Notes on sour beer
(Click on the image for a larger size.)
A week ago, carl, Scott, and I headed down to Brouwers to see what was left of the Sour Beer Fest that had started on the previous Thursday. Afterwards we came back to my place and drank the beers pictured above, almost all of them also sour.
My favorite of the three beers I tried at Brouwers was the New Belgium Tart Lychee, probably because it came closest to what I was expecting from sour beer. It was aggressively sour, much like New Belgium's Eric Ale. The other two weren't very sour at all, to my taste, although I've now read more about gose-style beers and so could probably appreciate the Cascade Spring Gose better. It tasted of woodruff to me, and I'd like to find out if that's the "herbal characteristic" for that one. The Odin Stout, however, was a pleasant enough imperial-style stout, but there was barely any sourness to it at all. It got better as it got warmer, but it stayed disappointingly unsour.
One of the things we talked about at Brouwers was that we seem to be going through a new burst of expansion in the brewing world in the Pacific Northwest and probably the whole US. There are a lot of new craft breweries lately. I asked why. The best theory we had was that market for craft beer has expanded. What's nice about this new wave of craft brewing is that it is exploring all kinds of beer styles, not just the standard ESB, IPA, porter, stout, hefeweizen, and lager of old. Sour beers are just one aspect of the experimentation going on, but it's one I'm very happy about.
carl and Scott told me about a brewer they know in Portland who put a batch of his beer out in a field to let the local wild yeast and microflora work on it. This is something I've been waiting for. Belgian brewers famously use all kinds of local critters in their beer. I remember talking to a Belgian guy in the Elysian several years ago who told me of a brewery he knows over there that brews in open vats and when they paint the rafters of the brewery, they only paint one half at a time, so that the microflora in the unpainted parts can re-infect the newly-painted parts and continue to drift into the beer as it brews. It seems only natural that with the growing interest in Belgian beer around here that we would start to see this kind of regionalization/localization of yeast and microflora in the more adventurous US breweries as well.
Of course carl said that the beer that had been left out in a field in Oregon tasted very sour indeed, and this kind of brewing also naturally butts up against the philosophical question of when is a beer pleasantly sour and when is it just plain spoiled? When I was helping jackwilliambell homebrew a couple of batches, he was fanatical about making sure we didn't infect the beer with unintentional critters. He had a bath of diluted bleach around that we were continuously dipping our hands in. This was because of past experiences he'd had with beers going bad because of wild yeast or whatever.
Anyway, I'm rambling, and I should get on with the show here. Although we took pains to light the bottles better than we did in the previous beer picture I posted, and thus it should be easier to read the labels if you click through to the larger size, I'll still list the beers, from left to right:
Cascade Sang Royal - Cascade, in Portland, is one of the cutting-edge breweries in the PNW. However, I'm afraid I don't remember much about this one.
Madrugada Obscura Dark Dawn Stout - very goth, what? A beautiful sour stout from Jolly Pumpkin in Michigan, which I think the high-heeled fishlifter might like a lot. This left the Odin Stout in the dust.
Deviation (Bottleworks IX) - an annual special brewed by Russian River for Bottleworks a couple of years ago, this was very much in the range of New Belgium's Eric's Ale or the Tart Lychee. Wish I'd picked up more than one bottle of it.
Rodenbach Grand Cru - One of the great sour ales from Belgium. Actually maybe this is what the Deviation was modeled after. I seem to recall they tasted very similar going from one to the other.
Mikkeler Black Hole - The one non-sour bottled beer we had (both carl and Scott had non-sour beers at Brouwers), and not for the faint of heart. Here's the description at RateBeer: "Finally……! Black Hole is what Mikkeller is all about. Daring, vulgar and extreme. From the very beginning Mikkellers goal has been to push the limit and with this warming, intense imperial stout, a new chapter in the Danish beer history has been written. The high bitterness from the hops and the sweetness from the malt and alcohol, creates a good balance which makes Black Hole an explosion of nuances, but also leaves a feeling of a perfect and complex beer - in the heavyweight category." This one almost tasted like a coffee liqueur, even though it had no coffee in it.
So another great beer adventure. Many thanks to Scott for providing four of the bottles that night!