Bend Brews & Beyond expands to 50 breweries, cideries and N/A makers

Bend Brews & Beyond is leaning into a bigger tent, and that is exactly the point. The second annual festival will take over Drake Park in Bend with 50 Oregon breweries and cideries, plus more than a dozen non-alcoholic makers, turning what could have been a standard tasting into a broader snapshot of Central Oregon’s beverage scene.

The event is scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, May 24 and 25, from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Drake Park, 777 NW Riverside Dr., in downtown Bend. Silver Moon Brewing is sponsoring the festival as it marks its 25th anniversary, a fitting anchor for a beer event that still wants to read as beer-first even while widening the pour list. Silver Moon says it has been pouring pints since 2000, which gives the partnership a little more heft than a logo slap on a banner.

For breweries and organizers, the model makes business sense if the craft identity stays intact. Bend Brews & Beyond is not just stacking booths with random beverages. The lineup includes every locally owned Central Oregon hopped, appled and honeyed beverage producer, and the total package is expected to include more than 100 beers, 20 Oregon-made non-alcoholic drinks and 50-plus breweries and cideries. That kind of scale helps sell tickets, but the local producer mix is what keeps it from feeling like a generic food-and-drink fair.

The festival is also capped at 5,000 attendees and is expected to sell out, which makes the demand part of the story. That kind of cap can work in a brewery festival’s favor: it keeps the crowd manageable, preserves some intimacy with the brewers, and makes special pours feel worth chasing instead of just another sample in the line.

That attention to detail shows up in the programming. The planning guide adds a Next Tap biergarten presented by COHO, the Central Oregon Homebrewers Organization, along with Meet the Makers sessions, where brewers will pour daily from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. It also brings back the community-goofy stuff that beer people actually remember, including the Drinking Pants Pageant and the Bend Bands & Brewers Bash, which will feature four brewery-affiliated bands. Samples generally cost one tasting token, or two for a double pour, with rare and specialty beers in the Next Tap biergarten also running two tokens.

The festival is backed by the Oregon Brewers Guild, founded in 1992, and appears to be organized under Grand Craft Beer, which says it started as Brian Yaeger Presents in 2015. Bend Brews & Beyond is making a clear bet: the best way to grow a beer festival now is to add more beverage lanes without losing the brewer access, oddball energy and local pride that made people buy the ticket in the first place.