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. Today, in the final chapter of Behind The Beer, the guys from Upland are here in Chicago, helping Revolution with their coffee brown ale.
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READ CHAPTER THREE >>
I sat down with Upland Brewers, Patrick Lynch and Matt Wisley to take a look back at the collaboration process.
Lakeshore Beverage: So where are we at with your coffee blonde ale?
Patrick Lynch: The blonde ale is wrapping up fermentation right now. They’re probably going to crash the tank today, turn the temperature down, and on Wednesday we’ll be able to dump the spent yeast out of there and that’s when we’ll recirculate the coffee. It’ll be infused with the coffee for a couple days and then we’ll package it afterwards and send some up here for the party.
Lakeshore Beverage: And what’s going on with the party?
Patrick Lynch: We’re going to rent a bus and put as many employees as we can in there and come up here and party.
Matt Wisley: We may bring some kegs of REVved UP that are infused with some other things, but we’re not sure with what yet. Revolution is going to have some different iterations of the brown ale as well.
Lakeshore Beverage: So are you coffee experts now?
Matt Wisley: Going through this process, doing several different cold brew steeps and having to document with a flavor wheel, you can actually pick out a lot of flavors that you don’t notice as a casual drinker. We break down the flavors of beer all the time, but unless you really put in the time to think about it, there are all these subtle aspects of coffee that start to come out and you have to think about “what about this coffee would go with this style of beer” as opposed to just “coffee flavor,” you know?
Lakeshore Beverage: What have you learned from this collaboration?
Patrick Lynch: One of the more unique things about this experience is that we’re getting two different beers out of the collaboration. We’ve done collaboration beers in the past where we have it for a week and then it’s gone, but this will be our first large-scale packaged collaboration; we’re putting it in bottles, they’re putting it in cans. It’s been the full brew process from start to finish.
The official REVved UP release party will take place on Friday, April 1st at the Revolution Brewing Tap Room, located at 3340 N Kedzie Ave, Chicago, IL. More details about the party can be found here. We hope to see you there!
