Boneyards Busy Winter | The Source Weekly - Bend, Oregon

Boneyards Busy Winter

New debuts across California and the world.

Boneyard Beer, the standard-bearer for good IPA across the mighty state of Oregon, has—in its own words—been "going event-crazy" for the whole month of February. The results are putting the hometown brewer on the map, not just across the Pacific Northwest, but also allowing the brand to quite literally brush shoulders with the world's best.

To begin with, Boneyard is joining locals such as GoodLife and Silver Moon and plunging into distributing their product in Northern California. They've teamed up with Mindful Distributors to produce a regular supply of RPM and the gang to places across the San Francisco Bay Area, including Beer Revolution in Hayward, the IBU Taproom & Bottle Shop in Milpitas, and Toronado, the bar in San Fran's Lower Haight notorious for leading the local beer scene since the 1980s, featuring bartenders who take a "Soup Nazi"-style approach to the job. (A basic primer: Know your order before you go up to the bar, don't ask "What's the lightest thing you have," and bring cash.)

Boneyard is holding launch events all across the Bay Area in February, but that's not all they've been up to. They recently collaborated with Barley Brown's in Baker City to produce Allocation IIPA Part Deux, a citrusy blend of Amarillo, Citra, Cascade and Manderina hops. This debuted at the Loyal Legion in Portland, which put 10 of each brewery's offerings on tap for the occasion.

There's another collaboration in the works, however, that's rather larger in scale. Boneyard has been invited to participate in Beer Camp Across the World, a case of beer featuring 12 beers made by 12 breweries, in collaboration with Sierra Nevada Brewing. This marks the third year the Chico-based brewery has released a mega-collaboration pack, and for this one, they've teamed up with six outfits from the US and six from around the world.

Notable participants in this box, due out this summer, include Garage Project of New Zealand, producing a porter smoked with indigenous wood; Mikkeller of Denmark, making a beer themed after Thai iced tea; and Tree House Brewing, the beer-nerd darlings of central Massachusetts, producing a low-key IPA that's billed as "East meets West."

What is Boneyard's contribution to the case? No prizes for guessing this: It's a west coast-style double IPA, set to clock in at around 8.5 percent alcohol by volume.

"I think it came out darn good," Boneyard head Tony Lawrence says. "I can't wait to make a couple of twists and tweaks. Calculator, pen, piece of paper, and we'll get this done."


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