Bend Brewing Company, Bend OR

29 June 2023

I met up with my older brother in Bend today and the distraction of that visit made me forget to get general pictures of this delightful little spot. Not only is downtown Bend a really interesting and lively place, but BBC has a lot of indoor and outdoor space available. Ah well, perhaps I’ll have to return some other year for the photos I missed.

Here’s the important part, though – my flight!

Daytime Dilemma Pilsner (Pilsner, 4.8%) – This was a perfectly good pilsner, nice and crisp and clean, very refreshing on this very hot day.

BPR (“Bend Private Reserve” lager) – If you’re following along on the flight list, this is supposed to have been the Bendelo Especial Mexican Lager but that one had kicked and been replaced with this BPR, most likely a play on “PBR.” As lagers go, it was fine; it was just the color that was rather odd! I wonder what they used to get that shade …

Wild Gravity Session IPA (IPA, 4.9%) – Again, I wasn’t expecting this color, but the beer was pretty good. It wasn’t particularly hoppy (49 IBU) but that was fine – it was really refreshing if not super flavorful.

Desert Sky Hazy IPA (IPA, 6.3%) – They describe this as “Ripe, Dank, Fluffy” and if you figure out what that means exactly, you’ll probably have a good idea what this tastes like. For now, I’ll just say that it was good but probably in the middle in terms of what I liked in this flight.

Sunscreen Daydream Hazy IPA (IPA, 6.9%) – Now this was one tasty beer! I almost had a pint of this; it was a mental coin flip between this and the last one in the flight.

Tropic Pines IPA (IPA, 6.5%) – This is BBC’s flagship beer and it’s easy to see why.

The menu wasn’t huge, but this Turkey Club with house salad was a lot of food and very, very good (I’d eaten almost half of everything by the time I took the photo). Everything was so, so fresh.

As I said, I did a mental coin flip for a pint and the Tropic Pines IPA won. I wish I’d had the time to hang out and do both this and the Sunscreen Daydream, but one pint had to do me.

BBC was doing a big business, at least in all the outdoor seating; the indoor seating was practically deserted. It’s certainly a candidate for a return visit at some point if I get out this way again.