Making wine, I mean beer

There's a new beer in the works here at the brewery that I'm really excited about. It started after meeting a winemaker here named John House. Amongst the subjects we chatted about was the Cantillon Vigneronne, a favorite beer of mine that uses muscat grapes, a favorite of John. A month or two later he tells me that he's getting some muscat from Eola Springs Vineyard and can get at least 400 pounds extra if I was interested. Supposedly the vines are especially well cared for and produce exceptional fruit. Naturally I was very interested. After thinking through some different ideas I decided the route for this project would be similar to Fantasia, the beer we started producing annually with peaches from Baird Family Orchards incorporating barrel fermentation on top of the fruit. To do this practically in our ten barrel kettle the minimum batch size would require eight oak casks and twice the amount of grapes John offered, so I asked him if 800 pounds was available. He said he'd see what he could do which was good enough for me so I started prepping some lactic acid bacteria, brettanomyces yeast, and figuring out what casks to use. The tricky thing was that during this time of the year winemakers don't have much in the way of extra barrels to spare, besides the fact that they're hard to get a hold of during harvest! Realizing that we were going to have to drain some of our barrels, I tasted some aging beers that have been sitting to see what was ready to package. Several different ones made their way into kegs and bottles (for the brewery Sole Composition Series) - two different versions of barrel aged Seven, a single cask barrel aged Four, and a Belgian stout named O.P. for jazz great Oscar Peterson. All the casks were in excellent form when it came time to pickup the grapes and brew the beer. Last Monday I drove to August Cellars where the fruit was being held and loaded up the car. The plan was to destem the grapes that afternoon and put them in the casks overnight so they could warm up, then add the pitched yeasts and bacteria in the morning and top off with the wort in the afternoon. In typical fashion I underestimated how long it would take Bobby and I to destem the fruit and we ended up leaving the brewery at midnight even with the help of a few friends, including John who sourced the fruit for us. It was certainly a lot of work, but these grapes were so delicious and beautiful that it ended up being a pleasure the entire time. Bobby and I also learned tons of interesting information about grape growing and wine processing from talking to John as we had plenty of time to chat!

In the morning with everything prepped and ready to go the brewday was smooth and uneventful. Our recipe was simple like the Fantasia, using just a bit of light caramel malt to give the beer something to balance the intensity of the fruit. With the muscat now at room temp the yeast and bacteria I added first thing immediately went to work, and when Gerritt topped the barrels off with wort hours later we couldn't have asked for a healthier stage for the fermentation, which is just now subsiding from its vigorous phase. Next week the barrels will be topped off and bunged for the long term. We're not only excited to see how the muscat flavor comes across in the beer, but also what the native yeasts on the grapes contributes to the aroma and flavor profile. The only drag is that it will be maturing for over a year in the casks and then undergo a lengthy bottle conditioning, so we've got quite some time before enjoying it in finished form. Stay tuned.

New beers

Today we kegged an American-style IPA. For real. 

I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "I love the fact that Upright doesn't make a bunch of IPA's and other over-hopped beers", or something to that effect. The truth is that the brewers here love hoppy beers, and half the time we're out at the bar you're likely to catch us drinking a pint of Pale Strider or Hop Lava. So after more than three years and hundreds of brews, we decided it was finally time to have some fun and make a good old IPA. No twists, no odd processing or ingredients, just a grip of pale malt, pinch of vienna and special roast and plenty of nugget, columbus and santiam hops. We snagged a pitch of yeast from a brewery down the street and let it rip in our conical fermenter. I'm drinking my first glass of it as I write this. Smells and tastes like it should, with an extra long and bitter finish. We don't normally use such resiny hop varieties and it's great to sense the extra oils as part of the mouthfeel. If you're looking for the beer, it goes under the name Supercool, taken from one of our favorite comedy sketches by the Upright Citizens Brigade. 7.3% and 65 IBU's.

Besides the Supercool IPA we've got another one-off draft beer in the works - an amber Bavarian-style hefeweizen. Last year for the Oregon Brewers Festival we produced an openly fermented extra pale version that reminded us how delicious hefe beers are, and lately I've been quaffing my fair share of the excellent Occidental Hefeweizen. After getting the bug to do one here again, I decided to go the amber route, similar to Schneider Weisse, just to mix it up some. That should get brewed next week and be out and about only a few weeks later as they tend to ferment and condition quickly. By then the weather should be more appropriate, right?

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the brewery just had its website redesigned by former tasting room darling Annalou Vincent. It's 95% done at this point, with some minor changes to the formatting and photos likely to happen over the next few weeks. I hope it will be easier to navigate and find information (besides being easier for me to update) and simply look better too. What do you think? Annalou, who moved back to her hometown of Bellingham Washington just opened a fantastic new joint named cheese meat(s) beer with her talented partner Travis Surmi. If you find yourself up their way, stop by!

Fantasia & Blend Love

Between now Upright's third anniversary in late March, two new sour fruit beers will be released. The first, titled Fantasia, after the musical term (not the movie, even though I enjoy it somewhat regularly), is one I'm really excited about. The project started early in the summer of 2010 after meeting Trevor Baird whose family operates an orchard that produces stunning fruit, most notably peaches. It was a tremendously friendly Trevor who planted the idea in my head to make a peach beer, and so I set about to brew something totally different from anything I've done before. The process started in July when it was time to begin propagating some lactobacillus and brettanomyces, which don't reproduce all that quickly. I wanted a healthy and respectable pitch to get the flavors I had in mind, and by the time the peaches were ripe and ready, which landed the third week of August, the yeast and bacteria were plenty ready to go. The few weeks leading up to the brewday were also spent procuring some appropriate oak barrels, eight in total sourced from four different wineries here in Oregon. After finally getting the call from Trevor that the peaches would be ready on the 23rd, everything was in order and Gerritt fired up the brewhouse while myself and a few very hardworking friends unloaded 800 pounds of fruit and spent most of the day cutting them up and stuffing them into the barrels.










It took quite a while, and the wort enjoyed an extra long boil in the meantime much like traditional lambic worts. The recipe was pretty simple, all barley (unlike the wheaten lambic style), but employing warm aged hops from the 2008 harvest. By the end of the boil, all eight barrels were full of the fruit plus a mixture of saison yeast and the aforementioned lactobacillus and brettanomyces. The wort was then cooled and pumped directly into the barrels, all of them getting filled to roughly 2/3 or 3/4 capacity to allow room for the fermentation (one that was filled a little much clogged the breathable bung with peach flesh and blew it out like a shotgun during a bottling run, which created one of the most incredible messes in Upright history), which after a couple weeks was on it's tail end and the barrels were topped off with one of two beers; the Four and the Tokay d' Portland, a small batch barrel aged experiment of sorts. At that point, the Fantasia was ready for extended maturation in the casks, so it was hard bunged and set aside until the following August when seven of the eight barrels were blended and bottled shortly thereafter. Those bottles have been conditioning in the back of the brewery since, and as soon as we get it labeled later this month they'll finally be at the end of their journey and ready to enjoy or to cellar for even more time as I expect this beer to continue developing for two years. After that the fruit character will likely dull a bit even though the beer will still be tasty.

The Fantasia is very lambic-esque, despite the fact that it wasn't brewed strictly to style. I suspect the aromatic similarity is due to the primary fermentation being carried out not only with the three yeasts and bacteria intentionally pitched but also with who knows what the fruit had on it. Fresh fruit is notorious for carrying all sorts of "wild" yeasts, and the Fantasia certainly has a pleasant complexity thanks to that. The Four Play on the other hand, a brew that has been released twice by Upright now, has used a puree from Oregon Fruit Products. I use their fruit often for all sorts of barrel aged beers. They're packaged aseptically, so there's never any surprises; the flavor is always consistent and excellent, and they're pureed so no hours and hours of destemming and cutting. I know, sucking the romance right out of it, but next time I get 800 pounds of peaches or 400 pounds of cherries, etc., I'll give you a call and you can see exactly how romantic it is after half the day has passed.

The Four Play has been a bit of a cult beer for us. It's always generated a fair deal of hype (much to my dismay) and sells out pretty quickly. Basically a barrel aged sour cherry version of the Four, it has what I think is a perfect balance of funk and fruit. This separates it greatly from the Fantasia or even more so from red fruit lambic-style beers which can be so forward that the grain-based beer gets completely buried. Well, I'm stoked to say that Upright is taking its most popular beer and retiring it. The Four Play, whose release coincides with the brewery anniversary, is being turned into a similar brew named after a colleague and friend, Ben Love of the upcoming Gigantic Brewing Company. The new beer, titled Blend Love, is essentially the Four Play but with barrel aged Six with raspberries mixed in. The inaugural release, blended earlier today, used 25% of the Six. It's an evolution of the Four Play, giving it added layers - more malt, more alcohol, deeper color, and more fruit (but still in check with the malt profile). I'm into it, and hope that you will be too! For those that loved the Four Play, don't be dismayed as the brewery is securing more space for barrel aging and is strongly considering producing a couple batches of Four Play annually to keep on tap year round at the tasting room, besides making several more new annual releases, but of course that's ripe for a future blog posting.

Fatali Four

The Fatali Four is going out the door today. Roughly half the batch is headed to our distributors in BC and here in Portland, while the remainder will trickle out the tasting room over several weeks, or as is happening right now, will find its way in a glass on my desk. This second bottling of the Fatali only varies from the previous by the addition of one first use old tom gin barrel. The rest is aged in three former pinot noir barrels that have been filled with beer at least twice, with two of those incorporating some mixture of brettanomyces and/or lactobacillus. The interesting thing is that the gin barrel portion brings a whole new dimension to the beer, even while representing a mere 25% of the blend. The nose, which was dominated by tropical notes last year, is full of bright lime and other citrus elements; aromas I personally am very fond of. Once on the tongue, the flavors of the 2010 vintage return with a bit less heat, but the gin character comes through here too in a way that people familiar with Ransom's wonderful spirit will recognize. Add in bits of brett and oak character along with a pinch of sulfur and you've got a 4.5% beer with a whole lot going on. I'm curious to hear what others think about the change this year, so please comment as I practically never fix recipes and am always open to more changes in the future.

Also worth noting is that Jason and Jay from Burnside dropped by during the blending and we decided to produce a couple Sweet Heat/Fatali kegs. I'm planning on bringing one of only two Fatali kegs over to their place tomorrow and we should have the blended kegs ready soon. Expect to see one on tap at the Grain and Gristle and the other at Burnside in the near future!

Big thanks to Snob Ritch for growing enough chiles in such an adverse year! Dr. Greenthumb, this brew wouldn't exist without you!