They were aboard the Cycle Pub, which is just what it sounds like, and if it is possible to slur pedaling, they were doing it. Their destination was Boneyard Brewery, one of the more recent breakthrough breweries in this little city so gloriously deep in the cups that a genuine economic analyst really was prompted to pore over the data.

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.