largest brewer in the world that uses whole hops, and we go to great lengths to do that. We’re battling with Sierra Nevada [Brewing Company, of Chico, California] to see who gets fi rst dibs on the harvest in Yakima.”

Bend Brewing Company

Hops have also captured the imagination of brewmaster Tonya Cornett, 37, of the Bend Brewing Company (BBC). After fielding numerous requests for an Imperial India pale ale, she brewed a batch of her now-infamous Hop Head using the extra hops she had on hand. With more than three times the amount of hops found in a typical IPA, Cornett says, Hop Head is so dry it will make you thirsty.

“That’s a monster I created,” she says. “Now I have a hoppy fan club. As soon as the Hop Head is gone, people complain that there are not enough hops in the regular IPA.” Working in a remarkably small brewing facility (in which she frequently bumps her head), Cornett turns out enough beer to supply her own pub and 20 other establishments. BBC typically has eight to 10 beers on tap, including such favorites as High Desert Hefeweizen, Outback Old Ale and Big Eddy Bitter. Axe Head Red, a seasonal that was first brewed in honor of the 100th anniversary of Bend’s fi re department, “has its own following,” according
to Cornett. “The IPA flies out of here.”

McMenamins Old St. Francis School

Hops may be the focus of Bend’s two oldest pubs, but yeast gets all the credit at McMenamins, the newer drinking campus in the Old St. Francis School. According to brewmaster Mike White, 32, “The yeast is the guy working. I’m just the monkey hooking up the hoses and clamps.”

In White’s basement brew house, the tuns, kettle and tanks all have individual, hand-painted personalities. On one tank, two women sit back-to-back playing trumpets. Another tank displays a dragon; a third shows a sun and a moon. The boiling kettle doubles as an ode to Hugh O’Kane, a local historical fi gure. From
these colorful surroundings, White supplies standard and seasonal brews to the entire Old St. Francis campus, including the Pub, the Theatre, the Fireside Lounge and O’Kane’s cigar bar.

Recipes for the signature McMenamins ales—including Hammerhead, Ruby and Terminator Stout—come from the head brewmaster, in Portland. “But I have more freedom in the porters, IPAs and wheats,” says White. And though pilsners take a relatively long time to ferment, six Grundy fermenting tanks allow him to
make them regularly. “People want pilsner,” he says.

Silver Moon Brewing Company

White’s respect for yeast and pilsner is shared by another local brewmaster, 35-year-old Tyler Reichert, owner of the Silver Moon Brewing Company. Both brewers typically keep a pilsner on tap; neither filters the yeast from his beer before kegging it. “Residual yeast is like your pilot on board,” says Reichert. “I don’t filter any of my beers, so the yeast are still alive, managing the beer.”

Reichert handcrafts a small selection of beers in a spacious renovated warehouse that also houses a home-brew shop. Silver Moon staples, such as Hound’s Tooth Amber and Bridge Creek Pilsner, are available in growlers and on tap at more than 40 locations in and around Bend. Reichert developed Silver Moon’s repertoire from his own beer journal, following his personal preferences. “I make after-work beers, something you don’t have to wrestle with,” he explains.

Cascade Lakes Brewing Company

Cascade Lakes’s Mark Henion follows a similar brewing philosophy. “I prefer more of a balanced beer,” says Henion, 34. “We try to produce good, drinkable beers that don’t overwhelm the palate.”

The Redmond-based brewery’s most popular beers—Blonde Bombshell, 20 Inch Brown and Monkey Face Porter among them—are sold locally and regionally in bottles. Cascade Lakes’s standard brews and rotating seasonals are also available on tap in Bend at The Lodge and Cascade West Grub & Ale House, in Redmond at Seventh Street Brewhouse and in Tumalo at Tumalo Tavern.

The Cascade Lakes brewing facility is a far cry from the stateof-the-art setup at Deschutes. According to Henion, his company was started in 1994 by three brothers on a small budget who “grabbed stuff out of scrap yards, welded it together and made it work.” The mash/lauter tun is an old dairy tank,” he says, and “I don’t know what the brew kettle used to be, but they put a burner under it.”

At one time, according to Henion, the brothers—who sold the company in 2000—used horizontal dairy tanks for fermenting. “Now we have real fermenters,” he says. “It’s not high-tech, but it’s functioning, and you can make great beer with it.”