For the past few months, we’ve been hanging out with brewery owners, brewers, roasters, sales reps, and other beer industry folk, to give a behind-the-scenes look at REVved UP, the collaboration beer between Upland Brewing and Revolution Brewing. Here’s where we are now: Upland will brew and bottle a blonde ale and Revolution will do the same with a brown ale. Both will use coffee from Chicago roasters, Dark Matter Coffee. Both will be called REVved UP. Today I’m in beautiful Bloomington, Indiana at Upland Brewing Company’s production brewery for the official REVved UP brew day.

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I arrive at the brewery sometime around 8am. It feels early to me but the guys and gals at Upland Brewing have been at it since 5am… and will be going until 3am, so I try not to feel too bad for myself.

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Upland will be brewing four batches of REVved UP today, a new batch starting every four hours. At the end of the grueling day, they’ll have all of the beer in the fermentation tank where it will sit for about two weeks before they add the Dark Matter coffee.

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I catch up with Upland brewer Patrick Lynch before the day gets started.

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Lakeshore Beverage: What are you guys brewing today?

Patrick Lynch: The base beer is a blonde ale. We wanted something that was somewhat neutral in flavor, kind of light, and will showcase the coffee flavors we’re adding. It also has to be strong enough to support those stronger flavors. It’s going to have a lot of oats which will give it a nice creamy, full mouth feel and enough of a strong base to support the coffee flavors later on.

Lakeshore Beverage: When people think of “coffee beers” they generally don’t picture blonde ales, why did you make that choice?

Patrick Lynch: That’s exactly why – because it’s what people don’t expect. Typically what you see is a darker beer that matches the coffee flavors, but we want to showcase the coffee in a different way. With a more neutral base and lighter color, it’s not what people expect.

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Lakeshore Beverage: What’s exciting about doing a collaboration beer?

Patrick Lynch: This is what’s great about the brewing industry in general, everyone’s so collaborative. We’re in a small college town, they’re in a large city but we’re still brought together by great beer and a desire to make a great beer. I’m learning more about brewing, I’m seeing how Revolution’s new equipment works. It’s just great to work with other breweries to keep on learning and keep on growing these friendships between the breweries.

Lakeshore Beverage: What’s it like having other brewers in the brewery?

Patrick Lynch: It’s always a lot of fun. It’s a different atmosphere than your normal day-to-day grind. It kind of brings you back to “we’re not just brewing beer; we’re connecting with other breweries.” To get them on your system and have them help you with some of the dirty work—you know, scrubbing tanks, scrubbing floors, milling grain, it’s just a fun environment. It’s a nice change of pace and good to get some friendly faces around.

The guys from Revolution Brewing arrive and the day kicks off. We join Patrick for his brewing shift at noon. Here’s how it goes down, in Patrick’s words:

“The first step is to mill the grain themselves. We have some light, pale malted barley that’s going to form the base of this beer. We add a couple specialty malts that have a slightly roasted nutty flavor to them. Then we’re adding a large percentage of oats as well which provide a nice, creamy, full feel to the beer. The first step is to just crack that barley in half basically, expose the inside of the barley husk for the brewing process.”

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“Next, we’ll mix that crushed malt with hot water and create our mash as the first step in the brewing process. This converts all the starches in the grains into sugars; those sugars will later be converted into alcohol in fermentation.”

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“Then we’ll transfer the liquid to our boil kettle, boil it for an hour. We’ll add the hops to the boil to balance out the malt sweetness. We’re not looking for a full hop character in this beer because it would clash with the coffee but we wanted just enough to balance out the sweetness in the beer.”

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“Then we send it through our whirlpool which rotates the beer and settles out any hop solids or proteins so that a nice clean beer gets sent to fermentation. On the way to fermentation we’ll pitch yeast which will convert the sugars into alcohol. Then the beer will be fermenting for about two weeks where all those sugars will be converted to alcohol. We’ll monitor that trend, taste it throughout the process and make sure everything’s proceeding right.”

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“Once that’s done, we’ll lower the temperature, add our coffee and get the final flavor. We’ll add the coffee beans to a holding tank and then circulate the beer through that so we have a nice control of how much coffee flavor we’re adding to the beer. We want to recirculate it long enough to extract those flavors straight from the beans but not over-do it. As soon as we get the profile we want, we stop the process.”

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“The last step is then the packaging. Once it’s all ready to go we’ll run the beer through our filter and put it in bottles and kegs and then it will be on the shelf next to Revolution’s beer which will be in cans.”

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Lakeshore Beverage: And then, we party. What’s the plan for that?

Patrick Lynch: We’ll have a big launch party on April 1st at Revolution in Chicago and then we’ll have some events here, have both versions on draft at the Upland retail locations and have some events around town and encourage everyone to try them side by side. One’s a blonde, one’s a brown but they both share the same Dark Matter Coffee in them and kind of compare and contrast the two beers.

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