The Deschutes Brewery Bend Pub is holding their grand (re)opening coming up this next Wednesday, February 1st—you’ll recall they closed down at the beginning of the month with a wall-smashing ceremony to finish the major expansion and remodel of the Pub—and owner Gary Fish waxed rhapsodic on their blog yesterday about the expandion and the fact that the Brewery has been holding a “soft opening” that’s been going on for about a week now.
In the nearly 24 years our pub has been open here in Bend, one thing has been abundantly clear, we need more room! We need room in the dining room, as no one really wants to wait 2 hours for a table, and we need more room in our kitchen which was never intended to serve the volume of food that has been required of it over the more than two decades its been in existence.
The so-called “quiet opening” has been underway for four days. Preceded as it was by five days of “friends and family” meals intended to give our staff, with 50-odd newcomers (they’re not odd, the number is . . . ) the opportunity to hone their skills in the new space. All our regular friends have managed to find their way back after being turned away for the past 20 days. And, the deft touch of architect and contractor, owner and enthusiast have created a warmer, more welcoming space where our bar has always stood. Additionally, the new space is more; more spacious, more seats, more comfortable, more engaging, more artistic, more . . . well, just more! Whereas we are not done yet, we have more things to hang on the walls, more details of menu and service to work out, suffice it to say, we are very pleased with the results. Even our toughest customers are very pleased with our results (and that is a relief).
I have an opportunity to check the Pub out this weekend sometime, as well as attend a media event on the 31st for the re-opening. From what I’d already seen at the beginning of the month, though, I can already safely predict that the new expanded Pub and menu is going to be a big success.
Though there aren’t any more hacking issues going on with this site, I’m in the process of switching servers so even though I have a ton of beer-related things to blog about, everything is on hold for the time being until the server move is complete.
I’ve most mostly offline these past few days, because I was recovering and cleaning this site (along with a bunch of others) from some malicious code that got inserted into the blog files due to the server account they reside on being exploited—or, in other words, the blog was hacked.
From a technical perspective it was innocuous enough: a bit of encoded PHP code (“PHP” is the programming language WordPress is built on) got inserted into the site files that simply redirected users coming from external links to spam or malware sites. The code itself was easy to spot and subsequently easy to clear out, but it had infected a lot of files so it took time, and of course I’ve been closely monitoring the sites since cleaning things up and locking them down to make sure it didn’t happen again.
So, if you’d tried to visit this blog over the past several days by clicking on a link from another site—Google search results, for instance, or Facebook posts—then you would have been redirected to something else entirely (possibly triggering a malware warning in your antivirus program). However, visiting the site directly—typing “thebrewsite.com” into the URL bar directly, or clicking from bookmarks—bypassed this redirection so if you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t know the site had been compromised.
Anyway, everything’s back to normal for the moment so I will resume blogging shortly.
I popped open and enjoyed a bottle of Hop Henge from Deschutes Brewery this evening, and rather than write a full review I thought I’d just jot down some thoughts. This is Deschutes’ “Experimental” IPA which masquerades as an Imperial IPA; at 8.5% alcohol by volume and 95 IBUs, this certainly qualifies in the “Imperial” department—the “Experimental” comes from the various techniques Deschutes has experimented with over the years to get more hops into this beer.
This is the bottle that Deschutes sent me at the very end of last year. I had opened a bottle (that I’d purchased) on New Year’s Eve and my impressions then are largely the same now: a bit of a damp cannabis quality to the aroma (“dank”), along with a sweet and green quality with a slight cattiness that seems to be Deschutes’ hop signature these last few years.
Hop Henge is a super-drinkable beer, with a creamy, soft and pillowy malt base infused with hops—not just bitterness, but the herbal, floral, spicy character that really highlights the hoppiness without ever being harsh. Deschutes handles hops better than almost any brewery out there: they know how to bring out the character of the hops without reverting to the scalding bitterness, or cotton-candy-over-hoppiness, that I find a lot of less-than-deft Imperial IPAs to possess.
And yet there is a hop burn, and a sweet sticky body, and all the hallmarks that hopheads seeking out the next Imperial IPA are looking for. It’s terrific. Don’t miss out.
The Deschutes Brewery Bend Pub is holding their grand (re)opening coming up this next Wednesday, February 1st—you’ll recall they closed down at the beginning of the month with a wall-smashing ceremony to finish the major expansion and remodel of the Pub—and owner Gary Fish waxed rhapsodic on their blog yesterday about the expandion and the fact that the Brewery has been holding a “soft opening” that’s been going on for about a week now.
I popped open and enjoyed a bottle of 
