Belgian brewing traditions meet Oregon-grown ingredients best enjoyed in an eccentric woodland hideaway taproom.
Bend is long revered as a top destination for Oregon craft beer, and Funky Fauna Artisan Ales is quietly carving out a distinctive presence in the scene. Here, the focus is on saisons crafted with Oregon ingredients and fermented with a locally cultivated native wild yeast, alongside a small selection of other styles like West Coast IPAs and fresh-hopped beers. Located a few minutes outside downtown Bend in a shifting industrial neighborhood, the taproom is well worth a visit. Owners Michael Frith and Danielle Burns are crafting an Oregonian sense of place in their beers, taproom and artwork — creating something unmistakably theirs.
The inspiration for it all began thousands of miles away. “Danielle and I took a trip to Belgium around 2013, which is really where we fell in love with spontaneous beers like lambic,” says Frith, who is the head brewer at Funky Fauna. “The idea that what we were drinking could only be produced right there was really exciting and something we hadn’t experienced in beer before. We fell in love with Bend many years later and felt it was the perfect place to create something in homage.”
All their brews are crafted with the Pacific Northwest as a key influence, with regional ingredients weaving their way into each batch. The brewery sources barley from Goschie Farms in Silverton, Oregon, while Portland’s Indie Hops supplies varieties like Strata and Lorien that appear throughout the lineup. The duo aims to celebrate local farmers while also paying tribute to the historical low-alcohol Wallonia saisons brewed with local ingredients and wild yeast. These saisons were traditionally brewed by Belgian farmers in the 1800s to share with their farmhands as a safe source of hydration and nourishment.
Using a traditional Belgian coolship method, Frith captured their signature house culture on a cool winter night in Sisters, Oregon, in 2021, with the centuries-old brewing technique where hot, unfermented wort is cooled in an open vessel overnight, deliberately exposing it to the open air to capture wild ambient yeast and bacteria. “What’s really cool is that our wild culture throws off a lot of the same characteristics of some Belgian cultures,” says Frith. “It’s highly expressive with notes of pear, apple and banana while being a little more restrained than a traditional Belgian culture.”
Each of their saisons is conditioned with seasonal fruit, herbs and spices alongside the yeast culture, which is kept active in the oak barrels used to ferment the beers. “Our beers are much more of an homage to saison in a sense that they are much lower in alcohol and meant to be extremely drinkable, which I think helps us stand out,” says Frith. “It’s typical for sours to remain in oak for upwards of three years, whereas we intentionally encourage a quicker fermentation in oak, around three to six months. This helps us maintain a level of acidity that’s very approachable and easy to drink.”
At the taproom, the saison selection ranges from traditional to more experimental flavors and is served in stemmed glasses as 6-ounce or 12-ounce pours.
The brewery’s commitment to local sourcing is expressed across the tap list. One beer that Frith considers to be a great representation of the Funky Fauna identity is the Sea Plague, made with Oregon-grown wasabi alongside seaweed and sea salt harvested from the Oregon coast. “I think Sea Plague defines our brewery quite well and our goal of showcasing time and place through local Oregon ingredients,” he says. “It really highlights an array of ingredients we’re lucky enough to source here in Oregon, making it such a cool place to do what we’re doing.”
The visual identity of the brewery is just as compelling as the brews. Burns creates all of the brewery’s can artwork and branding, blending influences from classic books and film, including plenty of “The Lord of the Rings” references spotted throughout the taproom. Both Frith and Burns collaborated on the taproom’s design, transforming an existing brewery space with black paint, greenery and foraged natural elements. “We like to call the taproom vibe ‘Gothic Wes Anderson,’” Burns says. “The main goal for the cans is to keep it fun and spooky. It’s dark and moody while keeping some quirky aspects and, of course, plenty of DIY.”
That same sense of playfulness extends to the brewery’s annual Halloween celebration, dubbed their Spookiversary, which honors the brewery’s first brew back in 2021. This year’s event on October 31 will feature a fresh lineup of spicy pepper beers made specifically for the occasion.
In a city celebrated for its abundance of breweries, Frith and Burns show that sometimes the most memorable beers are the ones that could only have been made in one place.
