There's a kind of sour beer renaissance taking place in the city's craft watering holes and no, we're not talking about the skunked cans of Bud you "discovered" in the back of your fridge. Some seriously funky and fun brews have been delighting beer geeks, who until the past few years didn't enjoy the same kind of access to these somewhat fickle, hard-to-find beers. The rest of the city caught on in the past year, with lots of folks chronicling the rise in popularity nationwide of these beers and their connection to the craft beer boom in general.
But what is a sour beer? The New Yorker as a wonderful primer on the history, production and current surge in popularity of these tart tinctures, which are said to be the oldest style of beer in the world. The tl;dr version is that in the pre-refrigeration days, some badass bacterium infected the beers, giving them a sour flavor. Modern brewers are now purposefully infecting their brews with these party animals—wild yeasts or certain bacterias mostly—in the hopes of creating a pleasing product. Unfortunately, it's not always a home run. Sometimes the resulting beers are imbued with flavors of leather, smoke and "horse blanket;" other times, it's nail polish remover, rotten apple and "baby diaper."
We reached out to Ben Wiley, bar owner and knower of beer things, for his take on the sour beer boom, which he attributes to the general movement towards small batch, artisanal food making. "People enjoy re-discovering older methods of doing things—you see this in pickles, fermented foods (which beer is!) like sour kraut and kimchi, artisanaly made anything, etc.," he told us. "And I think beer in general—but especially a style like sours where I believe the entire origin of the genre is just naturally occurring things—fits right in the whole movement."
(Courtesy Farm on Adderley)
So where can you go to imbibe some horse blanket brew? At Wiley's Glorietta Baldy they recently tapped the Rodenbach Grand Cru, a 6% ABV Flanders Red Ale-style brew with tart fruit flavors and at Mission Dolores and Bar Great Harry they've got the Other Half Lembeek, a German sour ale also with 6% ABV.
Over in Flatbush, The Farm on Adderley is "featuring funky beers in flights" this week as part of their Sour Beer Week celebration. They have four offerings, including two brews made with wild yeast (Jolly Pumpkin's Bam Noir and The Bruery's Saison de Lente) and two made by adding the Bretanomyces bacteria into the beer (Fritz Briem's 1809 Berliner Weisse and Brouwerij Verhaeghe Duchesse du Bourgogne). They'll have the brews available today through Sunday, March 30th.
Find other piquant beer inspiration at the city's best beer bars, many of whom are offering the brews on rotation. Sip on the Peekskill Simple Sour at the Blind Tiger or one of four sour beers currently being poured at The Ginger Man.
