Coming soon, or not so soon

People have been asking lately what's in the works as far as new beers go so here's a quick rundown of some exciting projects both big and small:


Fresh Hop - with harvest starting we expect to be brewing our second fresh hop beer in a couple weeks or so. While we haven't decided on a variety or yeast yet (house saison or good old American ale?) we do have a name: Tyler the Elder, after Saraveza's excellent bartender. This batch will be draft only. For those who don't feel like waiting we will have a small (5 gallon) keg of the Five on tap this Friday the 20th packed with fresh cascades clipped from my backyard this morning. The hot weekend seemed to help them out and they were smelling great.


Strong Lager - the brewery's next bottle release set for late September is a strong lager that we've left nameless and without a specific style declaration because it falls in between several. Ezra made a punk rock themed label that is a big departure from the heavily colored ones we've put out so far. It's extra pale and plenty hoppy while doing a good job of highlighting the ingredients.


Redwood Lager - currently fermenting is a dark lager we brewed with house-smoked malt. The wood was actually leftover scraps from our tasting trays and one of our tables - very old redwood that was once a large water storage vessel at a lumber mill in Albany Oregon. With the help of a couple friends we smoked 150 pounds of the grist in our custom built smoker and worked it into a recipe that will yield a full-bodied dark lager, not too unlike the color of the wood. This one is getting bottled just in time for fall and winter campers. Note to other local craft brewers: the smoker works great and handles about 40 pounds in a shot (we smoked each load for about 45 minutes). If anyone wants to borrow it just let us know, we'd love to see more smoked beers using different types of wood!


Fatali Four - last year we added some fatali peppers to an oak barrel of Four, lending it a fruity flavor and some heat as well. We enjoyed that batch quite a bit and plan to do a blend of three barrels this go round, all of which were brewed at different times ranging from April 2009 to just a month ago. The barrels also have different yeasts and bacteria in them as well which should make for a pretty complex profile. This brew may get kegged or bottled, not quite sure yet although we're leaning toward bottling.

Fresh Peach - after some difficulty in coordinating with a local peach grower (fruit harvests aren't as predictable as I thought) we're finally set to receive somewhere between 800-1000 pounds of peaches Monday morning that we'll be putting into a special recipe that incorporates barrel fermentation with brettanomyces claussenii and lactobacillus. It's a beer that won't be ready for quite some time but something to look forward to as the peaches we've been getting already from Baird Family Orchards have been amazing, not only in flavor and juiciness but especially in the aroma which I hope will integrate well into the beer.

Month of the Barrels

Well the brewery's Month of the Barrels has kicked off to a great start. For those of you who haven't heard we are tapping a different single-barrel keg for four Fridays in a row. Here is a rundown of the beers:

July 2nd - a keg of Lambicus Six was tapped (and drained by the end of the weekend). It was simply a batch of our dark rye beer aged with brettanomyces for over a year in what was a Pinot Noir barrel. We were happy with the complexity it gained over that time which yielded a Flanders-esque brew. If you missed out expect it to be pouring at Bailey's Taproom on the 31st as part of their third anniversary barrel aged beer fest.

July 9th - Rose City Seven, our entry to the organic fest this year. It spent several months in a barrel that housed our Billy the Mountain Old Ale which uses a different strain of brettanomyces called claussenii, giving the beer a gentle acidity and some earthy notes to contrast the big floral component coming from hibiscus, rose hips and rose petals, all of which were added directly to the aging beer.

July 16th - Easily the beer I'm most excited about, this one is from a very nice Hungarian oak ex-Pinot Noir barrel that matured a batch of Four with homegrown yarrow and rose flowers infused into it. The finished beer is a throwback to our Flora Rustica but with a bit more body and wheat character. The nose and flavors are fresh and balanced. Between the beer's pleasant acidity and sessionable 4.5% abv I hope that we can turn some people onto what a not so extreme beer can achieve.

July 23rd - Another exciting beer this weekend, our Single Cask Anniversary ale. The base beer was a simple apricot farmhouse brew that ended up in an Old Tom gin barrel from Oregon's own Ransom distillery. This is one that is probably better experienced rather than described as there is quite a bit going aromatically and in the mouth as well. Of important note is that the Old Tom gin is not dominated by juniper like one might expect but rather has a more diverse botanical character that certainly shows up in the beer.

As we drained these barrels we've been collecting more to produce several casks worth of fruit beers as soon as fresh apricots and nectarines are available. These will be fermented directly in the barrels with a mixture of our house yeast, brettanomyces and lactobacillus. They likely won't be kegged or bottled anytime soon but will certainly provide for some interesting beer down the road.

French and Belgian inspired, and German

So after leaving the brewery blog hanging for quite some time there's a good deal of beery news to report:

We just released a draft-only batch called Engelberg Pilsener, named after Mt.Angel. It's German-style: light, dry and full of hoppy flavor. We made a simple single malt (Canadian pilsener malt) and single hop (Mt. Angel-grown tettnanger) recipe using a Munich lager yeast. The finished beer came out remarkably dry so for the second batch set to be released around the third week of July we coaxed just a bit more mouthfeel and residual sugar out of it and used a different hop variety, hallertauer mittlefruh. The beer is currently on tap in the tasting room and at a handful of bars around town. When the second batch is ready both will be on hand to taste side-by-side.

For summer's two best local beer festivals we're bringing beers that incorporate unusual ingredients. The first to look forward to is the Organic fest at Overlook Park where one of Upright's two beers will be a special single barrel-aged cask of the Seven with hibiscus, rose hips and rose petals. The beer is set to be kegged directly from the barrel next week and will yield fewer than 5 kegs worth of beer. So far the flavors have been great with lots of floral character blending with the beer's citric quality and some deep background complexities.

At the Oregon Brewers Festival at the waterfront the Reggae Junkie Gruit will be making it's return after more than a year passed between when we produced the last batch. We liked it a lot the first time and plan on using the same recipe which blends Sichuan peppercorns, lemongrass, hyssop and bitter orange peel in place of the usual hops. It's a quenching and light beer that should be perfect for the event and the heat of late July.
Another exciting beer in the works is simply waiting for a label and should be out by early to mid July - Late Harvest. It's a spiced farmhouse-style dark amber we had planned on releasing as our 2009 fall beer but decided to barrel-age it instead. Four of the barrels had tasmanian peppercorns added to them, an extra aromatic and spicy peppercorn, and were blended and mostly bottled (about 80 cases and 3 kegs) while the fifth non-spiced barrel was kegged on its own and is exclusively on tap at our tasting room and Apex on Division street. The beer was brewed in early August and used grains of paradise and dried pomegranate seeds in the kettle before being fermented and transferred to the former Pinot Noir barrels that housed it completely undisturbed until recently. As soon as the labels are ready we'll set an official release date that will be wrapped around a party at the brewery.

Of somewhat small note are some recipe changes made to a couple of the year-round beers. First off, the the Seven now uses a combination of roughly half pilsener malt and half organic pale malt as it's base along with a small decrease in the munich malt, making the beer a tad lighter both in color and mouthfeel as well. We like the change and hope you do too. The second beer that changed is less likely to have such a difference in flavor or appearance (just brewed it today, we'll see) but good news nonetheless - our main malt supplier (Great Western of Vancouver WA) now has organic wheat malt which has replaced the former conventional product we were using. It looked, smelled and tasted great. That makes the Four and Five both about 95% organic and even more local which is important to us.

Well, that sums up our recent happenings. The next handful of months we plan to be kegging a few of our special one-off barrel-aging projects and make some barrel-fermented farmhouse-style fruit beers (with a grower we met at the PSU market) to get some new things going. Until next time..

Sixth-barrel series

Since we now have an additional three taps at the brewery tasting room we're able to pour more seasonal beers and play around with extra-small batch projects. The first few of these were the Anglo-Saison, the Scottish Six and the De Ill Ganumberg, all of which were variations of year-round beers brewed with different yeasts and made only in five gallon batches.


Side note: De Ill Ganumberg was jokingly named after De Ranke Guldenberg, a wonderful Belgian beer that Gerritt (last name ill) and I (last name Ganum) propagated some yeast from. We got lots of questions about that one.



I'm excited to announce that we plan to produce these interesting mini-batches more often. We think that being able to taste a similar or identical wort fermented with two different yeasts side by side is not only fun but halfway educational too. It's certainly a way to recognize how important of a contributor the yeast is to the flavor profile of most beers. The next one to expect on tap will be a batch of the Six fermented with a newly available strain, Wyeast 3655 Belgian Schelde. It should be on within the next couple weeks. After that we'll have a yet to be fermented variation of the Seven - any ideas or requests for yeast strains? We'll be picking some up by Tuesday the 16th and welcome any suggestions.