Duke Snyder rings up a customer in the new liquor section inside Newport Avenue Market on Wednesday in Bend. (Joe Kline/Bulletin photo)

Newport Avenue Market in Bend opened its new liquor section, The Spirit Shop, on Wednesday just ahead of the coming demand for holiday cheer.

The store at 7 a.m. debuted a 700-square-foot area devoted to sales of distilled spirits, for which the store received a contract from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission in October. Newport Avenue Market is the first to open of five new liquor stores planned in Central Oregon, three in Bend alone.

“The first customers were super excited,” said market CEO Laura G.R. Johnson on Wednesday, “and we were smiling ear to ear.”

Another contract went to Ferguson’s Market, 8150 N. U.S. Highway 97, Terrebonne, which plans to open its new liquor section Friday in a space even bigger than Newport Market’s, said Ferguson’s’ co-owner Tanya Lunsford.

“Our inventory is here; it’s a lot of stuff,” she said Wednesday. “If you want it, we probably have it.”

Lunsford said Ferguson’s has about 500 cases of liquor to start with; Johnson said Newport Avenue Market is stocked with 530 individual items, from bourbon to vodka.

“This initial order was established through our (OLCC) district manager, and now it’s our job to curate that selection based on what our customers want to buy,” Johnson said. “We’ve already developed a full page of customers’ requests.”

Newport Avenue Market created a “store within a store” with its own entrance and cash register tied to the OLCC. The commission prefers that new liquor retailers, such as grocery stores, not put distilled spirits “in line with diapers and bread,” said OLCC spokeswoman Christie Scott. While the OLCC, in awarding contracts, favors applicants who propose secure locations inside their stores, that’s not a regulatory requirement, she said.

The OLCC is the main supplier of distilled spirits in Oregon. From its one warehouse in Milwaukie, it supplies contract liquor stores around the state. The OLCC collects revenue by marking up each bottle of liquor. Contract store owners collect an 8.9 percent sales commission. Of the share collected by the OLCC, it keeps 4 percent to fund its operation and returns 37 percent to cities and counties. Bend in the 2015-2017 biennium received $2.4 million from liquor sales; Deschutes County received $1.8 million, and Redmond, $807,000.

The remaining two new liquor contract holders in Bend are not ready for business. Mark Merrick, the owner of East Bend Liquor on N. U.S. Highway 20, received a contract for a new liquor store at 740 NE Third St. Merrick said he’s still negotiating a lease for the empty space at the corner of the commercial complex anchored by Safeway between NE Franklin and NE Hawthorne avenues. Merrick has other locations in mind for the store if lease negotiations fail, he said Wednesday.

The third, Trails End Liquor, is still under construction at the Robal Road site of a commercial plaza at 63450 N. U.S. Highway 97, also home to future Chick-fil-A and Cracker Barrel restaurants.

Another contract went to Ray’s Food Place in Sisters, where an assistant manager said the store is not ready to open its new liquor section. The district manager did not return a call for comment Wednesday.

The contracts awarded in October were part of the OLCC campaign to increase the number of liquor stores around the state, which began in the Portland metro area in 2015. The commission this year received 31 applications from 14 counties in Eastern and Central Oregon, from which it chose seven, including five in Deschutes County.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com