Upright Brewing, widely considered among Portland’s very best for the length of its 16 years in business, will stop brewing beer and close its original location by the end of the year, owner Alex Ganum announced this week.
According to Ganum, operations will cease at Upright’s hidden-away brewery at 240 N. Broadway in a couple of months, with most beer expected to run out by the end of the year. The brewery’s Northeast Portland taproom and food cart pod, 7151 N.E. Prescott St., will remain open after a minor rebrand, transitioning to a craft beer bar pouring pints from other breweries.
Known for its eclectic mix of farmhouse saisons, pub ales and award-winning pilsners, Upright has been a mainstay on local top 10 lists, including landing at No. 2 on The Oregonian/OregonLive’s 2020 guide to Portland’s best breweries.
“I keep going back to the fact that we were just a really simple brewery,” Ganum said during a phone interview Wednesday. “We were making the beers that we wanted to make, and we got lucky that there was an audience for them.”
After an internship at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y., and a four-year stint at B.J.’s Brewhouse locations in Jantzen Beach and the Lloyd District in Portland, Ganum opened Upright Brewing in the basement of the Leftbank building in 2009. Upright takes its name from one of the signature instruments of jazz great Charles Mingus, the upright bass.
As beer writer Andre Meunier wrote in The Oregonian/OregonLive’s profile of Upright in 2019, that choice of name was apt, as Ganum’s own “inventive brewing approach likewise blends a swath of ideas and ingredients into complex, seamless beers that often add a tart complexity to traditional farmhouse flavors.”
Even the original taproom, which Ganum said he only opened after a bike frame maker backed out of an adjacent space just before his tiny brewery launched, had a free-flowing, jazz-like feel in those early days, with a tap list that changed week to week and no bar to separate customers and the bartenders pouring their beers.
Upright’s emphasis on farmhouse ales made in traditional open-top tanks called a coolship and aged in large wooden vats known as foeders arrived at a time of growing interest in the style. By 2014, Upright had become a favorite for bottle collectors and fans of Belgian and French farmhouse styles generally.
But around a decade ago, the brewery began branching out with crisp pilsners, distinctive IPAs and British-style cask ales.
“We always brew different beers and let the brewery evolve all the time,” Ganum said in 2019. “It goes back to the jazz thing, wanting to do new things pretty often. We’re always just trying to brew beers that we want to drink, but we also have to take into consideration what’s going to sell now, because the market’s so saturated.”
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That market saturation — along with cratering sales for packaged saisons, the lingering effects of the pandemic on business at the Leftbank building and the cost of doing business in Portland and Multnomah County — helped lead to the closure decision, Ganum said Wednesday.
“The brewery just doesn’t have enough volume to compete with the bigger brands,” Ganum said Wednesday. “Back when we started, distributors did most of the sales for you. But as breweries like pFriem and Breakside started to grow, it became more competitive and it was harder for tiny breweries like us.”
But Upright hopes to go out with a bang. On the brewing schedule for the next two months are the kind of unassuming, well-made beers that fans had come to expect, including a dunkel weisse, an alt bier and a new pilsner Ganum and brewers Gerritt Ill and Neil Yandow are planning for a pop-up event from the great Hood River barbecue outfit Grasslands on Nov. 8.
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