All posts by jon

The book is officially released!

Today is the official release date for Bend Beer! Looks like the hard work paid off:

Bend Beer is out!

It’s available online of course (see here), and you can find it on the shelves at the following locations so far (with more to come!):

  • Barnes & Noble (Bend)
  • Costco (Bend)
  • Deschutes Brewery – tasting room and downtown pub
  • McMenamins Old St. Francis School
  • Visit Bend (Bend Visitor Center, downtown Bend)
  • Des Chutes Historical Museum (Bend)
  • The Brew Shop (Bend)
  • Powell’s Books (Portland)
  • Central Oregon Locavore (Bend)
  • Paulina Springs Books (Sisters and Redmond)

Don’t forget the events are lining up too!

Cheers!

Upcoming signing events

These past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of prep for the upcoming release of the book (October 21!), and the History Press’s publicist has been a dynamo and lining up signing and meet-the-author events. Here’s what we have planned so far:

  • The Growler Guys, Saturday, October 25: The original east Bend Growler Guys features 36 taps of amazing beers and ciders and is the one that started it all here in Oregon! Come down from 3 to 5pm Saturday to meet the author, drink some beer, fill some growlers, and get a signed book!
  • The Platypus Pub, Thursday, October 30: Starting at 6pm one of the region’s hands-down best beer bars is hosting a event just before Halloween that is sure to be awesome. Should we request costumes?
  • Silver Moon Brewing, Thursday, November 6: One of the region’s OG breweries is hosting a book signing party from 5 to 8pm to celebrate the release of the book, so make sure to come down for great beer and buy a signed book!
  • Des Chutes Historical Museum, Friday, November 7: The Historical Society is hosting the official book release party on First Friday starting at 6:30pm! Deschutes Brewery will be on-hand as well, pouring their award-winning beer. Come join the party and celebrate where Bend’s history meets Bend’s first brewery! Afterward we’ll lead a pub crawl through downtown Bend to visit some of the places where Bend’s beer got its start.
  • The Growler Guys (West), Thursday,  November 13: Come down to the Westside Growler Guys for a chance to meet Jon, get a signed copy of “Bend Beer”, and enjoy some great craft beer (grab a pint, and fill a growler)! With 30 taps of delicious beer on hand it’s sure to be a great event!
  • Rat Hole Brewpub, Saturday, November 29: One of Bend’s newest (and smallest!) breweries is hosting an event the Saturday after Thanksgiving—come down to the Brewpub to enjoy some great food and beer and meet the author at 7pm.
  • McMenamins Old St. Francis School, Thursday, December 4: The OSF is a great historic venue for a beer history book event, so be sure to join us from 6 to 9pm. There may even be a special beer from brewer Mike “Curly” White on hand too!
  • Powell’s Books (Portland), Friday, December 5: At 7:30pm we’ll have a signing and meet the author along with another Oregon book release, Oregon Breweries! Come down and meet both Jon and Oregon Breweries author Brian Yaeger and be sure to purchase both books—what a great gift pack for Christmas! Afterwards there will be a pub crawl through Portland’s Pearl District.
  • Belmont Station (Portland), Saturday, December 6: Come down to one of Portland’s best bottleshops and beer bars to meet both Jon Abernathy, author of Bend Beer, and Brian Yaeger, author of Oregon Breweries! We’ll be partying on the patio from 1 to 3pm and soaking in Portland’s great beer culture!
  • Worthy Brewing, Saturday, December 13: What better way to temper Christmas shopping than with lunch, beer, and books? Worthy Brewing is hosting a signing and meet the author event at their eastside brewery starting at 1pm.
  • Broken Top Bottle Shop, Tuesday, December 16: Along with the Platypus Pub, BTBS is one of the region’s absolute best beer bars with a great bottleshop to boot! Come down at 7pm for a signing and meet the author event and enjoy some of BTBS’s great food and beers.

“Bend Beer” is available for pre-purchase

Bend Beer front coverThe book will hit brick-and-mortar shelves on October 21, but if you’d like to order it online, Bend Beer is available for pre-order at the following sites:

The History Press

Order direct from the publisher, and you can also select from the History Press’s entire catalog—particularly their American Palate series for beer of 34 other regional beer history titles.

Amazon.com

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s City of Books

And in addition to being available online at Powell’s, there is going to be a signing event at Powell’s in Portland on December 5! (Stay tuned for more details on that and other events.)

Buy now at one of the above links! Or if you would rather wait to buy a copy in person we’ll have a list of available locations where the book will be for sale soon.

Official Publish Date: October 21, 2014

We have an official release date for the book from the publisher! Tuesday, October 21, 2014 is the day!

I turned in reviewed copy edits last week, and should be seeing publication proofs soon. And I’ve seen a sneak preview of the cover (not sure when I can share that yet), and it looks great!

So mark your calendar for October 21. Amazon and other online retailers should offer the book up for pre-order soon, and overall the book will retail for $19.99. Keep an eye out!

I’ll continue to post updates and will post the cover when I get approval.

Enjoy this random ad for Olympia Beer

“It’s the water,” of course. It’s kind of amazing the kinds of things you find when doing research, nuggets of pure gold that may not make it into the book but are too good not to share.

Like this ad for Olympia beer from the June 30, 1965 issue of the Bend Bulletin. It doesn’t really fit any of the other beer advertising I’ve looked at so far:

Olympia Brewing fiesta ad

Brewing a pre-Prohibition American lager

I’ve been homebrewing for years, since the mid-90s really, and one thing I thought might be fun to do—as time allows, of course—is brew up some beers inspired by the local beer history I’ve been researching.

Hops

The first beer that came to mind was inspired by the very first brewery to exist in Central Oregon: the Ochoco Brewery of Prineville, which lasted from 1882 until 1890. Of course a pre-Prohibition brewery at that time—with an Austrian brewer, no less—would have been brewing a lager, though a stronger, darker, maltier lager by today’s commonly-understood “American lager” standards. So I set out develop a pre-Prohibition lager recipe loosely based on what I would imagine might have been coming out of the Prineville brewery.

Now, in all the time I’ve been homebrewing, I had never done a true lager prior to this. The main reason is temperature control: lagers require a fermentation temperature of under 60 degrees Fahrenheit (45-55 is pretty ideal) and I’ve simply never been set up to do that. However, during the winter our garage stays a relatively-stable 55 to 57 degrees, day and night, so while we had the colder weather I went for it.

Malt in the mill

Here’s the base recipe I put together:

  • 7 pounds of American 2-row malt
  • 1 pound of Munich malt
  • 1 pound of flaked corn
  • 2 ounces of chocolate malt (~350°L)
  • 8 ounces of cane sugar
  • 0.75 ounces of Perle hops (~8% alpha acid) for 60 minutes
  • 0.25 ounces of Santiam hops (~5% AA) for 60 minutes
  • 1 ounce of Santiam hops for 15 minutes
  • 1 ounce of Santiam hops for aroma
  • Wyeast 2035 American Lager

Homebrewers familiar with the style will note I’ve taken liberties with it. The use of 2-row versus 6-row malt, for instance. And likely there wouldn’t have been much in the way of specialty malts available in frontier Prineville, but I can imagine having an imperfectly-kilned malt which could have lent darker colors and roastier, nuttier flavors to the finished beer. And the hops would possibly have been Cluster or some similar Willamette Valley-grown early variety.

Also, I do a simple single-infusion mash, whereas lager brewers of the day likely employed step-infusion or even decoction mashing.

The end result is a 6.3% amber-brown lager that is tasty and I hope befitting the beer being brewed in Central Oregon 130 years ago!

Ochoco Lager

First interviews

A big “thank you” to Tyler Reichert (who founded Silver Moon Brewing) and Chris Justema (co-owner of Cascade Lakes Brewing) for offering up their time for the first of many interviews I’ll be conducting among all the various beer people in the region.

I met with Tyler last week at the Platypus Pub, and with Chris this week at the Cascade Lakes Lodge during their 20th anniversary celebration—and enjoyed some fine beers at each, enjoying the Platypus Pub’s own Haste Ye Back Wee Heavy, and Cascade Lakes’ 20th Anniversary IPA.

And of course, lots of good history and information is coming from the interviews, hopefully much or all of which will make it into the book! The scope won’t just cover the breweries, of course, but also other beer-related topics that contribute to Bend’s amazing beer culture, like homebrewing for instance (Tyler used to own the Brew Shop back in the day).

Tomorrow, I’ll be spending some time with the crew over at 10 Barrel and I expect a lot more good information to add to my research.