The question I've been asked most during events promoting my book, American Sour Beers, is "Why sour beers?" They take forever, risk "infecting" your clean beers, and sometimes exhibit flavors described as horse blanket, vinegar, sour milk, and Band Aid. However, those same microbes are capable of creating tropical fruity esters, rustic spicy, funky, and earthy phenols, and freeing aromatic aglycones otherwise locked in hops, fruits, and spices. Acidity gives sour beers a flavor balance distinct from the usual sweet-to-bitter spectrum. In short, sour beers possess a range and aromatics that are impossible to attain from any other beer.
Sour beer was what all beers were before Pasteur, stainless steel, hops, and refrigeration. They are the heirloom, foraged, farm-to-table, artisan beverage of the first 8,800 years of beer's 9,000 year existence. They can be tart refreshing 3% ABV summer wheat beers loaded with lemon zest, or 12% ABV behemoths with all the richness and depth of your favorite "Imperial" without the alcohol sharpness. You can add your favorite local fruit, dry hop with bold citrusy American (or New Zealand) hops, or age in a barrel from a local nano-distillery.
Buying sour beer can be more challenging than brewing it. They are rare, variable, and expensive. You can brew 5 gallon (or 20L) of lambic-ish beer for about the same price as two 750s of the real stuff. The ingredients aren't what drive the high prices; it is the heightened risk and extended aging required. As a homebrewer the worst that happens is you are out $30, a few hours of work, and the use of a carboy during a year of aging, for a craft brewery the stakes are much higher.
As homebrewers we like to challenge ourselves. For some, this means brewing a standard American lager, or other styles so clean that a minuscule slip-up feels like a rock in your shoe. Perhaps visiting a Chinese herbalist to brew with an ingredient never before added to beer, or recreating an ancient style no one has tasted for 500 years. Traditional mixed-fermentation sour beers require considering a half dozen species instead of a monoculture of brewer's yeast. All of these microbes (Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, Brettanomyces, Acetobacter etc.) have different requirements, optimums, and dreams. It's your job to play them off one another, favoring some at the exclusion of others.
A sour beer can be made as simply as splitting a batch of Klsch, saison, English dark mild, or American blond and pitching brewer's yeast along with bottle dregs from a few of your favorite unpasteurized sour beer. It can also be as complex as an arcane three-hour turbid mash designed to extract tannins and starches into the wort, followed by precisely timed additions of a dozen strains of carefully selected and propagated wild yeast and bacteria. It comes down to how much control you want to try to exert over these amazing microbes.
Expectations and process aren't nearly as rigid for sours compared to clean styles. They don't have to take years or even months, pitch Lactobacillus into 120F (49C) wort to generate most of the lactic acidity in just a few days, follow that with Brettanomyces as the only yeast to complete attenuation and contribute its funky character in a few weeks. Other breweries simply open the fresh wort to the air and allow the wild microbes to do their work over the next two or three years. Still others re pitch the yeast/bacteria cake from one batch to the next like a sourdough starter, not really knowing what microbes it contains (only that it produces delicious results). As you brew you'll develop your own style and preferred microbes that produce results suited to your tastes.
Each batch of sour beer is a unique creation. Unlike clean beers, it is impossible to precisely replicate a commercial sour beer at home, even if you had the exact recipe. Even with identical ingredients, process, and microbes each mixed-fermentation will yield surprising new flavors. Commercial breweries often blend batches and barrels in an attempt to smooth variations, but as a homebrewer I embrace them, blending to accentuate interesting flavors. These beers age gracefully as Brettanomyces continues to scavenge oxygen for decades in the bottle.
There is no better time to be brewing sour beers. There are a half-dozen new yeast labs that have opened recently, and almost without exception they are working with microbes in addition to brewer's yeast. The techniques that a decade ago were the closely guarded secrets of Belgian brewers have been freed by immensely generous American brewers who have reverse-engineered those old world processes, and then struck off in their own directions. If you haven't brewed (an intentionally) sour or funky beer, there is no time like the present!
Michael Tonsmeire blogs about homebrewing as The Mad Fermentationist. He consults as "Flavor Developer" for Modern Times Beer (San Diego, CA), for which he develops the recipes, process, and microbes to produce sour beers. His first book, American Sour Beers (Brewers Publications) was released in June 2014.
Sour beer was what all beers were before Pasteur, stainless steel, hops, and refrigeration. They are the heirloom, foraged, farm-to-table, artisan beverage of the first 8,800 years of beer's 9,000 year existence. They can be tart refreshing 3% ABV summer wheat beers loaded with lemon zest, or 12% ABV behemoths with all the richness and depth of your favorite "Imperial" without the alcohol sharpness. You can add your favorite local fruit, dry hop with bold citrusy American (or New Zealand) hops, or age in a barrel from a local nano-distillery.
Buying sour beer can be more challenging than brewing it. They are rare, variable, and expensive. You can brew 5 gallon (or 20L) of lambic-ish beer for about the same price as two 750s of the real stuff. The ingredients aren't what drive the high prices; it is the heightened risk and extended aging required. As a homebrewer the worst that happens is you are out $30, a few hours of work, and the use of a carboy during a year of aging, for a craft brewery the stakes are much higher.
As homebrewers we like to challenge ourselves. For some, this means brewing a standard American lager, or other styles so clean that a minuscule slip-up feels like a rock in your shoe. Perhaps visiting a Chinese herbalist to brew with an ingredient never before added to beer, or recreating an ancient style no one has tasted for 500 years. Traditional mixed-fermentation sour beers require considering a half dozen species instead of a monoculture of brewer's yeast. All of these microbes (Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, Brettanomyces, Acetobacter etc.) have different requirements, optimums, and dreams. It's your job to play them off one another, favoring some at the exclusion of others.
A sour beer can be made as simply as splitting a batch of Klsch, saison, English dark mild, or American blond and pitching brewer's yeast along with bottle dregs from a few of your favorite unpasteurized sour beer. It can also be as complex as an arcane three-hour turbid mash designed to extract tannins and starches into the wort, followed by precisely timed additions of a dozen strains of carefully selected and propagated wild yeast and bacteria. It comes down to how much control you want to try to exert over these amazing microbes.
Expectations and process aren't nearly as rigid for sours compared to clean styles. They don't have to take years or even months, pitch Lactobacillus into 120F (49C) wort to generate most of the lactic acidity in just a few days, follow that with Brettanomyces as the only yeast to complete attenuation and contribute its funky character in a few weeks. Other breweries simply open the fresh wort to the air and allow the wild microbes to do their work over the next two or three years. Still others re pitch the yeast/bacteria cake from one batch to the next like a sourdough starter, not really knowing what microbes it contains (only that it produces delicious results). As you brew you'll develop your own style and preferred microbes that produce results suited to your tastes.
Each batch of sour beer is a unique creation. Unlike clean beers, it is impossible to precisely replicate a commercial sour beer at home, even if you had the exact recipe. Even with identical ingredients, process, and microbes each mixed-fermentation will yield surprising new flavors. Commercial breweries often blend batches and barrels in an attempt to smooth variations, but as a homebrewer I embrace them, blending to accentuate interesting flavors. These beers age gracefully as Brettanomyces continues to scavenge oxygen for decades in the bottle.
There is no better time to be brewing sour beers. There are a half-dozen new yeast labs that have opened recently, and almost without exception they are working with microbes in addition to brewer's yeast. The techniques that a decade ago were the closely guarded secrets of Belgian brewers have been freed by immensely generous American brewers who have reverse-engineered those old world processes, and then struck off in their own directions. If you haven't brewed (an intentionally) sour or funky beer, there is no time like the present!
Michael Tonsmeire blogs about homebrewing as The Mad Fermentationist. He consults as "Flavor Developer" for Modern Times Beer (San Diego, CA), for which he develops the recipes, process, and microbes to produce sour beers. His first book, American Sour Beers (Brewers Publications) was released in June 2014.