(Photo | Courtesy of Bend Brewfest)
The Bend Brewfest is pulling out all the stops for 2019, with breweries offering beers that are exclusive to the event and presenting other hard-to-find brews. The three-day festival, held August 15-17 at the Les Schwab Amphitheater in Bend, will be the only place where beer lovers can enjoy some of these brews, as well as being a showcase location for some specialty creations. In total, more than 200 beers, ciders, hard seltzers and wines will be pouring at the 2019 Bend Brewfest.
Brewfest hours will be Thursday, August 15 from 4-11pm and Friday and Saturday, August 16 and 17, from noon-11pm. Admission is free. For beer tasting, patrons can purchase a 2019 Brewfest tasting mug for $20, which includes five tasting tokens. Limited edition Deluxe mugs are available for $30 and include ten tokens. Additional tokens are $5 each sold in packs of five.
A few of the Bend Brewfest beers to look forward to include:
Beers made exclusively for the festival
- Block 15 Brewing’s “The DAB Lab, High Desert,” the latest beer in its experimental DAB Lab series made with a dizzying blend of hop varieties and a Central Oregon grown malt
- Worthy Brewing’s “Experimental Hop Session IPA,” which was brewed in honor of the festival using an experimental hop (x-374) grown at Oregon State University
- Walking Man Brewing’s “BEND the Knee Pale Ale,” a hazy pale ale that was brewed to be a refreshing citrus bomb for the high desert sun
Hard-to-find beers
- pFriem Family Brewers’ North German Pilsner, which was brewed for a German competition in collaboration with Germany’s Bitburger Brewery, will only be found at the Bend Brewfest and Portland’s Pilsner Fest
- Barbarian Brewing’s sour beer lineup, including two different extremely limited experimental barrel-aged and sour beers that aren’t distributed in Oregon (and are even wildly difficult to find in its home state of Idaho)
Exciting collaboration releases
- Double Mountain Brewery and Barley Brown’s Collab IPA, a West Coast IPA by two legendary Oregon breweries
- Fort George Brewery, Ruse Brewing and Cloudburst Brewing’s 3-Way IPA, a beer for which Fort George issues new invitations each year to two other collaborators (with this lineup the 2019 result is sure to be amazing)
- Sierra Nevada and Bitburger Brewery’s Oktoberfest, drawing on Bitburger’s 200 years of family brewing knowledge in Germany, this beer uses an exclusive mix of hops that has never before been shared outside the brewery’s Deutsch walls
Other festival highlights include beers ranging from Imperial and bourbon barrel-aged stouts all the way to highly drinkable lower alcohol IPAs coming out of all sizes of regional breweries. The hard seltzer craze has not skipped the Bend Brewfest, with Eel River Brewing bringing its Craft Clarity Meyer Lemon seltzer and AVID Cider presenting its light and flavorful Tropical Smash.
