Bend May Have Too Many Breweries

I have argued, and will continue to argue, that there aren't too many breweries in the United States.  There is no craft beer bubble on the horizon.  But now our man on the Bend street, Jon Abernathy, reports that in addition to the twenty extant breweries in Central Oregon, five more on in the works. 

So, these additions put Bend and Central Oregon at 25 breweries by year’s end (assuming all goes as planned and paperwork is signed, etc.), though even then there’s still potentially on the horizon: three off the top of my head which have been mentioned are the Brew Shop/Platypus Pub‘s (small) brewpub, the “Old Mill Marketplace” brewpub, and a possible rumored brewery at Brasada Ranch Resort out by Powell Butte (between Bend and Prineville). Plus there’s a bunch of other potential names I’ve been discovering lately that I will be following up on (but may only be names and nothing else).

But 25! That puts Central Oregon at nearly half of the number of breweries in Portland (51 at last count) and who knows where the current rate of growth will put the region by the end of next year.

Let's do a little math.  As you probably know, there are a number of people who are already spooked about the number of breweries nationwide which, for the sake of round numbers, we'll put at 2,500.  That works out to a per capita total of one brewery for every 120,000 men, women, and children in this great land.  (They're obviously not distributed evenly, but that's a statistical quirk itself: the places with the greatest density are generally those with the healthiest craft beer markets.)  By comparison:

Country ... per capita
Belgium - 91,000
Czech Rep. - 81,000
UK - 63,000
Germany - 61,000
Austria - 50,000

Now, if we're being extremely generous and including the entire tri-county region in our population total (Deschutes, Crook, Jefferson), we come up with 150,000 souls.  That works out to a per capita brewery total of one in 6,000.  Considering what happened to real estate just a few years back, I'm beginning to think there's a bit of a gold-rush mentality in that old frontier town.  Surely that's not sustainable.