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CJ Coyne & Nicole Simeone
Sours: Love Them Or Leave Them?
Talk about debate season. Here are two takes on the divisive sour. How do you feel about the tangy genre?
We’re doing things a little different this Thursday. CJ and I have sat down with our feelings on sours. She delights in them. I do not. We shared a short brief of our thoughts and then went to work. Enjoy Nerd Girls!
Once upon a time, all beer was sour. Wild yeast and bacteria were frequently, if not always, invited into the brewing process either by open-air fermentation or by piggybacking in through the starter. In an age before Louis Pasteur and an appreciation for sterilization, the beverage pairings for your meals were often potentially disease-riddled water or a sour beer. Fine choices both, but I can see why sour beer was the more popular pick there.
Hundreds of years and lots of scientific advancement later, sour beer is still going strong. Sours are now a style of beer, rather than the only game in town. Keeping close to its roots, the sour style has a broad spectrum of flavors to choose from. At least, that’s what I’m told. And it’s what I’ve read in preparation for this week’s post. I have an unpopular take on these tart beverages and probably an uphill battle in this debate. Sours aren’t appealing.
Plenty of sours draw you in with their rich plum, deep red or bright yellow hues. The beautiful colors often bloom from the fruits added into the brew. A siren’s call to beer lovers craving a long pull of the carbonated liquid. I am far from immune to their cry. It’s hard not to rubberneck when a lambic is being poured. But when you’re dealing with sirens, you only see the rocks just before the crash. Once the beverage hits your lips, your other senses are smacked with the harsh reality of your beer selection.
Taste begins in the act of smelling. For sours, it is the yeast standing at the helm of the nose. The chemicals born from the fermentation produce an array of aromas. You are occasionally presented with the faint hint of salt air that leaves a sharp tingle in your nose or the raw tang of fruit puree. More often, you get the pungent fragrance of sweaty goat and/or uncleaned barn. That raw, earthy smell no one enjoys.
Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans would be a better subject for those descriptions instead of beer with those flavors. Neither the beans nor the smells wafting up from a sour prime the palette for pleasant flavor combination. At the first sip, your taste buds are assaulted. The taste from the hops and malts are muted by the high acidity. The odors wafting up from the glass mingling with the zing from the liquid. Basically, you invited an entire barnyard to use your tongue as a playground.
By the time I’ve gotten to the bottom of a sour sampler, my tongue is waving a white flag. It’s as if the beverage sprained my tongue. Damn that beautiful looking drink. Why did I ever let its gorgeous color pull me in? Put a full pour in front of me and about halfway through my tongue is ready and willing for a complete amputation. Where the hell was Odysseus and his wax?
My opponent would say I am using sweeping generalizations and only describing one type of sour. And, perhaps that’s true of the experience above. Sours don’t all deal in extreme barnyard or impersonations of Warheads. Mild sours are plentiful and readily available. However, even with the tamer offerings, the experience remains mostly the same. It just takes longer to get to the white flag. The acidity still going to win out over every other flavor, except for any fruit added to the recipe. When fruit is involved, the two ingredients mingle to form a second wave of tangy punch.
Yes, I know acidity is a part of all beers. It’s part of the brewing magic. But in the sour formula, there is an overabundance of acid with little to no balancing agent. The hops bring acidity into the kettle. Any fruit added to the recipe brings acidity. Then the bacteria produce more. For me, this leaves drinkers with a one-trick pony.
When the only choice was between a sour and the beverage equivalent of Russian roulette, yeah I’d choose the sour every single time. And I would have been happy to do so. Sorry tongue, I don’t want to die of dysentery. Thanks to sanitation and water treatment, I don’t have to worry about having to make that decision. The plethora of choice extends beyond clean water and into the beer world as there are so many other styles to try.
What need is there for battering our palette with astringent flavors? Do our noses need to be assaulted with Eau de goat? Beer has grown beyond it’s haphazard, wild infancy. The gobs of other styles available present more interesting combinations for consumers. All of the ingredients working together to create rich complexity. Rather than one element beating the others into submission for supremacy.
Sours deserve to be praised. They gave birth to a genre of beverage that is flourishing and downright delicious. But like the founding fathers, we should keep sours relegated to the occasional reenactments and history books. Wheel them out for show on special occasions to highlight how far beer has come rather than treat them as contemporaries.
Sorry, I got worked up and went plaid for a second. Unseating sours from their current seat of adoration would be a ludicrous suggestion. If sipping down a glass of concentrated Warheads is your thing or if the thick, permeating scent of barnyard titillates your taste buds, well, then to each her own beer. I’ll just be giving those beers time forgot a wide, wide berth.
When someone asks you about your favorite style of beer, and you answer sours, you will receive one of two responses. Either ‘OMG me too!’ or, ‘ugh ya gross.’ I am a sour lover, but the majority of beer drinkers I meet are not, so when we find another sour kettle fermented unicorn, we tend to get excited. Heads lift, bodies jump, hands are suddenly waving spiritedly. To onlookers you look like you’re in a “Teach me how to Dougie” video, but you know it’s just because you’ve made a new friend for life.
Sours are delicious. They can be like wine, like vinegar, or even fruity. I love a good fruity sour, like Golden Road Brewery’s Queen of Tarts, a fine sour guava brew. It’s like a sour Haribo bear in your glass! Not in the mood for fruity? How about a traditional gose, which blends sour and salty with just a hint of citrus to make you pucker in delight. Dogfish Head Sea Quench Ale is a delightful example of this style of sour. Looking to go traditional? You can’t go wrong with a lambic, which ranges from mild to pucker your lips sour. Feeling European, try a Flanders Red, which is as close to actual vinegar as you will get in a beer.
I enjoy a touch of sour/acidity in almost everything I eat. I put vinegar on potatoes, I scarf down sauerkraut, and I generally don’t enjoy candy unless the sweet is balanced by a tangy tartness. So naturally, I would enjoy it in my beer. So why do people not like sours?
Historically, large vats of wort were left out to ferment in the open air, drawing in varying strains of wild yeast that happened to be in the neighborhood…It really is the OG beer, so you would think beer snobs would all love it (or at least pretend to.) Personally, I blame breweries like Lindemans for creating low ABV sugary sweet framboise lambics that are basically the same as opening a Smirnoff ice. People drink them and associate sours with overly sweetened, highly carbonated soda beer, instead of the delicious, varied, and highly complex fete of accidental beer ingenuity I love.
Well, well, well. Why am I not surprised that Nerd Girl here is shitting all over my beloved sour beverage. Anything that isn’t a frou-frou Belgian she disregards like an old french fry. I thought we were friends. I’m incensed! Insulted! Enraged! Ok, not really but I do have to say she is totally and utterly wrong. I’d like to refute these points one by one if I may.
Sours are super easy to swallow. Much more so than the hopped-up super IPAs where you can practically feel the scratchy hop leaves tearing holes in your esophagus. And the smell is amazing! By pungent she obviously means a tangy and fruit-filled delight for the nostrils. If by farm like you mean reminiscent of berry bushes and sweet honeysuckle wafting in the warm summer air as a slow tractor plows the field then sure, it’s farmy. There is absolutely nothing goat-like about sour beers. You know what tastes goaty? Goat anything, so if Nerdy here is drinking beer that tastes like goat cheese girlfriend needs to check and see if she is actually drinking out of the udder of a goat. Earthy and raw! These are not adjectives that are used to describe any beer, let alone a sour. I think Nerdy may be out wandering in the woods lost in sour hating haze. Oh but then the beer is too sharp and tangy, it’s a sour it’s supposed to be sharp and tangy. Hello! It’s right in the damn name. That’s like saying mint chip ice cream is too minty.
With regards to the Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Bean, I cannot comment as I have not tried them. However, the Google box tells me they are a box of Harry Potter themed candies that may trick you into thinking you are eating a cherry-flavored bean, when it is actually vomit or trash or diaper or something equally noxious. I find this comment particularly appalling. It implies that opening a bottle of sour is some sort of alcoholic roulette. Look, I get it ok? I have drank mystery house punch at many a frat party in my day and drank the king’s cup filled with a myriad of mixed booze at a house party or two. Sometimes you quite literally don’t know ‘what ya gonna git.’ But sours never disappoint. We can tell who had to spit out warheads after three seconds as a kid – nudge nudge Nerdy!
But seriously, though. Her tongue is cramping! I call shenanigans on this. The only time someone’s tongue or mouth should be cramped is after a particularly raunchy round of oral sex. And between you and me, a sour beer usually tastes better! I do appreciate Nerdy’s magnanimous admittance of color, however. Sours are always a delight for the eyes, especially when they are fermented with fruit. Pinks, purples, ochres! I’ve yet to see a blue but bring it on.
In conclusion, Nerdy is wrong.
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