Sour Beers

So, I was at a local microbrewery and getting the nickle tour. The brewmaster was talking about a special beer made using enzymes from some tree in Europe that will eat the sugars and create the fermentation. This is done sealed food grade plastic containers. this vs traditional yeast.

Wiki has this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sour_beer

Has any GRM greatness sampled any of this?

Had a few sour beers from an Oklahoma brewery a few months back at a beer tasting.

WIth and without the green and red syrup's they put in it.......I didn't like it without the syrup..........with the syrup, not bad.

But if you have to doctor it up to make it taste good, why?

We have a local brewery that specializes in sour beers, Cascade Brewing.

I quite like their Sang Noir...

There is but one sour beer you need to find and try:

Tart cherry pie, but in drinkable form. Yea. It's that good.

Oh, and if you ever find yourself in central PA, a brewpub named Selinsgrove Brewing makes the best kriek you can find in...well probably the best outside of Belgium.

Bell's Oarsman Ale is a sourish wheat ale. It is pretty good, extremely light and refreshing. Not usually my style but I like them once in awhile on a hot day.

I really enjoy sour beers. There are various ways to make a soured beer. I haven't heard of enzymes from trees before. I suppose that could work, but extracted enzymes tend to be difficult to come by and very expensive. Usually souring is done with wild yeasts and/or bacteria (e.g. Lactobacillus). Most likely they too a yeast or bacteria culture from off of a tree.

Very often there is an initial fermentation done with regular brewing yeast, and the souring culture is added later. Or sometimes a batch will be fermented separately with a souring culture and then blended back in with a non-soured fermentation to reach the specific level of sourness desired.

The really tart beer that you add syrups to sounds like Berlinerweisse. I really like that beer style. It's nice and refreshing on a hot summer day. I enjoy it without syrup and like it best with just a very minimal amount of syrup. Think of it like lemonade. The sourness makes it refreshing, and you then add enough sugar to meet your taste. Not everyone's taste in sour is the same. I like having it start out too sour and getting to adjust it so that it is just right for me. Dogfishhead Festina Peche is a beer in this style, but has peach puree or extract or something added later to balance the tartness without being the full-on sweetness of the syrup.

For sour beers I am most partial to Flemish sour ales, either red or brown. Also Belgian "wild ales" are very good too.

I've done a couple of sour beers in my homebrewing that turned out very well. I'm looking forward to drinking my Oud Bruin now that I've been away for 8 months, and it's had additional time to age. Sour beers pretty much always get better with age.

And making sour beers is quite hazardous for a brewery. It is darn near impossible to completely kill wild yeasts or bacteria when cleaning equipment. It can make it very easy to contaminate other beers that should not be sour. All of my home brew equipment I used to make and bottle my sour beers has had to be set aside to only be used in sour beers from now on.

Twin_Cam wrote: There is but one sour beer you need to find and try: Tart cherry pie, but in drinkable form. Yea. It's that good.

I tried their Geuze at Delerium Cafe. Wow. Just wow. Seriously intense stuff. Had a weird crazy funk to it that would have been bad in another beer, but really worked.

In CA, Russian River and Lost Abbey make some excellent sour beers too.

+1 on the Russian River. It's pricey, and I don't have it very often. Which is a bummer, because I can never remember whether I really liked the Consecration, Damnation, Supplication, Temptation etc...

Supplication is Heaven Sent

Had it on tap at Russian River, not particularly "beer-y" but delicious and darn near perfectly balanced.