Four new beers!

In what may be typical fashion, there's plenty of different and unusual beers in the works at Upright. Because of increased flexibility thanks to a few extra tanks installed early in the year, we've been able to work in more one-off brews as well as expand the number of batches maturing in oak barrels. For quick updates on new draft-only beers, I added a section to the website here. There are two coming up very soon in particular, a smoked helles and a low gravity saison. Both should be ready to keg and within the next couple weeks.

The helles uses the same yeast as the Engelberg Pilsener, but the similarity basically ends there as it's about as smokey as the pils is hoppy. The brewery's smoker can only accommodate 40 or so pounds at a time, so it took a pretty solid chunk of the day to do the 160 pounds that went into the beer. The smoking process was however a wonderful time that was shared with Jonathon Carmean from Saraveza and Neil Yandow from the Belmont Station. As I write this the beer is over one month in and lagering away behind me. Samples from the tank have shown an unsurprisingly smokey nose but somewhat soft flavors which should make for a nice beer in the end. It fermented a bit more dry than expected but I expect it to have enough malt character to balance the maple and ash wood smoke out.

The saison, dubbed "Todo Modo" after one of Charles Mingus' compositions from Cumbia and Jazz Fusion, is a true session beer at 3.8% abv. It's somewhat heavily hopped using a couple varieties for aroma and flavor that we don't normally employ - east kent golding and santiam, the latter providing an attractive nose of white pepper. Todo Modo is fermented with the classic Saison Dupont yeast, so the overall fermentation profile is a significant departure from beers using the brewery's somewhat new house yeast strain. Besides the main portion which will be kegged soon, one oak barrel was also filled and there is a loose plan to blend it down the road with an oak barrel of the Monk and Mingus made in the spring for the Cheers to Belgian Beers festival.

There are a couple exciting bottled releases coming up halfway soon as well. Wednesday I'll be blending four oak barrels worth of Late Harvest, Upright's annual spiced brown ale. The 2011 recipe was brewed in November with coriander, bitter orange peel, and long pepper, and has been maturing in two wine barrels, one Old Tom Gin barrel and one Whippersnapper Whiskey barrel. While the recipe changes every year, certain aspects are carried over like layered aromatics and mid-level acidity. The Late Harvest has always been one of my favorite beers to sip on slowly or try pairing with food as it's more complex and challenging than just about anything else coming from the brewery. As the schedule stands, expect a release toward the end of September.

For the sour beer fans out there we've got a special beer nearing the end of its processing journey. In fact, it's all bottled up and simply waiting for labels while it continues to condition in the back of the brewery. The beer is named "Fantasia" after the musical term it evokes. It began 364 days ago when with the help of several friends, 800 pounds of fresh peaches from Baird Family Orchards were stuffed into eight oak barrels while the brew was underway. A simple grist of organic pale malt with a pinch of light caramel and rolled barley was mashed and ran off into the kettle as usual before the beer took it's first odd turn by using aged hops and a long boil of 3.5 hours. Instead of fermenting the beer in stainless steel tanks, it was pumped directly to the peach filled barrels with a mix of saison yeast, brettanomyces, and lactobacillus. Roughly two weeks later, after the bulk of the malt and fruit sugars were used up by the organisms, the barrels were topped off with a mix of freshly brewed Four or other barrel aged beer and bunged up until a few weeks ago when they were blended and then bottled. I would describe the profile as somewhat similar to a straight lambic, with a peach nose like perfume up against the earthy and funky brettanomyces and wild yeast aromas. 100 pounds of peaches per barrel is quite a bit, and the high level of skin contributed lots of tannin that give the beer a great edge. By the time labels are ready and the Fantasia is released this fall, the conditioning should be just right, or in the beginning of what is surely a very long sweet spot.

On a different note altogether, I'd like to express my own excitement in having another professional brewer in the family! One of my many cousins, Jose Guzzi, has just started a nano brewery in Tucuman, a province in northern Argentina. It's about the opposite of the beer paradise that Portland has become over the years, but he's sure to help grow the "cerveza artisanal" movement of the country. If you ever happen to be down there you can find his beers by contacting him here.