Category Archives: Events and Signings

Talk Oregon Beer History Sunday, July 14, with “Bend Beer” and “Southern Oregon Beer”

This Sunday, July 14, I’ll be teaming up with Phil Busse, the author of the new Southern Oregon Beer for a book discussion event at Broken Top Bottle Shop. We’ll be discussing Oregon Beer History and will both have books for sale!

A fun discussion that puts together two big puzzle pieces of Oregon’s history and beer culture. Phil Busse, author of the recently released “Southern Oregon Beer: A Pioneering History,” in conversation with Jon Abernathy, author of “Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon” and blogger at The BrewSite.com. The two compare and contrast the history of beer in Central and Southern Oregon.

The event starts at 7pm, and we’ll be enjoying beer, talking history, and signing books. Come out and see us!

Meet the Writers, Buy Some Books Dec. 3

Meet the Writers at Bazi Bierbrasserie

Add another event to the Portland schedule this weekend, on Saturday, December 3: a Meet the Writers event at Bazi Bierbrasserie! It takes place from 5 to 7pm. Here are the details:

Join us for Happy Hour and meet the writers of these must own beer books:

Jon Abernathy – Bend Beer Book
Jeff Alworth – The Beer Bible
Pete Dunlop – Portland Beer Book
Niki Ganong – Field Guide to Drinking in America
Steven Shomler – Portland Beer Stories

Writers will be onsite to answer questions and sign copies. Get an extra 10% off your tab when you purchase one of these books for your collection.

It is amazingly generous of Bazi to offer the 10% discount with a book purchase! Bazi is a terrific Belgian-themed beer bar and one you should be visiting anyway—but especially come out and visit on Saturday night! I and my fellow writers will be more than happy to sign a book for you.

See you there! Cheers!

Books & Beer at N.W.I.P.A. in Portland, Dec. 4

Holiday Books & Beer at N.W.I.P.A.

On Sunday, December 4, I will be one of several authors signing and selling books in Portland at N.W.I.P.A. beer bar for their Holiday Books & Beer Event taking place from 2 to 5pm! This is going to be a terrific event and the perfect opportunity to do some Christmas shopping for the beer and book lover in your life!

We’re bringing together local publishers and a few local authors to sign books this holiday season. A signed book is a great personalized gift!. You’ll find gifts for beer lovers, traveling tipplers, art fans, books for the tikes and toddlers in your life and more. The team at N.W.I.P.A. will help you select some gift-worthy bottles of beer and cider to round out your holiday shopping list. Stop by, buy a book, buy a bottle and raise a glass all in the name of getting things done this holiday season!

This event is age 21+

Meet the authors:
Jeff Alworth (The Beer Bible)
Niki Ganong (The Field Guide to Drinking in America)
Brian Yaeger (Oregon Breweries)
Steven Shomler (Portland Beer Stories)
Matt Wagner (The Tall Trees of Portland and art director for Gigantic Brewing label art)
Jon Abernathy (Bend Beer)
and more to be announced!

We’ll also have books by these publishers:
Overcup Press
Hazy Dell Press
and more

N.W.I.P.A. is a beer bar that almost exclusively serves—you guessed it—IPAs, along with other limited-availability beers. Come on out, have a beer, and get a signed copy of the book!

See you there!

Central Oregon Winter Beer Festival – Saturday, December 12

This Saturday, December 12, is the 3rd annual Central Oregon Winter Beer Festival, being held from 1 to 9pm at GoodLife Brewing in their Biergarden. I’ll be there, enjoying many a tasty winter beer and signing and selling books!

Central Oregon Winter Beer Festival

We are happy to announce Bigfoot Beverages as our Title Sponsor for 2015.

COWBF is a showcase for seasonal and specialty beers brewed in celebration of the holiday season. Admission to COWBF will be $10.00 and attendees will receive a commemorative COWBF glass, as well as 4 drink tickets. Each additional ticket will cost $1.00. The festival will be in a heated tent, and there will be food carts available on-site.

Breweries slated to be pouring include:

  • GoodLife Brewing
  • Three Creeks Brewing
  • Silver Moon Brewing
  • Cascade Lakes Brewing
  • McMenamins Old St. Francis School
  • Deschutes Brewery
  • Boneyard Beer
  • Wild Ride Brewing
  • Oblivion Brewing
  • Ochoco Brewing
  • RiverBend Brewing
  • Sunriver Brewing
  • Bridge 99 Brewery
  • Bend Brewing
  • North Rim Brewing
  • Worthy Brewing
  • Crux Fermentation Project
  • Craft Kitchen & Brewery
  • Atlas Cider

It should be a fun event, so make sure to come by, drink some great winter libations and buy the book—it’s the perfect Christmas present for the beer or history lover in your life!

Signing at Silver Moon Brewing’s Redmond Grand Opening

This Friday, November 20, Bend’s Silver Moon Brewing is holding the grand opening party for their new Redmond production brewery (in conjunction with their annual One Beard to Rule Them All fundraising event) starting at 6pm, and I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be there as well, with books to sign and sell!

Silver Moon Redmond Grand Opening

You can learn more about Silver Moon’s expansion and plans in a post on my Brew Site blog here; it’s great to see the effort being put into revitalizing the brewery by James Watts and Matt Barrett, who bought Silver Moon in 2013, paying off! It’s also interesting to watch the “rise” of Redmond in the local beer and brewing scene, which now has four established breweries with Silver Moon becoming the fifth, as well as a growing focus on beer with pubs like The Pig and Pound and restaurants like Jersey Boys Pizza.

Come on out on Friday the 20th, party with Silver Moon and let’s talk books and beer history! See you there!

Redmond Third Friday Stroll at Paulina Springs Books

This upcoming Friday, September 18, I’ll be participating in downtown Redmond’s Third Friday Stroll, with Paulina Springs Books once again for signing and selling copies of the book from 5 to 8pm.

Redmond Third Friday Stroll

This is the last “Stroll” of the year for downtown Redmond, and the theme is “Central Oregon Spirits” so I am going to be in good company! Here’s the description that Paulina Springs has posted:

Get ready for a fun night on the town with this month’s Third Friday Stroll! The theme is spirits, and many of the downtown buisinesses will be participating. We will be welcoming back Jon Abernathy, the author of Bend Beer: A History of Brewing in Central Oregon. You can enjoy some spirits from Bend Distillery at the Shabbie Attic, and then head over to Redmond Craft Brewing [the homebrew supply shop] to check out home brewing supplies and sample a recently brewed beer. The Greater Historical Society Museum of Redmond will be displaying an antique distillery, as well as antique beer bottles and cans. It’s going to be a great evening! As you wander between the participating businesses, you can enjoy the music of the two bands, Hat Trick and Mosely Wotta, that will be playing downtown.

It’s going to be a good night all over downtown Redmond, so come on out to enjoy the Stroll, and be sure to come by to say “Hi!” and chat about Central Oregon’s beer history!

See you there!

This weekend: Come see me at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters and Redmond

This Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4, I’m pleased to be the guest of honor for a book event and signing at both Paulina Springs Books locations in Sisters and Redmond! I’ll be in Sisters on Friday the 3rd, and in Redmond on Saturday the 4th. Both events start at 6:30pm.

Paulina Springs Books

And there will be beer sampling at both events as well! Friday in Sisters, Sisters’ own Three Creeks Brewing will be on hand pouring samples of their terrific beers, and the following evening in Redmond, Juniper Brewing of Redmond will likewise be pouring samples of their own fine beers. Books and beer—it doesn’t get much better!

Paulina Springs Books is a great local bookseller (at both locations) with a wide selection of books to offer—I’ve seen titles that aren’t stocked elsewhere which always provides unexpected delight. They also do a great job of hosting authors and events, although I believe these books-and-beer ones are the first of this kind they’ve hosted!

So please come on out either or both days, say “Hi!” and buy a book so I can sign it for you! I should also be doing a talk and/or reading and that should pair well with the local brews being poured. The events officially start at 6:30 though I will likely be there by 6:00 and will be more than happy to answer any questions, sign books, and chat about our local history and beer.

See you there! Cheers!

Cheers to 20 years with Bend Brewing Company!

Bend Brewing Company2015 is a special year for Bend Brewing Company—it’s their 20th anniversary this year! Indeed, they opened way back in 1995 as only the second brewery in Bend (as hard as that is to believe today considering we have 18 here in town alone), and have grown to become one of the most popular and award-winning brewpubs in the Pacific Northwest.

Bend Brewing Company

To celebrate their two decades, today (Friday, February 20th) they are having a party! All day long pints are $3 and appetizers are half-price; and tonight the block in front of the brewery will be closed and from 5 to 10pm BBC will be holding a street party with live music, food and drink specials, raffles, and “20 beers for 20 years”—they will have their 10 taps inside and 10 taps outside in the tent pouring through a staggeringly strong taplist—you can see the full list I posted here. And, to plug the book, BBC has generously invited me to set up a table and sell some books this evening!

BBC's 20th anniversary Outback XX

And to help commemorate their 20th, I am posting some excerpts from the book regarding their history here for your enjoyment.

[In] Bend [in November 1993], businessmen Dave Hill and Jerry Fox were hoping to launch the Brooks Street Brewery downtown, in a building a few doors up from the historic Pine Tavern restaurant overlooking the Deschutes River. Though they “both had experience in drinking beer,” Fox recalled, they had no experience in brewing it. Fox credited Hill with the idea to start a brewpub, and despite the need for extensive renovations for the building they purchased, they hoped the brewery would be open by the following summer.

That timeline proved to be overly optimistic, but the plans for the brewpub were not: the Bend Brewing Company (the name had been changed “in order to give it an identity that would be easy to associate with the city in which it was located,” said Fox) opened its doors in 1995, becoming Bend’s second craft brewery.

Bend Brewing Company opened to the public in February of 1995, located in a building on Brooks Street that had once housed a glassblower. Dave Hill and Jerry Fox oversaw renovations which installed a seven-barrel brewhouse in the upper level, a cramped space packed with tanks and equipment that looked out a large picture window to the dining room below. The west-facing dining room itself looked out onto the Deschutes River through large windows. The brewer was Scott Saulsbury, an alum of Deschutes Brewery who had joined Deschutes in 1993. The brewpub launched with a lineup of five ales: High Desert Hefeweizen, Metolius Golden Ale, Elk Lake IPA, Outback Old Ale, and Pinnacle Porter.

Hill ultimately had other interests besides the brewery, and Fox bought him out within that first year of opening and brought in his daughter, Wendi Day, to manage the day-to-day operations of the brewpub. Day had moved to Bend with her family from Cleveland, Ohio in 1986, and after graduating from Bend High in ‘88, left for Arizona State University to study accounting and marketing. It was at Arizona State that she met her future husband, Rob Day, and her post-college years found her in Seattle working in retail management. When the offer came from her father to manage the business, Day and her husband returned to Bend in 1995.

Bend Brewing from the beginning focused exclusively on the brewpub and restaurant business, with their small-batch beers served only in-house and not packaged for distribution. The brewpub soon became a popular downtown destination, particularly as a post-recreation stop for locals and tourists alike. “Bend Brewing is more upscale than its friendly competitor, Deschutes Brewing Company,” reported The Brewpub Explorer of the Pacific Northwest, published in 1996. “Large windows offer a pleasant view of the park and the Deschutes River. Antique tables and chairs possibly once gracing an old English pub are scattered about the main dining and bar area.”

By February of ‘96 the brewing duties for Bend Brewing had been taken over by Dan Pedersen, a graduate of the Siebel Institute who had spent the previous year and half brewing in Eugene, Oregon for the Eugene City Brewery. Scott Saulsbury moved on to southern Oregon, with brewing stints at Wild River Brewing in Grants Pass, Caldera Brewing in Ashland in 2001 and in 2008 joined Southern Oregon Brewing in Medford.

[The] brewpub continued to be an increasingly popular destination for locals and tourists alike. Brewer Dan Pedersen left in 1998 and brewing duties were taken over by Christian Skovborg, a former brewmaster from the defunct Nor’Wester Brewing. By 2000 Jerry Fox was anxious to retire and wanted to turn over ownership to his daughter Wendi Day. Day was reluctant at first, but partnered with her kitchen manager Terry Standly to purchase the business from her father.

Meanwhile, there was a quiet revolution taking place at Bend Brewing Company. In 2002 Wendi Day hired a new brewer, Tonya Cornett, who was to become one of Bend’s most well-known brewers thanks to a well-honed instinct for an emerging trend in sour ales, a number of high-profile awards, and a featured role in a documentary about women in the brewing industry. But that would be in the future.

Cornett grew up in Marion, Indiana, earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology before moving to Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1996, where she experienced her first taste of craft beer and became hooked. She began homebrewing with a kit that had ostensibly been for her husband, Mark, and started working at H. C. Berger Brewing in Fort Collins putting together boxes and giving tours. Cornett then segued into an unpaid apprenticeship learning the ins and outs of commercial brewing, and when Cornett and her husband moved back to Indiana in 1998 she took a brewing job at Oaken Barrel Brewing.

After three years at Oaken Barrel, Cornett decided to enroll in the Siebel Institute to further her education. Enrollment in Siebel’s World Brewing Academy took her to Chicago and Germany, during which time her husband Mark was scouting three possible “go to” states on the West Coast to move to when she returned. She graduated in 2001, and was ready for larger-scale, production brewing; she wanted to apply her newly-acquired knowledge to a brewing operation beyond the scale of the brewpub. Ironic then, that Cornett ended up accepting a job offer with Bend Brewing, but the opportunity to run the show proved too appealing, and she started at the brewpub in 2002. (The recommendation for Cornett came to Wendi Day from a high school friend of Cornett’s who worked for Day’s cousin, who owned the Southside Pub in Bend.)

There was only a two week overlap with the former brewer, Christian Skovborg, and Cornett took over brewhouse operations entirely. (Skovborg subsequently opened and still owns the Reed Pub in southeast Bend.) She was working 50 to 60 hours per week, brewing four batches per week, and quietly improving the quality of the beer. “I do quality checks all of the time,” she told the Bend Bulletin in a 2002 interview. “I’ll even test the fermenting to detect change. From the beginning, I’ll make sure it’s on the right track.” In addition to cleaning up the house beers (there were no master copies of any recipes, only brewing logs), she was experimenting and developing new recipes, brewing beers such as a “peach lambick [sic] and a razzwheat” (types of beers that would herald the styles for which she would later gain notoriety). The fruits of this labor would begin to pay off in only a few short years.

[She] was consistently improving the core lineup of beers at the brewpub, and introducing seasonals such as Apricot Summer Ale, Axe Head Red, and HopHead Imperial IPA. The HopHead in particular was a popular beer, so much so that the brewpub began offering it in 22-ounce bottles available at the pub only in 2005, and in 2006 the beer won the gold medal in the coveted “American-Style India Pale Ale” category at the Great American Beer Festival—the first such medal for Bend Brewing, and a sudden thrust into the brewing spotlight for Cornett. She would follow up with a win in 2007 with a silver GABF medal for Outback X (a double, or strong, version of the brewpub’s popular Outback Old Ale) and Bend Brewing would go on to win at least one medal per year subsequently.

The GABF medals were followed by an even more prestigious award for Cornett in 2008: at the Brewers Association’s World Beer Cup, Bend Brewing and Cornett won the Champion Brewery and Brewmaster award in the “Small Brewpub” category. Even more significantly, Cornett was the first female brewmaster ever to do so.

Tonya of course moved to 10 Barrel Brewing in 2011, and brewer Ian Larkin took up the head brewer role and continued to rack up awards for the brewery, most recently with his Salmonberry Sour at last year’s Great American Beer Festival.

So make sure to come down to BBC tonight and help celebrate 20 years (and kick off 20 more!)—and if you want to buy a book, I can help you out there too.

Cheers!

This weekend: Costco and the Bend Public Library

This weekend I have a couple of book events lined up! If you’re interested in getting a signed copy of Bend Beer, or attending a reading, check these out:

Tomorrow, Saturday the 7th, I’ll be doing another signing at Costco. The first signing I did with them back in December was a big success, and they generously invited me back! I’ll be there from 1 to 3pm signing any and all books for anyone who wants one. These books are all sold through Costco, so once I sign you simply check out with it up front. On top of that, I’m happy to chat up beer and answer any questions too!

On Sunday, the 8th, I’m invited to the Bend Public Library’s monthly Second Sunday series—an open-mic forum at which I’ll be doing a reading from the book followed by Q&A. That one should be a lot of fun, and I understand there’s also poetry slam-styled stuff that happens after the main speaker, which will be cool. That starts at 2pm, come by if you’d love to hear me read and have any questions!

Looking forward to this weekend! Come on out!

Come brew beer with me in Redmond this Saturday!

This Saturday, the 31st, Redmond’s homebrew club, the Cascade Fermentation Association is having their monthly group brew—and I’m the guest of honor. The theme is “Brewing with Jon Abernathy” in that I’ve provided the recipe (Dusseldorf-style Altbier) and I’ll be set up with books for sale and to help brew and chat and drink beer with anyone who wants to come by.

Cascade Fermentation Celebration

So please do! If you are interested in homebrewing (either learning as a beginner, or are more advanced and just enjoy the process), or interested in beer and history and/or books, come on out! The brew day is open to anyone who wants to check it out.

Brewing will start by 11am, and it’s all taking place at Redmond Craft Brewing Supply, located at 235 SW 6th Street (about a block and a half from Wild Ride Brewing). This is also a great opportunity to acquaint yourself with Redmond’s homebrew shop and get a handle on the local beer scene.

Cheers!