Bend Brewfest 2019: The beers to watch for

Bend Brewfest 2019

The 2019 Bend Brewfest kicks off Thursday, April 15 and runs for three days, featuring over 200 different beers and ciders pouring at the Les Schwab Amphitheater adjacent to the Deschutes River. The Brewfest follows the standard format, with one token equaling a four-ounce pour of beer along with a souvenir mug. You need to purchase a tasting package to drink, which is $20 and gets you the mug and five tokens; additional tokens are $5 for five.

You know the drill: pace yourself, stay well hydrated, wear sunscreen, be patient with people, and scope out the beers ahead of time.

Naturally I have some pointers for beers to try. In fact, I’ll start by cribbing some highlights from the press release that went out last week:

A few of the Bend Brewfest beers to look forward to include:

– Beers made exclusively for the festival:

  • Block 15 Brewing’s “The DAB Lab, High Desert,” the latest beer in its experimental DAB Lab series, made with a dizzying blend of hop varieties and a Central Oregon grown malt;
  • Worthy Brewing’s “Experimental Hop Session IPA,” which was brewed in honor of the festival using an experimental hop (x-374) grown at Oregon State University; and
  • Walking Man Brewing’s “BEND the Knee Pale Ale,” a hazy pale ale that was brewed to be a refreshing citrus bomb for the High Desert sun.

– Hard-to-find beers:

  • pFriem Family Brewers’ North German Pilsner, which was brewed for a German competition in collaboration with Germany’s Bitburger Brewery, will only be found at the Bend Brewfest and Portland’s Pilsner Fest; and
  • Barbarian Brewing’s sour beer lineup, including two different extremely limited experimental barrel-aged and sour beers that aren’t distributed in Oregon (and are even wildly difficult to find in its home state of Idaho)

– Exciting collaboration releases:

  • Double Mountain Brewery and Barley Brown’s Collab IPA, a West Coast IPA by two legendary Oregon breweries;
  • Fort George Brewery, Ruse Brewing and Cloudburst Brewing’s 3-Way IPA, a beer for which Fort George issues new invitations each year to two other collaborators (with this lineup the 2019 result is sure to be amazing); and
  • Sierra Nevada and Bitburger Brewery’s Oktoberfest, drawing on Bitburger’s 200 years of family brewing knowledge in German, this beer uses an exclusive mix of hops that has never before been shared outside the brewery’s Deutsch walls.

Those first three, made special for the Brewfest, are definitely among the first I would seek out. Among the collaboration releases, I believe the Double Mountain, Barley Brown’s beer is the new Coyote Sunset IPA.

And then there are others worth checking out, including:

  • Crux Fermentation Project’s Apricot Golden, a nicely drinkable straightforward fruit ale (more of these, please)
  • Deschutes Brewery’s Teensy Weensy, billed as a 2.7% ABV “petite IPA” (yes, you read that number right)
  • Sunriver Brewing’s Trending Upwards German-Style Pilsner, you can’t go wrong with a good pils
  • Georgetown Brewing’s Ricklberry Gose, another nicely low-ABV offering at 3.8%
  • Wolf Tree Brewery’s Joe Pechie, an oak-aged saison with 100 pounds of peaches added
  • Oakshire Brewing’s Smoke’N Hell, a helles lager brewed with smoked spruce tips (??)

And that’s just scratching the surface. The full beer list is here.

Don’t forget the X-Tap beers, either! These are the specialty, limited, and/or one-off beers that will be pouring at various times throughout the fest. (Shout out to my Central Oregon Homebrewers volunteers who will be pouring these beers!) I don’t have any particular guidance here, although the one I would be watching for is GoodLife Brewing’s Man of the Hour, slated to be tapped Friday at 4pm. It’s a Flanders-style red ale and was the last beer founding brewer Curt Plants worked on before he died. So definitely a meaningful tribute beer.

Enjoy this year’s Bend Brewfest and stay safe!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.