Uppers & Downers is back! The Chicago-based celebration of coffee, beer, and coffee beers invites brewers and roasters to collaborate and create new and exciting beverages!
BY ASHLEY RODRIGUEZ
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
Photos courtesy of Good Beer Hunting
What’s not to like about Uppers & Downers, the annual event hosted by Good Beer Hunting in Chicago celebrating the intersection of coffee and beer? This year, Uppers & Downers promises to be better than ever, with a weeklong bevy of events ranging from charity dinners to roasting tours to cocktail competitions.
“Uppers & Downers started as an experiment between GBH’s Michael Kiser and Stephen Morrissey (now brand strategy director of the SCA) bringing together craft beer and coffee culture, exploring the process, technique, and even origin of these ingredients,” their website states. “Since then it’s gone on to include cross-overs from a variety of other craft cultures.”
At last year’s Uppers & Downers, we got to taste some of the most interesting and wild collaborations between roasters and brewers—this isn’t just pairing stouts with coffee. Think brewing a beer using lactic acid fermentation and pairing it with a coffee processed in the same manner, or lagers with coffees from different origins.
Although the main event centers around a big coffee + beer tasting at Thalia Hall on Saturday, March 30, Uppers & Downers is a weeklong affair encompassing events all across Chicago. Starting Tuesday, March 26 with a coffee cocktail competition, folks can mingle with and try new concoctions from some of the most innovative and forward-thinking food and beverage leaders in the city.
Learn more about Uppers & Downers by visiting their website and following Good Beer Hunting on Instagram, which will continue to be updated with information as the event draws closer. Tickets are available now!
Disclosure: I work part-time for Good Beer Hunting (I also write some cool articles for them as part of an eponymous series exploring beer and coffee), and have judged the coffee cocktail competition in the past—and it was pretty tight.
