The fire that is my love of sour beers caught on fast and has burned bright and hot since then. It’s been a flurry of tart brews for a few years now, such that I’m not sure whether I can remember exactly what first struck the spark.
It might have been in August of 2011, at my first Great Taste of the Midwest. I had a beer called Harvey from Brugge Brasserie in Indianapolis, an American wild ale brewed with blackberries. I hadn’t yet met the lovely (and very similar and much higher profile) Juliet from Goose Island, so I was both smitten with the beer and struck by its novelty.
The word “wild” appeared 12 times in relation to fermentation style or sour flavor profile in that year’s Great Taste program, and that many times over again referring to wild berries or flowers.
Cut to the 2015 Great Taste program, where there are 78 mentions of the word “wild,” 40 of them specifically referring to wild ales. 40 mentions of the word “sour,” up from 28 in 2011.
People are still discovering (and yes, still complaining about) the sour flavor profile, but it has become mainstream enough in the world of craft beer for there to be, in opposition to the newest of the newcomers, a cadre of scenesters, purists — sour beer jerks.
Boy, do I try to not be one of those. Despite my tale of back-in-my-day, little-guy sour beer appreciation above, I try to not look down my nose at anything that isn’t Batch 1. (Wild ales, more often than other styles I think, tend to be referred to by batch numbers as well as production or packaging date.) I may not always loooove ’em, but kettle sours like Next Door’s Mutha Pucka don’t bother me on a weird emotional level. And what I’ve discovered, unexpectedly, is that I’ve started to excuse myself from the arms race of extreme sourness.
The degree to which a sour beer puckers your cheeks like Sylvester the cat with a mouthful of alum has become an endurance test almost as much as bitterness in IPAs. It has gotten so bad that even styles that shouldn’t be particularly sour — saisons, for one — are derided by some drinkers for not being sour enough.
The wild yeast Brettanomyces is a regular contributor to many wild ales’ flavor profiles, but on its own, it imparts no sourness. Even so, due to Brett’s appearance in sour beers, the under-informed beer drinker has been known to complain that a 100% Brett beer isn’t even sour. When people look for sour, even in places where it shouldn’t be, they want it capital-S sour.
I admit that I too chased the pucker in my younger days. I remember a raspberry lambic from Destihl Brewery’s Saint Dekkera series of sour beers that damn near turned me inside out at the 2013 Great Taste. It was so weapons-grade that I chased it down at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver that autumn, just to make sure I hadn’t had an off batch. It was as tart as I’d tasted in summer. I swooned.
There were a lot of mighty sour beers at that 2013 GABF. That year’s Bear Republic Tartare remains the tartest Berliner weisse I’ve had, and AC Golden — a startlingly creative Colorado division of MillerCoors — was cranking out a peach wild ale and other fine sour beers under the supervision of current wild ale superstar Troy Casey. Greedily did I stalk the line at Almanac Brewing’s table, tasting beers like Dogpatch Sour and Farmer’s Reserve No. 3, made with strawberries and nectarines.
2013 was also the year that New Glarus released Wild Sour, its Thumbprint wild ale, and R&D Very Sour Blackberry, which has since ballooned in value from its original $8 to over $400 per 500mL bottle on the secondary market. If there was a year in recent memory wherein people had their sour beer switches flipped to ON, it was 2013. You could hardly fault me for getting swept up.
Years and many sour beers later, just this last week in fact, I was sitting with my wife at the Brasserie V bar. It was the day after the restaurant had hosted Almanac and tapped a handful of the San Francisco brewery’s creations. They were all still pouring when we visited, and we ordered the flight.
Valencia Gold: not a sour, just some citrus flavor.... Tropical Platypus: lots of fruit, some funky Brett, good hops flavor, a respectable bit of tartness.... Farmer’s Reserve Pluot: astringency from the pluots, more flavor than sour.…
And then our palates were cluster-bombed by Vanilla Cherry Dogpatch, with just a whiff of vanilla before the scouring pad of sourness scraped over our tongues. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s very sour indeed. I got a little acidy.
As I employed the smooth richness of Barbary Barrel Noir, Almanac’s barrel-aged imperial milk stout, to psychosomatically soothe my esophagus, I realized where I’d arrived. If I’m totally honest with myself, I’m still a wild ale scenester, but metaphorically, probably one of those graying ones that might wear a cardigan over his brewery T-shirt. The fire for sour beer burns just as hot, but the flame’s a little lower. Any higher, and I’ll have to take a Prilosec.
