Reno's food culture, long identified with all-you-can-eat casino buffets and steak-and-egg specials, is maturing and diversifying.

Aside from restaurants, Reno offers food enthusiasts a small and quiet but industrious community of entrepreneurs who produce specialty foods and beverages of uncommon creativity and quality.

They're scattered all about Reno and Sparks, often tucked into blank-faced industrial parks or cookie-cutter shopping plazas.

While readily accessible, they aren't so numerous or centralized to justify on their own a trek to Reno, but they will provide a diversion for food enthusiasts who happen to be visiting the "the Biggest Little City in the World."

I spent a couple days touring a dozen specialty food and beverage producers in and about Reno. Next month, I'll tell you where to get a memorable cup of coffee, pastry and lunch.

Today I bring you news of where to go for brews and dining.

Buckbean Brewing Co.

Open a little more than a year, Reno's newest microbrewery is tucked into a small and utilitarian corner of an industrial complex in the city's southeastern reaches.

Buckbean Brewing, unlike rivals that double as restaurants, is first and only a microbrewery.

The bowl of pretzels on the tasting counter is the extent of the food, unless you bring your own, which some groups do, taking their seats at tables arranged snugly between the counter up front and brewing tanks in back.

Something more notable than the lack of food distinguishes Buckbean. It's one of the few microbreweries in the country to package its most popular beers in cans.

Cans more effectively protect beer from the potentially harmful effects of light and air than do bottles, says Buckbean brewmaster Daniel Kahn.

They require 70 percent less cardboard when packaged for shipping, he continues, and they're lighter than glass and therefore less costly to truck. In addition, they can be taken places – swimming pool, golf course, river raft – where a broken bottle could be both nuisance and danger.

Besides, microbrews in cans are so rare they can't help but stand out in a display case.

The two beers that Kahn and business partner Douglas Booth are marketing in cans are their bright and light flagship Original Orange Blossom Ale, whose floral aromatics suggest a citrus orchard at peak springtime bloom, and their rich but buoyant Black Noddy Lager.

The Orange Blossom, which Kahn created for the Orange Blossom Festival in Riverside when he was with Riverside Brewing Co. in the 1990s, is Buckbean's most popular beer, accounting for about 60 percent of sales.

Despite its semi-remote setting, and aside from Kahn's and Booth's affinity for beer in cans, Buckbean draws a steady clientele that returns often for refills of half-gallon glass jugs called "growlers."

Buckbean is named for a Sierra herb that occasionally has been used by brewers when they found themselves short of hops, says Booth, a wildlife biologist and avid bird watcher, which explains not only the name for the brewery but the name of the lager Black Noddy, after a seabird common to Hawaii.

Kahn and Booth haven't yet made a beer with buckbean, and may never, noting that the plant is more bitter than hoppy. But they liked the sound of the name and its natural tie to the Reno area (it flourishes in Tahoe Meadows) and figured it would be catchy and memorable in the marketplace.

Buckbean beers are increasingly available in the Sacramento area. Local outlets include Powell's Steamer Co. and Pub in Placerville, Nugget Markets in Roseville and Sacramento, Ikedas California Country Market at Auburn, Taylor's Market in Sacramento and Eco Liquor and Food in Rancho Cordova.

Buckbean Brewing Co., 1155 South Rock Blvd. (at South McCarran Boulevard), is open 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and Saturdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Fridays.

Silver Peak Restaurant & Brewery

On a knoll at the southern edges of downtown Reno, Silver Peak Restaurant & Brewery occupies a rustic and rambling complex that resembles nothing so much as one of Nevada's historic silver works.

Here, brewmasters Trent Schmidt and Brandon Wright chase whatever promising vein catches their fancy, from traditionally fermented lagers to such modern inventions as a wheat beer infused with the delicate scent and flavor of lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves.

Each year, they'll brew 30 to 35 beers, with around a dozen available at any one time. Lately, the lineup has included the complex and gripping Battle Born Lager, the hoppy yet creamy Silver Peak India Pale Ale and the thick and smoky Vintner's Chocolate Stout, a beer infused with cocoa nibs and aged in French oak barrels that in an earlier life held cabernet sauvignon at a Napa Valley winery.

The stout, in fact, was a surprisingly compatible companion with Silver Peak's "squash me pizza" – grilled zucchini, yellow and chayote squashes with pesto and Fontina on a crust dark and chewy with barley.

Schmidt, who with business partner David Silverman opened Silver Peak in early 1999, boasts that the business isn't so much brewpub as "a restaurant that crafts beer."

In addition to pizzas, chef Silverman's menu includes a roasted leg-of-lamb sandwich, barley-crusted chicken breast, crawfish jambalaya, Szechuan shrimp salad, grilled diver scallops and tandoori lamb chops.

Silverman and Schmidt grew up in Reno, met when they were 16-year-old high school students, and have been buddies ever since. Schmidt went on to earn a degree in business management at the University of Nevada, Reno, followed by brewing studies at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. Silverman, meanwhile, went off to the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park in New York's Hudson Valley.

In 1991, while both were working in the posh French restaurant Adele's in downtown Reno, they began to sketch out their plans to collaborate on an upscale Reno restaurant and brewery that would appeal largely to locals.

None of Silver Peak's beers is distributed beyond the restaurants.

Silver Peak Restaurant & Brewery, 124 Wonder St., is open 11 a.m. to midnight daily; Silver Peak Grill & Taproom on the River, 135 N. Sierra St. (at First Street), is open 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. daily.

Great Basin Brewing Co.

On any given day, 10 to 14 beers will be on tap at Great Basin Brewing Co., founded in 1993 as Nevada's first modern brewery.

The lineup lately, for example, has included the fruity and perky Bitchin' Berry, made with fresh raspberries; the rich Midnight Special Schwarzbier, a dark German interpretation of an English porter; and the nutty, caramelly and finely structured Truckee River Red, an unfiltered ale made with organically grown barley and hops; and Cerveza Chilibeso, a pilsner infused with the tingle of jalapeño chili peppers.

Great Basin's flagship beer is the floral and refreshing Ichthyosaur India Pale Ale – "Icky" for short – named for Nevada's official state fossil.

Tom Young, a mining engineer, and Eric McClary, a partner in a wine-and-cheese shop, were avid home brewers when they put together Great Basin. At that time, breweries in Nevada could be established only in redevelopment districts, Young recalls.

Great Basin's beers developed an enthusiastic following early on, with the restaurant side of the business taking longer to be recognized, says Young.

During a recent Friday lunch hour, however, the place was fairly busy with a clientele drawn by such dishes as a beer-braised prime-rib sandwich, Sonoran-style fish tacos, shepherd's pie, and assorted sausages.

Great Basin Brewing Co., 846 Victorian Ave., Sparks, opens daily at 11 a.m., serving lunch to 5 p.m., dinner 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 5 p.m.-10 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with the bar continuing to serve beer as long as the crowd demands.

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