After 15 Years Upright Brewing still grooving and improvising to their own tempo
Alex Ganum isn’t the type to brag about his accomplishments, but any brewery that makes it fifteen years is worth bragging about. Like the legendary Jazz musician Charlies Mingus, Upright Brewing has been grooving to their own bass line for the entirety of its existence.
Starting as an urban farmhouse-style brewery in 2009 that almost exclusively focused on saisons and open fermentation with just a few variations (more on that later), the Upright of today cranks out IPAs, lagers, barrel-aged beers, British-style cask ales and more while still sticking to the humble vision that Ganum first laid out fifteen years ago. As the 10bbl brewery tucked in the basement of the historic Leftbank Building prepares to celebrate this milestone, it’s worth looking back on how it made it this far, its influence on the Portland beer scene and beyond, and the ups and downs that have come along the way.
This funky little brewery named after the upright bass clef can trace its origins back to national brewpub chain BJ's, and influential Portland bottle shop and beer bar Belmont Station. Ganum worked at both of these places while other future Upright staff, including brewers Gerritt Ill and Neil Yandow, also worked together at Belmont. After moving to Portland from Michigan in the early 2000s, Ganum landed a job at the shop and his love affair with the beers he would later champion was born.
“Working [at Belmont,] you sort of drink everything. I just loved the Belgian beers and started home brewing and just fell in love with the style,” reflects Ganum.
Ganum had previously held an internship at revered Belgian-leaning New York brewery Ommegang before making his way back to the Northwest for his first official commercial brewing gig. The combination of these milestones, as well as his time at Belmont, fully piqued his interest and he would soon get into his own brewing experimentation.
“There weren’t many Belgian-esque beers being produced [at the time]. Breweries might do a witbier here and there, but the scene was a lot different then. When I started at BJ’s the head brewer Dan had an affinity for Belgian beers and would do some neat shit. Every year he would host a tasting of classic Belgian Christmas ales. That was a fun event and people got really into it,” says Ganum.
With his love of Belgian beers firmly established, Ganum’s curiosity and passion for brewing only grew before he was sidelined from his job with a back injury, and the downtime led his wheels to start turning. “I was working at BJ’s a while between ’03 and ’06 or something like that. I’d gotten in a car accident and got kind of messed up, and I tried to work through it but was having a hard time. So I quit that job to focus on rehab, and as I started to sort that all out, I thought this might be a good time to start my own brewery. This probably would have been around 2007 and I started putting the plan together. I was really into farmhouse-style beers at the time and was doing a bunch of trialing, so I was already planning to have the brewery focus on that from the get-go.”
Like much of the Upright story, it was a series of accidents and chance encounters that eventually found Ganum moving into the basement just east of the Broadway Bridge and downtown Portland and a stone's throw from the Moda Center. Though he had originally set his sights on finding a cheap industrial space on the outskirts of Portland, Ganum practically fell into what would become Upright’s home for the next fifteen years after a serendipitous encounter with an eavesdropping stranger.
“I was at Amnesia Brewing on Mississippi having a beer with a buddy and he said, ‘have you found a space for the brewery yet?’ I said no, and a woman was sitting at the table next to us who worked with the owner of the [Leftbank Building]. She overheard us and said, ‘oh you’re looking for a spot for the brewery? I work with this guy who is renovating this building,’” says Ganum. “I have an affinity for old brick buildings and I knew exactly where she was talking about. This wasn’t where I was planning on looking, but [I said] what the hell, I’ll take a look. I thought it was cool what they were doing with the building, a major renovation to restore it. The basement wasn’t the best place but it was cheap so we rolled with that.”
Once he was able to squeeze his open fermenting vessels and other equipment into the basement space, Ganum got to work. Though he hadn’t envisioned any sort of space to serve people, he once again found himself the victim of a happy accident, and what was then an innovative concept for a taproom was born. Compared to the wealth of breweries scattered across the Portland landscape of today, the idea of a drinking space more akin to a winery tasting room than a traditional brewpub was still somewhat foreign.
“When we started the brewery, I don’t think there was a single place in town that was a small production brewery with a taproom. Every brewery in town was basically a classic brewpub, and if it wasn’t that then it was a production brewery like Hair of the Dog. I don’t think there were any tasting rooms back then. It’s kind of funny that nobody in town was doing it that way. When we opened I thought it would just be a production brewery. The area where our old taproom was [in the basement] was supposed to be walled off and leased to a bike frame builder for a workshop. They backed out when we were roughly halfway through our buildout, so the landlord comes to me and says that the space right next to us is available and asks if we have interest in the space. Then I was like, we can pop in a few faucets and have a tasting room, so it was kind of like an afterthought,” reflects Ganum.
Before Upright took over the sun-washed and spacious Stingray cafe space on the main floor of the building in 2021, they would gradually build out their basement space from something that would be a stretch to call a tasting room into the cozier bar space it would eventually become.
New School Beer founder Ezra Johnson-Greenough was an early employee of Upright and was a witness to the shenanigans as well as the growth in Upright’s prestige. “In the early days, people only came to Upright through word of mouth. I hand-painted an A-frame sign with acrylics to put outside, otherwise no one would know we were there. Then just finding their way to the basement was an odyssey. I would be in the taproom hearing voices echoing along the basement like someone lost in a maze. If I was in the bathroom or in the back of the brewery, people would sometimes wander in and pour their own beer because there was no bar or even counter. It was cash only, and we had a vintage register that didn't even work, you just pressed any button and it would pop open. I was constantly sending people to find an ATM that was blocks away and many times they never returned. People loved the vintage record player, but some over-confident privileged people with a few beers in their system would try to stop what was playing and put on their own music from time to time,” he says.
Space was limited and Johnson-Greenough remembers the occasional spillover from the brewing operation into the taproom area. “Every once in a while I would come in to open the taproom on a weekend and there would be an entire river of fruit sludge that had bursted through a bung hole on a barrel and was refermenting all over the floor. I remember at least once when a bung shot off of a barrel and hit the ceiling while people were hanging out drinking, people were ducking for cover.”
It’s hard to say with certainty that Upright’s taproom concept influenced the wave that would follow or if that is just the way craft beer was headed at the time, but the beers Ganum and his small team were producing would undoubtedly be influential outliers at a time when the name of the game was IBU-busting IPAs loaded with C hops and caramel malt. This may be why, when you ask any serious beer lover or brewer in Portland about their favorite brewery, Upright will inevitably be at or near the top of the list. It’s the kind of place that is supremely underrated in the big picture but has earned serious respect and awe from its fans.
As with many places that are ahead of their time, becoming an influential presence in the Northwest scene wasn’t something Ganum set out to do. In fact, he still sees Upright as doing the opposite. “We never picked what we wanted to brew by guessing future trends, but we have joked in the brewery over the years that some of that stuff sort of took off after the fact. Then we joke about the opposite where we started making stuff way after it was cool. We just brewed our first black IPA.”
After brewing the old ale Billy the Mountain as their very first beer, Upright would produce four numbered beers inspired by Belgian farmhouse ales. They were simply titled Four (wheat farmhouse table beer), Five (hoppy farmhouse), Six (dark rye farmhouse ale), and Seven (strong golden saison) in a reference to the starting gravity of each beer. Just a few years later, these kinds of beers would start popping up throughout the Northwest and beyond as brewers and drinkers finally developed an affinity for funky sours and barrel-aged offerings.
Helping with the taproom as well as the label art and marketing, Johnson-Greenough would bear witness to the evolution of Upright as a brewing operation. “What’s super interesting is that the Upright beers were all initially brewed with French Saison yeast, but while that yeast was super flavorful and different than other saison yeasts, it was temperamental and did not clump together enough to top crop from the open fermenters. A big part of the choice to do open fermenters was so that you could just scoop the yeast off of an open fermenter and pitch it into another brew. Eventually they had to abandon that yeast, which did change the way the beers taste,” he says, pointing out some of the other quirks to the Upright process that led to its unique beers. “The open fermenters were sealed in a room under positive pressure with UV lights to kill bacteria. No one was doing that and I’m not sure anyone else is doing it in Oregon now (not counting coolships, but this is different.)”
Soon, Upright found itself thinking beyond farmhouse ales. “Back then it wasn’t like [breweries] had to make new beers every week like they do now. A new beer was kind of a special thing. We still did a lot of stuff in the farmhouse and Belgian vein for seasonal and one-offs, but we started to make other beers pretty early on,” says Ganum.
One of those beers was Engelberg pilsner, an early example of a craft brewer making a more refined version of a German-style lager that wouldn’t catch fire until years later. Engelberg became a favorite at bars across Portland with thirsty fans eager to sip on something craft but crushable.
“I think we started messing around with that lager recipe like a year after we started and maybe it was around 2012 when we started producing that beer regularly. At that time, there was a real lack of pilsner beer in town. Heater Allen was doing their thing but they were small at the time so it wasn’t like their beer was very available. Caldera made a pilsner that was really nice. Those are the only two pilsners that I remember being brewed in Oregon that were any good, so when we started making the Engelberg it was kind of like the only craft pils being made in Portland at the time, which is kind of crazy to think about.”
Upright eventually developed a cult following for its fruited saisons and mixed culture sours, lagers, bright but never hazy IPAs, and an array of cask beers and real ales that it has been cranking out more recently. Beers like herbaceous gruit saison Special Herbs, the wild-fermented wine-hybrid Oregon Native and the peach-laden Fantasia even brought the brewery into the hype realm. These styles are commonplace with many breweries now, but it’s hard to imagine what the Portland beer scene would look like without Upright’s hugely creative and endlessly eclectic approach.
“I’m just a brewer and I make beers. I don’t think what we’re doing is particularly special. I don’t think of it in the context of how it’s influencing people around us. I’m sure it’s had some influence on other breweries and creative people, but it’s not something I think about. It’s silly to think we created a scene or anything, that never happened,” says Ganum in his typically modest fashion.
Nearly two decades on, other brewers have a different perspective on the impact of Upright. Breakside Brewery’s brewmaster Ben Edmunds was an early admirer of what Ganum was doing at Upright and even put in a brief stint there.
“I think it would be hard for me to overstate how much Alex has influenced my way of thinking about beer, both during the brief time that I worked at Upright and in the years, especially the early years, at Breakside. There's a calm-but-fierce intellectual honesty to Alex's/Upright's beers. I think he has a very low tolerance for gimmickry in his experimentation - it's never 'we did it because we could', and that's incredibly rare. Alex will readily dive into using unusual ingredients and techniques, but it's always borne from curiosity, culinary memory, purposefulness. I think it's that creative approach that influenced me the most, because I found it to be such a healthy, fad-weary approach to innovation. It's a really inspiring, deep personal connection that I saw between Upright and the beers that were/are brewed there,” says Edmunds.
“I think for myself, and probably for a lot of people, Alex and Upright were an inspiration. The focus on (at the time) esoteric styles, and putting his unique and creative thumbprint on them, making them his own, was and is inspirational. It gave me confidence that focusing on something unique and different that you care about is possible in this industry. There aren't many people that build an audience for something new, by virtue of their own dedicated efforts. He did,” says brewer Trevor Rogers, who would go on the found the revered de Garde Brewing just five years later.
Ganum’s beers even factored into the story of The Commons, itself an influential brewery in Portland. Mike Wright of The Commons has fond memories of the early days. “In the summer of 2009, when The Commons was still known as Beetje and was a tiny, fledgling experiment in my garage, I was unaware of Upright. Fast forward one year and I am fully aware of Upright, conversing with Alex and super impressed and inspired by the beers he and the crew were making. Alex was very welcoming to me and generously answered the long list of tedious questions I peppered him with about entering the brewing business. I was definitely influenced by the way Alex approached the beer business. He was open, approachable, took the art and science of brewing seriously, and generally appeared to be having fun doing it. I aspired to all of those things.”
Wright isn’t shy about Upright’s role in the Belgian beer uprising that would happen soon after its founding. “There was a Belgian, European-inspired beer renaissance in Portland (and beyond) from 2010 through about 2016 (in my opinion) and Upright was very influential on that front. I would argue they were seen as the gold standard locally. I suspect there were Upright-like breweries in other locales that had similar influence in their respective space, but Upright beers were widely respected and sought after. How were they influential? I think brewers learned that making these types of beers requires intention, sincerity, and patience. You can taste that in Upright beers.”
Fast forward to the contemporary and even some of Portland’s most hyped brewing operations cite Ganum and Upright as playing a major role. Buzzy nano saison purveyors Nebuleus Beer see his vision as an integral part of their own journey. “From the first time we went to upright in 2011 we were really impressed with how nuanced their beers are. Everything Upright makes is so drinkable and we really respect their creativity and tendency to experiment with unique ingredients and barrels. It also helps that Alex is a really easygoing dude that doesn’t give in to the trends in the industry. Alex doesn’t give a fuck,” says Nebuleus co-founder Rachel Jo.
For Ganum and the Upright team, there are numerous favorites and greatest hits in the ever-evolving beer lineup.
“A lot of beers that I have liked the most have been the quietest beer in the marketplace. We did an alt bier once for the Oregon Brewers Festival that I fucking loved. Nobody gave a shit but it was awesome. Early special herbs was great. We were almost about to dump it but we were too lazy to send it to the drain, so it just kind of hung around. We tasted it again a few months later and it had developed some nice acidity and the whole beer had transformed. That beer was a happy accident almost. Flora Rustica I always loved. That was an original beer and we’ve made it almost every year since.”
The success of Upright led Ganum to open two restaurants that were also influential in the way they combined craft beer with a farm-to-table-style menu. Both Grain & Gristle and the more upscale Old Salt would gain plenty of fans before closing in 2023 and 2018. While both of these closures came as sad news and Ganum is quick to say he’ll never do a restaurant ever again, Upright would reveal some more positive news when they opened a satellite taproom in the airy space of an old filling station in Northeast Portland on NE Prescott in early 2023. Just recently, the brewery also jumped aboard the pop-up craze when they announced food offerings in collaboration with Votum.
Breakside Brewery’s Ben Edmunds offers his thoughts on the longevity of Upright. “The fact that Upright has been such a bastion of quality and innovation for so long demonstrates that you can marry those two things in the beer industry with longevity and be a real inspiration to the community of brewers around you. Upright has managed to create a pretty distinctive path forward over the past 15 years - shifting from the saison-heavy early days to years of excellence in mixed culture beers to a renewed focus on sessionable takes on a lot of classic English and American styles. I think it is a model for others to follow and people (try to) heed that lesson: you don't have to brew beers in a cookie-cutter fashion. Idiosyncrasy can work!”
Ganum reflects on the journey of his brewery with positivity and the occasional chuckle at some of the ridiculousness over the last fifteen years - like drunkenly building a rudimentary smoker so they could smoke their own malt or letting the Old Salt team store an entire pig in the Upright cooler - but there have also been challenges that started in the pandemic and have continued amidst a shifting, declining market for craft beer.
Ganum is candid in his assessment of where things stand. “It’s tougher than ever right now. Stuff never really got back to normal for us after the pandemic. Now you have this combination of competition with more and more breweries opening and more packaging. People are drinking different styles of beer that generally aren’t what we want to do. There won’t be a smoothie beer or a hazy IPA. The cost of operating is very high right now. With 15 years came 15 years of rent hikes for us. When our basement space was cheap in 2008, it’s now not that cheap for what it is. What we sell our beer for wholesale to distributors hasn’t gone up, while rent has gone up every year, labor costs, utilities, ingredients, but now the price we’re getting for our kegs hasn’t gone up much at all. There’s no good answer for that, it basically just erases your profitability.”
As Upright gears up to officially celebrate its anniversary on Saturday, April 6th, Ganum and his team have some fun things in store. These include a fun collaboration real ale with Ben Edmunds that will be a white chocolate-laced summer ale, a Grains of Wrath collaboration IPA, working with Away Days on a dark mild with some French variety hops, a new batch of Special Herbs that will be the biggest change they’ve ever made to the beer, and and a hoppy saison available in cans. In typical modest Upright fashion, there won’t be any kind of major blowout party, but one can only hope that the small celebration will be the start of the brewery’s next successful chapter.
