On Sunday, May 5, Matt and I had
the chance to spend a couple hours with Caleb Staton of Upland Brewing Company
talking about their amazing sour program and touring the new facility they
recently opened on the west side of Bloomington. Caleb started with Upland in 2004
as a cellarman after completing the 5-month Master Brewer program at UC-Davis.
He worked his way up through the ranks to being the Head Brewer for the 11th
street facility. Upland has since hired a VP of Operations allowing Caleb to continue
work on the sour program and recipe development with the brewers at the Vernal
Pike facility.
HBG: So, we're here at the 11th
Street facility, I assume this is the original brewhouse?
Caleb: This is our original
brewhouse which has undergone some modification. The kettle is maybe five years
old and we turned the original kettle into a hot liquor tank. This was the
brewhouse that got us to 10,000 BBL in a year on this property. Towards the end
of last year, we started to change a few things here, but with Carmel opening,
graduation, and Little 500, some things have been put on hold.
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| Caleb and Jake |
HBG: So what is left to do here?
Caleb: From a brewery standpoint,
we are pretty much done. There is some expansion in the restaurant space and
adding another bar area to support the business they are already doing and try
to cut down on some of the wait times on the weekends.
HBG: How long have you guys had
the Foudre and where did you get it?
Caleb: It is a 75HL French Oak
tank that we got from a California winery that was kicking it out of their
program. Oliver was buying some tanks and they told us that there was an extra
tank they were not going to use. I think all said and done it cost us about
$7000.
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| French Oak Foudre |
HBG: Are you guys using it to
store beer long term or something else?
Caleb: I use it as our primary
fermenter/inoculation tank for our lambic-style beers. We usually fill it
up and then two weeks later use it to inoculate the individual
barrels that we store in the other building until they are ready which is about
eight months. It is currently aging beer that has been in there for two months,
but when we are really turning things, it gets filled and emptied every couple
of weeks. I say that, but we took this facility from 10,000 BBL/year to Lambic
and we will probably only brew 300 BBL or so this year. The real bottleneck is
being able to store the barrels.
HBG: You mentioned Oliver
(Winery). Is that where you are getting most of your barrels?
Caleb: I would say 75% of our
barrels are coming from Oliver and are white oak. The other 25% are bourbon
barrels which were used for what was named "Gilgamesh", but we have
now renamed "Malefactor”.
HBG: So the sour program. was
that really your brain child?
Caleb: Yeah. We had a guy named
John Metzcar who used to work at Upland go over and start to work for Oliver.
We already had great contacts with Oliver, but I e-mailed John and asked if
they ever kicked barrels out of their program. He said, "Yeah, we
do." So, we got four barrels from them originally and I brewed a really
small batch, filled them up, and tucked them in the grain room for about eight
months. We continued to grow the program, but we had to focus on our other
growth as well, so we are just getting to a point where we can really start
focusing again.
HBG: In the local beer community,
people have always known about Upland, but it seems the sour program has helped
put it on the map from a national sense. How has it been to watch that happen?
Caleb: I'd like to say that we always
had a pretty good Midwest spotlight, but this kind of gave us the national and
international glow. It is still such a small portion of what we do, but the
attention we get for it sometimes shocks me. With our first release, it was a
couple of days before we went through the reservation process. The next time it
was about an hour. With the most recent release, it was minutes. We have been
trying to make it the most fair that we can, but it is really hard to please
everyone with the limited quality that we have.
HBG: What do you guys currently
have fermenting in this area?
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| Where the magic happens |
Caleb: In the foudre, we have the
base lambic beer. I just brewed a batch for Malefactor last week, so that will
get divvied out to bourbon barrels in two weeks. In the barrels over there we
have three fruited with strawberries and three fruited with blackberries. We
fruited those about three weeks ago, so they are starting to really get into
the re-fermentation process. The (blackberry) one in the middle is especially
cantankerous. It has popped the air lock a couple times.
**NOTE As we were talking, one of
the strawberry barrels started to pop the air lock. Thankfully Caleb saw it
coming and relieved some of the pressure.
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| Active Airlock |
HBG: We covered that you get most
of your white oak barrels from Oliver, but where do you get most of your
bourbon barrels?
Caleb: Most of the ones we have
are Buffalo Trace. We do have some Wild Turkey and a Pappy Van Winkle. We
brought them in for our core line brewing (Bourbon Barrel Winter Warmer,
Bourbon Barrel Teddy Bear Kisses). After they are used for those beers, we kick
them over here for a secondary use with Malefactor.
HBG: So the primary run is to
pull the bourbon character into the core line beers. Are you using them for
some of the oak character the second time?
Caleb: I am looking for some of
that dark, oak character. The idea is not to have a boozy sour, but to have the
polite amount of bourbon barrel character. The char, even little bits of
bourbon, but in a polite amount. The goal with Malefactor is a strong Flanders-style
Red that has a polite amount of bourbon character.
HBG: When the barrels come over
from the core line beers, what do you do to prep them?
Caleb: We give them two cycle of
two minutes with 180-degree water, then a cold rinse for two minutes, and then
we inspect the barrel with a flashlight to make sure it is free from debris. We
also smell the barrel, use our other senses, to make sure it is free of any
unwanted aromas. If we see some flaws, we will repeat the
cycle. Ultimately, if it can't be cleaned, we kick the barrel out of the
program.
HBG: We really respect what you
guys did by making the decision not to release Persimmon. That had to be tough.
Caleb: That was a tough day to
dump almost two skids of bottles. But, we have been working on the way we bottle
condition the beers since then to try and get it to be a little bit more
reliable for us. I think we had some storage environment issues, related to
bottle conditioning temperature, with that batch so what was a great beer when
we put it into the bottles, it went south from there.
HBG: You mentioned barrels going
all the way back to 2008. Was that when you started the program?
Caleb: We started in 2006 with
the four barrels and I think the program started to really get ramped up in
about 2008. We grew it to 2011 when we had to put the brakes on the program a
little bit because of the amount of barrels that we had room to store.
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| Those are cobwebs between the barrels. A good sign of traditional lambic aging. |
HBG: About how many barrels do
you currently have in the program?
Caleb: We have about 141 barrels
right now off the top of my head. I will say, the barrels we get from Oliver
are mostly red wine, so I am sure the beer picks up some of those
characteristics, but we are really using them to harbor the micro-organisms
that live in the wood.
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| They have multiple stacked rows of barrels like this |
HBG: Do you guys brew a single
base beer? I know New Belgium uses two base beers for their program, so I am
wondering if you use one for all of the beers in yours or if there are
different base beers.
Caleb: We brew the primary batch
and then once it goes into the different barrels, you still have consistency,
but that is really where you get variation. Even down to where the barrels are
in the stack and in the location of the building, there can be a degree or two
of temperature variation.
HBG: So you guys are definitely
using a blending technique.
Caleb: Yeah, once we go and
sample, we really pick what we are looking for. We have some barrels that are
still in there from 2008 we are hoping can turn into something great. We go
through and pick some of the different years. For example, the next round of
strawberry and blackberry is a blend of '08 and '10. So, we fruit an empty
barrel, draw out our blend into the barrels, let the refermentation happen, and
then we will bring all of those back together in our mixing tank for packaging.
HBG: I see some of the barrels
labeled with what looks to be a mix of other years. Am I reading that
correctly?
Caleb: Yes. We have them labeled
as "Geuze" because as we go through we found some really primo stuff.
They are still pretty good despite being moved a number of times. Once of the
big things we have learned is to try and move them as little as possible.
HBG: When you say "refermentation"
are you talking about the fruit sugars?
Caleb: Yes. The funny thing is
that they take a little bit to get going, but when they go they GO. For
example, it took those 2-3 weeks to really get going.
HBG: About how long does that
last?
Caleb: The really depends on the
fruit and the amount of sugar in those fruits. It can even depend on the
season. Some years, you get more sugar based on the season. With persimmon,
young, non-ripe persimmon is really astringent and not a pleasant experience to
eat. So each fruit we work with have their own respective character,
composition and handling aspects.
HBG: Are you guys trying another
persimmon batch then?
Caleb: Oh yeah. We have three
(barrels of) persimmon and three (barrels of) kiwi over here that we brought
back over here to rest. Their activity has pretty much run it's course, so we
let them rest. they will then get crashed in the cooler later this month for
two weeks. Then we rack them into the mixing tank and add our priming sugar.
Then we have a paddle on the mixing tank that tries to make that as homogenous
as possible. Then we raise the whole tank up and put the in-line strainer in
place to catch any particulate. Then it feeds by gravity down to the filler and
over to the corker and cager.
HBG: What kind of output do you
expect in cases from each wooden barrel?
Caleb: Each barrel gets us 20-25
cases.
HBG: It sounds like you expect a
lot of loss into the barrels with those numbers.
Caleb: Oh yeah, the fruit loss is
atrocious. Because we use whole fruit, the amount we lose is pretty massive.
HBG: Whole Fruit? Really?
Caleb: I really am a true
believer in using whole fruit, to the detriment
of profitability sometimes. We have tried Strawberry puree, which is
basically juice, and I don't think it was as awesome.
HBG: Do you leave the skin on the
kiwi and cut it in half or how did you handle it?
Caleb: We de-skin the kiwi.
750lbs of kiwis with three guys hunkered around a table. We cut the top and the
bottom off, put a slit down the middle, and pop the fruit through by pushing
with our thumbs opposite the slit.
HBG: How many days did that take?
Caleb: Two days.
HBG: What about the strawberry
tops?
Caleb: We didn't worry about the
tops. If you have tasted them, they taste like strawberries, so we leave them
on.
HBG: You guys have what looks
like a pallet of Sour Reserve 3 and a pallet of Dantalion back in the corner.
Are those recent bottling runs?
Caleb: Those were both bottled in
March. The Sour Reserve is showing great promise with the bottle conditioning
and we hope that some of the cases will be ready for Sour Fest next weekend
(May 11, 2013), but we are patiently waiting for Dantalion.
HBG: How often do you check
barrels?
Caleb: I really try to taste as
little as possible. When we know we have a deadline coming, we start the
selection process, but we really do not want to disturb the pellicle that forms
on the top of the barrels.
HBG: What lessons learned can you
share?
Caleb: 1) You can spend as much
or as little time on this, but you are only as good as the number of people you
can bring in to help package it all. 2) We store our barrels wet and with a
sanitizing solution to make them easier to rinse. 3) The way we arrange the
barrels now makes sampling much easier and makes the selection process more
efficient.
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| Note the nail. Samples are taken by removing the nail instead of opening the bung |
HBG: What future projects are you
planning at this point? Is a coolship in the works?
Caleb: Right now our focus is
getting everything in place for 2014 releases. We had a large number of barrels
that were filled with water, so we have been focused on getting those filled
and ramping up our fruiting process later in the year. We are hoping that 2014
becomes our first big, solid year of releases. I would love to incorporate a coolship,
but we don't have the space as you can see, nor have we done any homework and
experimentation to indicate we have ambient micro floating around to generate
fantastic results.
UPDATED As of Noon EST on 5/10: Caleb was nice enough to confirm the list that Upland will be pouring this weekend at Sour Fest:
We are pouring:
Sour Reserve Batch 3
Blackberry Lambic (both 2010 and 2012 releases)
Cherry Lambic (2010)
Persimmon Lambic (2010)
Sour Reserve Batch 1
and there will be small windows where Peach, Raspberry and Dantalion will make an appearance
**Editors Note: This post will be updated with Pictures. However the Brew Bokeh team took some great shots in March that can be found here (http://www.brewbokeh.com/place-upland.html)
Regular readers of this site will know that we aren't above tomfoolery. In fact, you might say that on occasion we can be downright buffoonish. I wouldn't have you believe for a second that we aren't aware that our wanton disrespect for common sense is anything more than a ploy to entertain ourselves and those reading.
The bad pairings:
