The taps have gone dry at the Broken Top Club, at least through the weekend.

Local Oregon Liquor Control Commission inspector Larry Brown handed the club’s managers a letter Thursday, ordering them to cease all alcohol service at the club until its new owners can get themselves properly relicensed.

The move was the latest fallout from the January sale of the club to new owners, who have proposed major and controversial developments that have roiled the golf club’s members and their neighbors in the Broken Top subdivision.

Angus Cameron, the San Francisco-based real estate capital manager who helped engineer the club’s sale and is coordinating its current management, said he expects the setback to be temporary, but it won’t be sorted out until Monday at the earliest.

”We will comply exactly to the requirements of the OLCC and, yes, I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t be in receipt of a liquor license again in due order,” Cameron said Friday. ”It’s an inconvenience to the members.”

Dinner and bar sales apparently continued for the private club’s members, but only with juice, soft drinks and water to wash things down.

Broken Top Club advisory board member Mona Divine said she got the news from a club employee after she finished her round of golf Thursday.

”They did say there will be a happy hour tomorrow night (Friday),” Divine wrote in a widely distributed e-mail. ”We’ll just have to be ‘naturally happy.’”

Board member Mel Stoltz was unimpressed.

”It’s just one black eye after another,” Stoltz said. ”It’s just amazing.”

The club’s new owners, who have been identified by Cameron so far only as a Seattle-based family trust, got off to a rocky start in January when their local agents unveiled tentative plans to build a new retail and hotel complex over the club’s centerpiece lake.

The Broken Top Homeowners Association, which represents homeowners in the neighborhoods that line the club’s signature golf course, hired a law firm to determine what it can do to defend the gated community’s zealously guarded ”residential only” status.

And club members who bought ”equity memberships” from the club’s former owners in hopes of buying it outright someday have hired lawyers of their own to clarify their ownership rights.

Meanwhile, the new owners have hired Troon Golf, an internationally known golf course management company, to run the course, its restaurant and its clubhouse, while Cameron looks for a developer to take charge of any future building plans. But the owners have guarded their own identities, letting Cameron stand as their sole public face.

Some unsettled neighbors and club members have hoped to pierce the owner’s privacy veil through the club’s liquor license, since state law requires the owners of liquor licenses, or the owners of the companies that own the licenses, to identify themselves for routine background checks.

But it remains to be seen whether the OLCC’s inquiries will move beyond the owners’ hired managers.

The liquor shutdown occurred after the owners’ representatives informed the Liquor Control Commission that they had transferred control of the club’s food and beverage functions from Broken Top Partners LLC, the entity that owns the entire club and its liquor license, to a separate entity called Broken Top Management LLC, commission spokesman Ken Palke said.

Application for a temporary license

The shift meant that a new, unlicensed entity was selling alcohol at the club, Palke said, so Brown shut it down until the new entity gets a license of its own.

License applicants are commonly granted a 90-day temporary license while their application is processed, Palke said. Broken Top Management has filed for a license of its own, but Brown demanded more information from the club’s management group before the commission will grant one.

Among the demands: that Troon Golf, the company the new owners have hired to manage the golf course and clubhouse, be listed as an applicant because Troon employees are actually in charge of serving the club’s alcohol. And that Troon and Broken Top Management’s ”principal or members” file individual history forms for routine background checks.

Cameron, who works for the Chicago-based capital group Cohen Financial, is currently the only member of either Broken Top Partners or Broken Top Management whose name is listed on state forms.

If a limited liability company applies for a liquor license, the state licensing codes still require any members who own 10 percent or more of it to provide personal histories with their applications. The same requirement can extend to a parent company, the codes say, if the company filing the application ”was created in whole or in part to apply for the license.”

Cameron said it’s routine in the restaurant industry for the owner of a club or resort to create a separate entity to control its food and beverage service, including the holding of its liquor license. He said he is currently the sole member of Broken Top Management LLC.

”If we need other people to become members, we will take that under advisement,” Cameron said.

Stoltz, meanwhile, said he believes the club’s owners will move to clear up the license snafu as quickly as they can.

”I suspect they’ll step up,” Stoltz said. ”Otherwise they’ll have a kind of mutiny on their hands, I suspect. People just aren’t going to go there. I mean, some will, but they are going to have a substantial decrease in volume.”