Upright Brewing – New Beers On The Way

We spoke with our friends at Upright Brewing in Portland, OR, to find out what’s in the pipeline of new beers.

Here are some details on 5 news beers from Upright, including an unnamed beer paying homage to The Clash. Cheers, TFP

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.