What it showed was this: While places like Seattle and Denver and Brooklyn and Delaware can claim impressive craft brewing scenes, and a weirdly large number of people nationwide now speak of hop fetishes and beer crushes, Bend is a per capita powerhouse. With 80,000 people surrounded by not much of anything — with no Interstate and the closest major city 160 miles away across steep and snowy mountains — beer has had room to make a difference.

And it has.

“Deschutes County breweries and brew pubs reported 450 jobs in 2010,” Carolyn B. Eagan, a state economist, wrote last fall. “That is 15 percent of all of the brewing employment in the state. For a county that had 4 percent (one of every 25 jobs) of the state’s total employment that year, one out of seven jobs in Oregon brewing is quite impressive.”

Just four or five years ago, Bend was a New West boomtown, one of the fastest growing municipalities in the United States, luring Californians and others rich with real estate equity to buy relatively inexpensive homes here. Then it all fell apart. The housing market collapsed, employment plummeted. People who had been wealthy enough to live off investments and rental income no longer could.

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Beer endured.

“What we did for so long was just take advantage of the land we have,” Ms. Eagan said in an interview, noting that, although Bend is slowly growing, people are not flocking here the way they once were. “Well, you can’t export land, but you sure can export beer.”

Of course, much of the appeal of beer in Bend is being here to drink it. Eric King, the city manager, said that since last year the city has collected more in hotel taxes than surrounding Deschutes County, where people might stay to ski or bike.

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“Now we’re sort of seeing this shift of people coming to Bend as an urban environment and coming here specifically for beer,” Mr. King said.

Gary Fish founded Deschutes Brewery with a single brew pub in 1988, a few booms and busts back. Bend was a struggling timber town, “a desolate place,” he recalled.

Over the years, Mr. Fish became increasingly involved with local business leaders, joining and then helping lead Chamber of Commerce and economic development groups. He also fostered what became something of a salon for aspiring brewers, who in turn went on to found breweries of their own.

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Bend had become a Black Mountain, a Silicon Valley, a Napa. Spinoff ventures emerged: the Cycle Pub, which has expanded to other cities; an Ale Trail through town; Silipints, a company that makes silicone beer glasses.

“You have to thank Gary Fish for kind of creating that culture,” said Larry Sidor, a former brew master at Deschutes who left last year to open a brewery of his own this summer, CRUX Fermentation Project. “It’s been kind of a training ground, a spawning ground for the craft movement.”

Purists worry that the culture is being diluted, of course. Some even fear a “beer bubble.”

“They’re trying to make it Beer City, U.S.A.,” said Rob Leonig, a regular customer stopping at Boneyard on a Friday afternoon. “There’s always other breweries opening up, and I’m worried at some point somebody’s going to start making some junk.”

Then Mr. Leonig handed over his growler bottles for a refill.

“But I do love beer,” he said.