For the past few years, sour beers have been growing in popularity, both on the commercial scene and among homebrewers. We’ve seen a few all-sour breweries appear, many tasty one-offs from breweries of all sizes, and some breweries that have committed to a sour brand in their lineup. Homebrewers have been represented soundly on the competition circuit as well, with barrel-aged Flanders reds and browns, “pseudo Lambics (pLambics),” Berliners, and more recently, the Gose, that salty wheat beer from Goslar and Liepzig, Germany.
For the most part, brewers have been content to take their best stab at a recipe and “get what they get.” More recently, however, notable strides have been made to achieve better predictability, cleaner profiles, and repeatability. A big piece of this has been closer monitoring of pH on the front side and recording titratable acidity (TA) in the finished beer, especially for blending purposes.
If you’d like to go a bit deeper in your own attempts at sour beers, it isn’t too hard to shorten the learning curve and make all that time and effort count with just a bit of understanding and a few measurement tools.