Here are the details from the comments:

Broken Top Bottle Shop & Ale Café will be opening our Ale Café in early February!!! (Bottle Shop coming soon thereafter!)

The Ale Café will offer a rotating 12 tap selection of craft and specialty beer, along with wine and other beverages, to be paired with delicious, healthy food, such as smoked meats, panini sandwiches, appetizers, soups, salads, as well as awesome vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options (whipped up by Chef Bethlyn Rider). We’ll also have chilled single bottle and canned beer you can purchase from our coolers to drink at Broken Top Bottle Shop or take to-go. We won’t charge you a corking fee on the bottled and canned beer you buy to drink here. And, you can buy your to-go beer as single bottles or cans, mixed-and-matched in any number, 6-packs, and 12-packs. Come on by in early February and taste some great draught beer, have some scrumptious food, and pick up some beer to go!

COMING SOON… the Bottle Shop!!

The Ale Café portion of Broken Top Bottle Shop is only the beginning!! We’ll soon be expanding into the suite next door in order to offer you over 700 varieties of single bottle and canned beer in our retail Bottle Shop. Only Broken Top Bottle Shop & Ale Café will offer this unique combination of tasty food, a variety of draught craft and specialty beer, and a grand selection of bottled and canned beer for on- and off-site consumption.

After visiting on Saturday, I have to say I’m fairly impressed with the overall plan they have laid out for the new venture and the enthusiasm the new owners are bringing to the shop/beer bar. On the one hand, the space was already set up as a beer bar, so they’ve kept much of that the same, with some repainting, a new foot rail running along the bottom of the bar, more artwork for the walls, and so on.

On the other hand, they are revamping the kitchen—adding some equipment, reorganizing for efficiency—and have added an impressive smoker/grill/roaster that will sit on a corner of the patio and offer a whole new level of food than was available before. The menu is going to be vastly expanded, and yes, there will be a focus on vegetarian/vegan options (something that—in general—Bend is largely lacking).

And of course, the expanded bottle shop is going to be the biggest change: Broken Top will be gradually moving into the space next door, which previously hosted a wine shop and tasting room, and will be able to offer over 700 different beers (as noted above)—this is going to be huge and once fully realized, may well be the largest single selection in Central Oregon. (The Brew Shop currently has at least 500 different beers, and while I don’t know specific numbers both Whole Foods and Newport Avenue Market in Bend have fantastic beer selections as well.)

They plan to be open by this weekend (yes, the first weekend in February) though that will only be for the beer bar portion. They will be open seven days a week, from 11am to until 10pm, maintaining largely the same hours as the Abbey Pub (though the Abbey was closed on Sundays).

After meeting and chatting with the owners I can say I’m fairly excited to see the new place open: they are extremely nice and accommodating, and their enthusiasm for Bend and beer is infectious. I’m looking forward to heading over there (hopefully this weekend!) and sampling the new menu while drinking some really good beer.

In the meantime, there are many other good beer blogs that I highly recommend also.

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.

AMERICAN BEER BLOGGER is a half hour television series dedicated to all facets of the ever growing craft beer market. From home brewing, to micro beer; viewers will experience the very best of the craft beer culture. In each episode, Lew will visit a different brewer, each of which has their own sets of quirks and ways of doing things. Lew will talk to these brewers, get to know them, will show us first hand the various methods and techniques used in creating a craft beer. From the tiniest bottler to the largest manufacturer, Lew will get his hands dirty. Topics such as bottling, food pairing, manufacturing, distribution, history, technique (and so much more) will all be touched upon as Lew spends a day with these brewers. Some doing well in the business, others not so well. Thankfully, the DIY nature of this business can lead to some pretty different results, as Lew lends a hand and helps out in any way he can. Lew will show us all the kinds of micro-breweries currently out there. From the smallest, hippest label to large manufacturers.

The first time around, the goal was to raise $60,000 for a six-episode commitment, but they were unable to reach that goal. This time, it’s only $6000 for a pilot episode (and hopefully if that were to go well, then there would presumably be a chance for more).

And the goal will be met this time, I’m quite sure: as of this writing, with 10 days left to go, there has already been $5402 raised—which means there’s only $598 to go for the project to reach its goal. I’m pretty sure at this point the pilot will get off the ground.

Still, if you’d like to see “American Beer Blogger”, see if you can find some time to pledge to the project.

Finally, as some of you know I have sold the Pub and a new group of people are coming in. This is going to be exciting to see the changes that they are going to be implementing. They are going to be expanding into the space next door and adding an expansive bottle selection. So I need to drain the above kegs, thus ALL PINTS WILL BE $3.50 until the kegs are gone! I know several are getting low so if you want the best selection get on down sooner than later. Thanks for all your support over the last 2 1/2 years. Hope to see you soon.

After emailing for more details, I learned than it’s a group of four who are buying the Pub and are planning on expanding into the space next door (a former wine bar/tasting room named WineStyles) and installing a big cooler to hold many more bottles. Tentatively, the name will be “Broken Top Bottle Shop” but as with anything else that could change.

I’m sorry to see the Pub change, its a neat space and mellow bar with good taps—and who could forget it was the only Central Oregon venue to get a keg of Pliny the Younger last year? Though I’m glad it’s not shutting doors entirely, and let’s hope the new owners are successful in the transition.

Blogging is going to be light through the rest of the year most likely (I may or may not do the Oregon Beer News daily posts, we’ll see); it’s always nice to take a break after a month of Advent calendar posts leading up to Christmas. And then I’ve got some big ideas for 2012 coming up, so I may be working on those behind the scenes this next week.

Stay safe everyone, enjoy the holidays, the good beer, and good cheer! Merry Christmas!

Plenty to be thankful for! Have a happy holiday everybody!

We are very pleased to announce the 2012 North American Beer Bloggers Conference will be July 13-15 in Indianapolis, Indiana. To make it even better, we are arranging a pre-conference excursion in nearby Chicago. Registration is open now.

Indianapolis now has over 40 breweries in the state and this is growing quickly within another dozen or so expected to open within the next year. Sun King Brewing in Indianapolis was the recipient of eight medals at the 2011 Great American Beer Festival. Not only did Sun King lead the field in total medal count, its four Gold Medals were the most won by any single brewery.We have the support of the Brewers Guild of Indiana, which is hosting one of our conference dinners, and World Class Beer, a two-time conference sponsor that has arranged for dinner and a tour in its million-case-strong Monarch Beverage warehouse.

Surprising, but very intriguing. It will definitely be an easier destination for bloggers from the East Coast to reach, and it’s probably not terribly difficult for West Coasters, either.

What does everyone else think? Good, bad, indifferent?

Some of the more interesting offerings were Rock Bottom’s Cerveza Calabaza, brewed with two gallons per barrel of Whey from Beecher’s Cheese to add creaminess; Silver City’s Punk Rauchen, a smoked German style rauchbier, only instead of using smoked malts they roasted fresh pumpkin over apple wood for 6 hours before adding it to the mash; Elysian’s Coche de Medianoche, a Mexican-themed pumpkin beer made with cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, pan-roasted guajillo chilies, and both Indian and African cayenne pepper, with a late addition of fresh epazote from Prosser Farms. This was definitely one of the standouts.

The interview with Cantwell is just as good, and this paragraph jumped out me (as someone who brews with pumpkin almost every year):

We mostly use frozen, blanched and puréed pumpkin from a farm in Oregon.  We get it in 30 pound buckets.  We’ve also used canned, and we’ve roasted them as well (as we did in this year’s Saison of the Witch, brewed with the Tom Douglas restaurants here in Seattle, with pumpkins and fennel from their farm near Prosser). We add it in the mash, kettle and fermenter, and have had few problems with runoff or fermentation.  Pumpkin tends to thin expected gravities (because of the water content), so that has to be kept in mind.  You also get different effects of pumpkin character depending on the style, yeast and techniques used. Some are very sort of slippery pumpkiny, others barely discernible.  I figure if we’re making better than a dozen every year, it’s okay to have varying effects.  I do think it’s important to be able to pick up some pumpkin character, though.

I had never considered water content from pumpkins before.

Are Pumpkin Ales Really All That Divisive?: Alan links to an article at The Atlantic titled, “The Divisive Pumpkin Ale” which broaches this question and himself defends the noble pumpkin. Of course I will always defend the use of pumpkin in a beer (does anyone who reads my blog really expect anything less?) but frankly I do also wonder why there is such antagonism towards beers with pumpkin in them—it’s one thing to not like a style of beer, but I’m hard-pressed to think of another style which invokes such a vocal response against it.

And, as I mention in my comment on Alan’s post, I want to see how pumpkin beer evolves: I love the “classic” spiced pumpkin ale, but what more can be done with it?

Oregon Pumpkin Beer Hunt: Speaking of pumpkin beers, this is a shameless plug back to my earlier post where I’m tracking pumpkin beers being brewed by Oregon breweries. I updated that with three new beers based on Brewpublic’s Killer Pumpkin Fest going on this very evening.

In Defense of Language: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Black IPA: The latest argument in the “Black IPA vs. CDA” debate by Stone Brewing‘s Greg Koch. (Good article, but basically linkbait.) Koch argues that “Black IPA” should be the term largely because language has evolved so that “IPA” doesn’t really mean “India Pale Ale” anymore. But if the language has evolved to make “Black IPA” valid… isn’t coming up with a new term for an emerging style (Cascadian Dark Ale in this case) oh I don’t know, the evolution of beer language? You know, pretty much the exact same argument?

And for what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of regionalism in the names of styles. I rather hate “American IPA” as a name because, well, it really doesn’t make any sense, and I kind of hate that we’re stuck with it. (Go read the article to see why I bring this up.)

(Also for what it’s worth, I don’t really care what the term is for this new style—Cascadian Dark Ale, Noonan Black Ale, Hoppy Black Ale, even American Black Ale to a certain extent—I just don’t like “Black IPA” because it is self-contradictory. I have actually had conversations with people who have asked me why it’s called Black IPA because “IPA” is supposed to be a pale ale—and these are people who are relatively normal beer drinkers, not pedantic beer geeks like I am.)

The Oxford Companion to Beer: Based on the commentary flying around the internet, this book is not without its flaws but is also a great (first start?) overall reference to all things “beer.” So, probably one of those invaluable resources to your beer bookshelf. Maybe. At any rate, Alan has set up a wiki to make commentary and corrections on the book, should you be interested.