If you love sour beer you’ve come to the right place. These nine craft breweries specialize and/or focus exclusively on the creation of sour beer, using multiple souring techniques, from kettle souring to sour mashing, to barrel aging and inoculating with souring bacteria. Pucker up!
The Rare Barrel
Jay Goodwin, the cofounder and director of blending and brewing at The Rare Barrel in Berkeley, California, lives and breathes sour beer. “We make only sour beer here and we’re doing it all the time,” he says, and goes on to explain that his beers start as one of three base recipes: golden ale, red ale, and dark ale. “From there we sit down with fruits and spice and tinctures and such, and evaluate the beer’s flavors with those additions.” The results are beers such as Emerald Vision, a golden sour beer aged in oak barrels with fresh cucumber and fresh mint, or Ensorcelled, a dark sour beer aged in oak barrels with raspberries.
Cascade Barrel House
Often noted as the godfather of sour beer in the Northwest, Cascade Barrel House in Portland, Oregon, offers an array of sour beers with “aggressive tart notes balanced by residual sugars.” The brewery’s blending house currently houses more than 1,400 French oak, Kentucky bourbon, and Northwest wine barrels.