LETTER FROM PRESIDENT, DOUG DAYHOFF

To the Friends and Family of Upland:

Thirteen years ago the Upland Brewing Company launched in an old building which originally stored ice that would be distributed to local homes by horse and cart. In 1998 few people ventured beyond College Ave and Sixth Street, where downtown Bloomington effectively stopped, and Indiana’s entire beer production was measured in the hundreds of barrels. Much has changed since then: the buzz of new construction fills the neighborhood, and Upland alone brews over 10,000 barrels, including Upland Wheat and Dragonfly IPA, two of the best selling craft beers in the state of Indiana.

Through the great recession of the last five years, our sales have tripled. Gigantor, the 150-barrel (nearly 5,000 gallons) fermentation tank installed last fall, was the last tank we could squeeze into our building (and it doesn’t really fit, since it sticks four feet out of the roof). Just six months later we’re having difficulty keeping pace with demand yet again. We owe a tremendous thank you to those who have helped sell and drink all that beer we’ve brewed, and raise a big toast to our fellow brewers who have helped to change the beer culture of an entire state!

A few years ago we bought the adjacent property preparing to build a new brewery beside that historic ice house. But while finalizing plans to expand our current location, we came upon an opportunity to acquire a big but dilapidated building in a neighborhood that looks a lot like 11th Street did 13 years ago – and we couldn’t help but consult the old play book.

Now the plan is to move our production brewery equipment to that new location by next January and install a smaller pilot brewing system in our current location where our Brewpub restaurant will remain. The pilot brewing system will enable us to experiment with new recipes and develop small-batch, specialty beers for limited distribution. The new brewery location will have plenty of room for adding many more tanks, upgrading our bottling and kegging equipment, and storing the tons of hops, malt, and packaging materials that go into our unique beers. We are also very excited to dedicate a space the size of our existing brewery solely to the production of our barrel-aged sour beers, which are regarded as some of the finest American examples of these very old Belgian beer styles.