Jon Abernathy

Deschutes Brewery VIP Tour and Media Event

On Thursday I (along with a group of other local media folks) was invited to Deschutes Brewery for a special VIP brewery tour and media event. I was entirely unsure what to expect beforehand, and as it turned out the Brewery had set up a special tasting for attendees beforehand, presented by one of the senior brewers Jimmy Seifert and marketing manager Jason Randles.

While the brewery tour was great (particularly so due to main tour conductor Aaron), it was the tasting that was the main event of the evening. For each beer tasted, Seifert talked about the making and history of the beer, and there were interesting nuggets of information to be gleaned along the way.

Batch sparge grain bill calculator

Last week I talked about the batch sparging technique as presented by John Palmer’s How to Brew, and noted that because of the loss in extract potential due to the technique (as compared to “normal” all-grain recipes), that Palmer provides calculations to help you scale up your recipe’s grain bill to accommodate for that loss [...]

Batch Sparging

A few months back I wrote about my initial foray into all-grain homebrewing, building out my mash tun and recommending John Palmer’s How to Brew (which served as motivation to start all-grain brewing). I now have two batches under my belt (both otherwise-identical Porters), and I wanted to highlight this bit about the “batch sparging” [...]

Silipint Review

Over a month ago I wrote about the Bend Ale Trail and how, for completed Ale Trail maps, the Visit Bend organization was giving away Silipints: pint glasses made from 100% silicone. However, they were backordered, and only finally got them in a week ago—so now with Silipint in hand, I can now write up [...]

Field guide to the Oregon Brewers Festival: The beers

Last week I shared some tips to attending next week’s Oregon Brewers Festival that I’ve gleaned from experience. The OBF is Oregon’s largest beer festival, attended over a four-day weekend by some 70,000 people, and features 81 beers on tap representing 80 breweries from around the country (the 81st beer is the Collaborator beer from Widmer and the Oregon Brew Crew).

Unless you’re planning a hardcore tasting mission encompassing all four days of the Festival, you probably won’t be sampling all 81 beers offered; or at any rate, I’ve never been able to get close. Since they post the list of beers online, you have ample opportunity to make a game plan ahead of time: work up a list of your “must try” beers. That’s exactly what I’ve done in past years, and that’s what I’m doing now—presenting you with a suggested list of beers that you should seek out first, with some notes about some of the others.

Field guide to the Oregon Brewers Festival

In two short weeks the largest beer festival in Oregon kicks off: the Oregon Brewers Festival, in Portland’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park from July 22nd through 25th (the last full weekend in July). I know at least a few of you will be attending, and for some it may well be your first time. Now, I won’t be attending myself this year (a family birthday falls at a conflicting time), but I have been there in past years and have some words of wisdom to impart.

Beer takeaways from a Walla Walla wine weekend

Last weekend my wife and I traveled to Walla Walla, Washington, for an anniversary wine trip (hence my lack of a post last week)—Walla Walla is the new Napa, if you didn’t know—and after a weekend of visiting wineries and tasting wines, I came away with a number of takeaways that are interesting to me [...]

The Silipint’s a-comin’

We complete the Bend Ale Trail yesterday, having visited all seven Bend breweries plus Three Creeks Brewing out in Sisters. Today we plan on taking the completed maps into the Visit Bend office and (hopefully!) redeeming our Silipint (the collapsible silicone pint glass).
I’m planning to post a picture and review of the Silipint here, as [...]

The Bend Ale Trail

If you happen to be visiting Bend, Oregon, anytime soon (obviously something I highly recommend), you’ll want to check out the Bend Ale Trail. This is a project launched and sponsored by our local tourism bureau, Visit Bend, and (I gather) it’s based loosely on the “New York Beer Trail” —with the purpose to promote both craft beer in Central Oregon and travel and tourism to Bend itself.

Good beer in unlikely places: Pacific City, Oregon

This past Memorial Day weekend we were out of town, staying on the Oregon Coast in Lincoln City and generally being “offline.” Of course, this doesn’t mean I stop seeking out (or thinking about) beer, and it’s always awesome [a treat] to find amazing beer in unlikely places. And for this trip it was in Pacific City, 23 miles north of Lincoln City, where we spent a good part of our Sunday.