Upright Brewing

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.



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I'm happy to announce that the brewery's little tasting room is beginning to settle in. We've setup an extra three taps for a total of nine, hung more local art and are getting ready to open Fridays by the end of the month. John Foyston recently gave us a nice writeup in Mix which has already begun to attract some new visitors to the cast of regulars and we're hoping to bring even more people this Saturday for the citywide brewery event Zwickelmania.


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I'm often asked for food suggestions to accompany our beers, the last request being amusing in that it was texted to me while I was in front of a fish counter pondering the exact question myself. I was in the mood for some sort of seafood and excited to see fresh mackerel in the case, a fish that is unfortunately somewhat rare to find in such beautiful whole form. I asked the man behind the counter to bag one up for me and my close friend Christian who also doubles as Upright's most important assistant and general helper (she named the Turkey on Rye for instance).

After picking up a few more things we headed home and to the kitchen to prepare dinner. Mackerel is a very flavorful fish and I didn't want to obscure its own character so I filleted it and gave it a simple coating of salt, nothing else. That went into a hot oven to roast until just done, although like salmon it's a fish that is easy to cook and forgiving of a little extended cooking time. Alongside the fish we served up some bacon-fat sauteed dandelion greens and jasmine rice seasoned with cumin and fresh thyme.

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Upright had a great bottle release event Sunday and I would like to thank several people. First off, the patient people who showed up to find an unusually long line and the quickly dwindling food and snack table. We certainly didn't expect the crowd that arrived and appreciate the great attitude that most everyone displayed. I'd also like to thank the crew at Ned Ludd for expertly smoking the dry-rubbed pork loin and my friends who stepped in to hand-wash glasses after I pulled a smooth one last week and broke the dishwasher (which just got fixed yesterday!).

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I had the surprise and pleasure recently of checking Jeff Alworth's Beervana Blog to find that he picked the Upright Four for his Satori Award. I've got to say that it was all the more satisfying as when I pulled the blog up on the brewery computer I had in my hand a glass of the Four (although that's not all too unusual). I stopped what I was doing to reflect a bit on Jeff's eloquent words which really capture what that beer means to me:

...its lineage is long. I suspect that a time-traveler could take this beer to Southern Belgium in the 1880s and, with its wheat and lactic zing, it would be recognizable to the locals who loved tart, rustic beers.

Thanks for the award Jeff, it really means a lot to me. I'll keep brewing it up thanks to the support you and others have given us.

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