The Session #133: Hometown Glories

The SessionThis month’s installment of The Session is hosted by Gareth of Barrel Aged Leeds, who is asking us to consider Hometown Glories:

Take this and run with it how you wish, but when thinking about possible subjects I had in mind an imminent visit to the place I spent my formative years and blogging about it’s highlights and wider beer scene. Possible starting points could be –

  • Describing the types of bars/pubs you have in your home town, how popular are they? Has craft beer culture made much of a splash?
  • Are there any well-known breweries? Is there a particular beer or style that is synonymous with your home town
  • History of the town and how that can be reflected in its drinking culture
  • Tales of your youth, early drinking stories
  • Ruminations on what once was and what is now? Have you moved away and been pleasantly surprised or disappointed on return visits?

My visit over the next week is going to hopefully inspire me, and it’s a great excuse to visit a few old haunts and new venues. If you’re less enamoured with your hometown, or even if you left and never returned, feel free to respond anyway – maybe you’re an adopted native of somewhere better. My home town is no longer my home, so if you’d like to write about the place you feel most at home in relation to beer, that would be welcomed too.

Being that my hometown is Bend, Oregon, I’m comfortably confident in saying that craft beer has had something of an impact here. Deschutes Brewery is the best-known brewery success story to come out of Bend, though hardly the only one, and for a while it was known for (among other things) having one of the higher breweries-per-capita numbers in the country.

Ironically it’s a big beer town, but it’s not much of a pub town. We have a couple of good beer bars, and there is certainly good beer on tap at many of the town’s restaurants, but as bars and pubs go, their contribution to the local beer culture is fairly minimal. At least as far as in considering the topic of this Session.

Bend BeerIn fact, I’ve already written at length about Bend as a beer town as well as its history and culture—in my book! Yes it’s a bit of a shameless plug and perhaps a bit of a cop-out but it truly is an encapsulation (as of 2014) of this very topic. Minus the tales of my own youth, but frankly, I don’t have many early drinking stories that are actually that interesting. I was really only peripherally aware of Deschutes Brewery in my late teens and early twenties, and only after discovering good beer and homebrewing in the mid-1990s did I begin to fully appreciate Deschutes and how it helped to shape Bend as a beer city.

By then there were two other breweries in Central Oregon, Cascade Lakes Brewing and Bend Brewing Company, and the stage was set. The region’s growth since that period in the late ’90s in both beer and population is remarkable, and today the overall region has 26 brewing companies, several operating breweries out of multple locations.

Still, if you come to Bend, the first place I’ll recommend to you is Deschutes Brewery, our biggest hometown glory, so you can see where it all started. And drink some great beer too of course.

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