ON a frosty winter night in Bend, Ore., members of a local home brewers club swilled beers inside Boneyard Beer, where a tiny tasting room is plastered with snowboard stickers and beer posters.

“This brewery’s moving up my list as I get to know this IPA,” said Joleen Noble, a member of the club. She was drinking the RPM IPA, a hop-heavy beer with notes of orange.

In a town of 80,000 people and nine breweries, with at least four more in development, Bend has one of the highest brewery-to-resident ratios in the country, which points toward a thirsty population with discriminating palates, not to mention the two million tourists who visit the mountain town each year. And while Bend, about 175 miles southeast of Portland, is somewhat isolated from main shipping routes, making it an unlikely spot for large-scale brewing, brewers find inspiration in the town’s soft water — beer’s primary ingredient — the result of nearby mountain snowmelt.

Deschutes Brewery, which was founded in 1988 and has become the fifth largest craft brewer in the nation, helped set the stage for the current brewing boom. The brewery’s reputation has greatly defined Bend as a beer town while creating a unique training ground for brewers, and for samplers as well. “The brewer I am today is 100 percent because of Deschutes,” said Jimmy Seifrit, brewmaster at 10 Barrel Brewing Co., who worked as a brewer at Deschutes. Mr. Seifrit said the brewery’s size helped him learn how to produce consistently good beer on a large scale.