Summer is over. Any way you want to cut it, any last heat wave that comes rolling in, Labor Day has come and gone. So put away your seersucker suits and white pants, fall is upon us. And with the nail in the summer’s pervertible coffin, it’s time to drink up all those delicate saison’s and farmhouse ales to make room for fresh hop brews, pumpkin beers, and the influx of winters bevy of imperial stouts.

Upright Brewing’s Four Play is one such summer beers that I’ve been sitting on for a while now since my last trip to Portland. A young brewery barely over a year old, Upright has been making waves in the PDX beer scene turning out amazing belgian inspired brews from a town best known as a hop-lover’s paradise. Four Play is their commemorative one-year anniversary brew.

“Four Play is a Belgian-style sour beer that has been aged since March of 09 in Pinot Noir barrels with an addition of cherry puree, lactobacillus and brettanomyces to sour and dry out the beer. It is very tart, dry and complex like a wine with notes of oak, pinot, wheat and terroir. The beer is very limited with only 5 kegs being produced and 80 cases of 750ml bottles.”

So was it worth the wait? Despite an initial flimsy head and non-existent lacing, I’d say a resounding yes. This is a tart and funky, complex farmhouse. The Brett flavors come forward, as do a lot of cherry notes (from the addition of Cherry Puree) that mingle well with the innate characteristics of the Pinot Barrels. There’s also a nice lime peel note and a subtle dry finish from the barrel aging. The Pinot aging is really excited and a nice break from brewing’s current fascination with Bourbon barrels. Overall, it’s an impressively complex brew for a mere 5.0% ABV and a great one to knock back on those warm days of our impeding Indian Summer.

Style: Saison / Farmhouse Ale (Barrel Aged)
Brewery: Upright Brewing (Portland, OR)
ABV: 5.0%
IBUs: ???
Hop Variety: Hallertauer Mittelfrüh
Malt/Grain Variety: Organic Pale, Wheat, Organic Munich, Rolled Wheat
Adjuncts: Cherry Puree
Yeast: French Saison, Brettanomyces Clausennii, Lactobacillus, Delbrueckii
Availability: One Time Release

Always pushing the limits of Belgian inspired American beers, Portland, Maine’s Allagash brewery have developed their very own Koelschip for creating spontaneously fermented beers similar to the lambic style. While sour beers utilizing wild yeasts such as Brettanomyces have been popping up all over, all of the American versions of these are brewed using cultivated yeast strains. That is, until now.

The new Koelschip – aka a very large open air room with a steel tank and wooden ceiling (see photo above) – will change all that. For a few months out of the year, the weather by the Allagash brewery will be just right for cultivating “good” wild bacteria which accumulate on the ceiling and then fall into the beer tank. The beer is then pumped back indoors for fermenting and later aged in barrels.

Check out the awesome video below and keep an eye out for the first batch (no release date announced). In the interim, grab a glass of Allagash’s amazing Interlude which is a sour Belgian that was “accidentally” infected with local yeast and started this whole adventure. More photo’s here.


UPDATE: Beernews.org reports that this beer will make its wordwide debut tomorrow, December 16th in Philadelphia:

So when does the beer make its U.S. debut? Tomorrow night according to Felicia D’Ambrosio of the Philadelphia City Paper: “Rob Tod, owner of Allagash Brewing in Portland, Maine, will visit Philadelphia to make the U.S. debut of the first-ever American spontaneously fermented lambic in a Tria Fermentation School class on Thursday, Dec. 17. Hyped lambic-heads have already sold the class out, a testament to Philadelphia’s devotion to the rarest and weirdest of all artisanal beer styles.”