Last week I got to attend a beer pairing benefit dinner hosted by Silver Moon Brewing, Revolvr Menswear, and the Scoutpost food cart, who all teamed up to support Cascade Youth & Family Center. This “Pairing for a Purpose” dinner featured five courses of food prepared by Scoutpost and paired with beer from Silver Moon; Revolvr provided the venue and as part of the showcase for their store, the servers changed clothes between each course in a sort of mini fashion show to highlight the store’s offerings.

Tickets cost $50, and all the net proceeds from the tickets sales as well as the raffle benefited the Cascade Youth & Family Center organization (disclosure: I was offered two seats at the dinner for free). Representatives from the youth organization were there to talk about the service they provide, which is impressive; here’s the about blurb from their website:

Cascade Youth and Family Center (CYFC) focuses on prevention, intervention, and crisis services for adolescents and their families. We are the sole provider of a comprehensive spectrum of services targeted to work with runaway, homeless, and throwaway youth in Deschutes County. Our program provides emergency shelter and counseling, works to reunite youth with their families, strengthens family relationships, encourages stable living conditions for youth, and supports youth in choosing constructive courses of action, toward education completion and employment.

They are the only such program in Oregon east of the Cascades, which makes what they do and supporting them all the more important.

The evening started with Silver Moon’s Chapter 2 Casual Ale, which was paired with the appetizer of clay oven flatbread featuring both squash butter and poached pear, and a roasted lamb and spiced yogurt. If you’re unfamiliar with Scoutpost, they specialize in tandoor, or clay oven cooking for their dishes. The courses mostly reflected this, and while I’m not certain if they actually cooked the food at their cart, I have to admire the technique as everything they served was incredibly tasty.

The first course after the appetizer was a vegetable course: mesquite roasted farm vegetables with a harissa roasted red pepper sauce and a romesco sauce, with beer bread. The course was paired with Silver Moon’s new Ghost Fields Rye IPA. Overall very, very good; the vegetables were a head of cauliflower (charred slightly), potatoes, and beets. All were delicious but I thought the cauliflower and particularly the beets were excellent. Seriously I could have just kept on eating those beets! The beer paired very well; it’s an easy-drinking India Pale Ale, with a nice bitter hop character underlying the rye spiciness.

The second course was a dish featuring ricotta gnocchi, winter squash, and Brussels sprouts with sage and parmesan—all tossed together to present a composed bite. It was paired with Twisted Gourd Pumpkin Ale, on the reasoning that pumpkin beer with squash would be a good combination. Spoiler alert: it was, and overall this was another excellent dish, and honestly I preferred the vegetable component to it. Don’t get me wrong—the gnocchi was good but it was the squash and Brussels sprouts that really stood out here. Scoutpost is working magic with vegetables.

You’ll note from these pictures that the meal was served family-style, with large portions brought to each table for everyone to help themselves. This worked pretty well, and fits into the “food cart narrative” that Scoutpost brought to the table (pun intended!). There was plenty of food to go around, and they even brought a second plate of vegetables (from the first course) to our table at our request.

The third course was the meat course: IPA brined pork loin, served with apple butter, and a side of soft polenta. Naturally since it was IPA brined, the paired beer was Silver Moon’s flagship IPA 97, a delicious and high-quality ale. The pork was served with micro-greens and a not-quite sour saurkraut type vegetable. It was excellent and here I think the beer and the food paired really well, not to mention Scoutpost knocked it out of the park with this pork which was fork-tender and succulent. As I’m writing this, I’m wishing I could have taken some home to enjoy later…

Finally, dessert, but honestly—I think many of use were full after that third course! However, that didn’t stop us from diving into dessert once these were set in front of us:

A coffee pot de creme with a beer doughnut, paired with Snake Bite Porter. I’ll be honest: best dessert I’ve had in awhile. The doughnut was amazingly light and airy, and the pot de creme was covered in a caramel sauce which made it truly decadent. The beer paired well but honestly wasn’t my favorite pairing; for me this was a dessert that cried out for a similarly rich and decadent beer, like a barrel-aged barleywine or something similar. Of course then I might have slipped into diabetic shock.

Overall I was very impressed. Scoutpost did a fantastic job on the food, Revolvr’s hosting and service were great, and Silver Moon’s beer was spot on. And the beneficiary of the evening, Cascade Youth & Family Center, is an important organization that should be on your radar. Most importantly, they offer a variety of ways to get involved with their organization—direct donation, in-kind donations, and you can even order coffee through their website which helps youth “with hands on training and experience as baristas.” They’re doing important work.

There is already talk of hosting this dinner benefit again next year. I’ll be sure to post about that when it happens.

Here are some more pictures from the evening: