Upright Brewing

Part of the reason I decided to visit Oregon for my beer trip was the wonderful beer writings of Jeff Alworth. I've mentioned in a few of my last couple posts that I visited places based on the recommendation of another beer blogger. Well, he is that blogger. His blog, Beervana, is my personal favorite and I read it on a regular basis.

On his blog, Jeff had created a series of 4 "craft beer crawls" in Portland. They each contained no more than 4 places to visit, so as to keep things reasonable. After checking those out, I also emailed Jeff. He was kind enough to help me as I played with other ideas for exploring Oregon's beer scene. Thanks Jeff.

Yesterday, we started with Jeff's crawl titled "The Northern Expedition". This took us to Upright, Widmer Gasthaus, Hopworks, and Lompoc Sidebar.

I was really looking forward to visiting Upright brewing, as their house yeast is a saison strain. Hidden in the basement of a multiple-story business building, they use open fermentors and do a lot of barrel aging.

Yep, this seemed like my kind of place. I was extremely excited to taste these brews.

They had 9 brews on tap and, as usual, we went with the sampler.

All the beers were great and I could have stayed their all day drinking more tasty goodness. My personal favorite was the De La Seven. They took their Seven (which is a more traditional saison), added Brettanomyces, aged it in wine and gin barrels, and blended it to taste. They did a great job, at least in my opinion. It was tasty, tasty stuff.