Deschutes Brewery’s 5th Annual Crab Bake
This past Saturday was a great day. I started off with a 6th Gear Sangwich and met the Monkey and finished it off with all you can eat crab at Deschutes Brewery 5th annual crab bake. I am a whore for some crab. Seriously. I love shell fish especially crab and lobster. So when I got an email from the Deep Rapper about the crab bake, I was in.
The wife can’t stand the smell of crab or lobster so I save $75 and I still get my fill of beer and all the crabs I can handle. It’s a win win win….win.
I arrived just after 6 and am slapped in the face by the Island sounds of Bill Keale giving a Hawaiian twist to some classic songs. I quickly get a pint of the absolutely delicious Green Lakes Organic Ale which I stuck with for the entire night aside from a miss timed blown keg episode where I was forced to slosh down a tourist favorite, Mirror Pond. Longest 10 minutes of my life.
Back to me whoring it up for some shell fish. I took my pint to my table, dropped off my camera and jumped in line for some oysters. Fresh raw oysters in the half shell you can keep, I don’t dig on the slimy uncooked raw oysters in buffet style fashion. I’ll stick with the cooked Oysters Rockefeller or in this case, the seafood medley as they had renamed it from the time I viewed the menu online to the printed version on my table.
I grabbed three Oyster Medley’s and spooned on a sample of each of the three sauces available, one cayenne pepper sauce (probably too spicy for the Monk), one cocktail, and one mystery clear, buttery/oily looking thing with pepper and garlic mixed in. All were great and the cooked oysters mixed with all sorts of goodies and some bacon…a winner in my book.
Next up was the Crab Vol-au-vent or as any regular chap would say – Seafood filled Puff Pastry. The Brewerman summed it up nicely when he said “I could eat 20 of those”. Sounds like a challenge for another time. They were good and not to heavy on the mayo which I sort of expected.
Ah the Crab Louie. Redmond Rodge didn’t make it out to this event like he did the last time but he’d have done the same as I did…eat the crab, leave the veg. My wedge of iceberg could have taken down the Titanic. I barely touched it. I want CRABS!!! (yeah, make your jokes…I don’t care)
At last, a HUGE mixing bowl was placed in the center of our table. I have never stood up to take a photo of food in any restaurant to date, but I was in awe. It was massive. We dug in. I devoured a whole crab and took my time to get all that I could out of each one not wanting to be wasteful. But once that second bowl of crab boil was place on our table, I was all about the claws, large leg portions, and body meat. I didn’t waste much time with the smaller portions of the legs and whatnot.
And I had to take a photo of the Coffee Pot full of clarified butter.
I was sad as our bowls didn’t have any sausage as promised by the menu. As I went up for another pint, a friend at another table shared the same disappointment. I talked to a couple of the friendly waitresses and wouldn’t you know it, later in the evening a small bowl of sausages topped with one peel and eat prawn was placed in front of me. Thank you Missy and Jen!
Then there was dessert but it had coconut which I don’t really care for and I’m not even a big fan of dessert anyhow so here ‘s the photo of the Keylime pie and we’ll move on.
Awesome night all around. I absolutely love these events and wish I would get more notice for when they are doing something up at the mountain room. They should have an RSS feed on the events page.
