Silver Moon Brewing: The New Moon Emerges

When Tyler Reichert originally started Bend’s Silver Moon Brewing, he bit off far more than a lot of young entrepreneurs would be willing to chew; a huge and focus-pulling mouthful of Iconic Brewery, just across the pond and up the hill, where Deschutes Brewery hunkers down, there on the corner of Simpson and Colorado, in picture-postcard Bend, Oregon. They’re only two-three blocks from Deschutes’ landmark Bond Street Pub and taproom, which, predictably, ate up a lot of SM’s potential customer base. Tyler embraced this struggle and, when I wandered into Silver Moon for the first time, on a sunny, frigid afternoon in November of 2009, I was slapped sideways by what was issuing from their tanks and taps.