Growing sweet on sour beers
In the quest for new beer styles to compete with popular IPAs, American brewers have begun to pucker up. Sour beers of all sorts have become the hottest trend in the craft beer world, inspired by old styles from Belgium and Germany that embrace the kind of bacterial "bugs," both wild and lab-grown, that more familiar styles of "clean" bee
In the quest for new beer styles to compete with popular IPAs, American brewers have begun to pucker up.
Sour beers of all sorts have become the hottest trend in the craft beer world, inspired by old styles from Belgium and Germany that embrace the kind of bacterial "bugs," both wild and lab-grown, that more familiar styles of "clean" beers like pilsners and IPAs strive to keep out. Sour-beer fans praise the complexity, variety, and food-friendliness of such beers. Brewers love the potential for them to grow an untapped audience: women.
According to a recent survey by Nielsen, women are 75 percent more likely to prefer sour and wild ales as their favorite style.
The "wild" label refers to beers that are inoculated and fermented with spontaneous ambient yeasts known as brettanomyces, which give Belgian-style lambics their distinctive funk. They can acquire even more complex, earthy shades during months of additional aging in wood barrels. Add fruit and yet more flavors develop. Belgian breweries such as Cantillon helped set the standard, but domestic pioneers such as Russian River, Allagash, and Jolly Pumpkin, as well as local stars Tired Hands and Weyerbacher, helped give it an American twist. But these aged sours can take many months, if not a year or more, to mature.
The tart beer trend's biggest boost has come from recent enthusiasm for a relatively new technique called "kettle souring." The technique adds lab-grown Lactobacillus bacteria before the boiling process (as opposed to after), resulting in a clean and tangy beer that requires less aging time (costing brewers less money) and that runs less risk of brewery cross-contamination. This is the method that gives a twang to runaway hits such as Anderson Valley's Blood Orange Gose, a beer that has inspired a nationwide boom in gose, an ancient German style that also uses salt water and coriander. Though the category still is too young to track for telling data, Brewers Association economist Bart Watson said Google searches for gose last year were almost double those for sour beer - especially during warm months, when relatively low-alcohol gose (and Berliner Weisse, another now-popular German style) are especially refreshing.
Of course, there's great controversy in the beer world as to whether quick-kettle sours, which can often be one-dimensional, have cheapened a noble tradition. But as the Brew-vitational panel discovered over the course of tasting 23 locally made sour ales, there are good and bad versions of each style, showing varying skills at balancing acidity with other flavors.
"Brewing a sour beer is not hard," said Brewvi judge Ben Keene, managing editor of BeerAdvocate magazine. "But brewing a good sour beer requires finesse."
215-854-2682
@CraigLaBan