I love how beer and brewing just keep evolving. A few basic choices spawn a rainbow of beer styles to fit every taste. Then, certain exotic flavors with maybe one or two examples expand like the rare-elements section of the periodic table.
Sour beers are a case in point. Once they were mainly represented by Belgian lambic, Berliner weisse, and sanitation errors. Except for that last one, they were not particularly easy to brew at home.
To tackle a lambic-style beer, you’d have to find or cultivate a list of special bugs to infect your wort, and you probably ought to have a wooden barrel, if only for the ambiance. The Berliner path was somewhat less daunting, but its character was more simplistic than its Belgian cousin. Brewers exploring this corner of the beer world eventually popularized the technique of kettle souring. In turn, that helped lead to the revival of gose, whose brackish wheat base has become a pliable foundation for a multitude of spiced and fruited specialty beers. These days, the average bottle shop is well stocked with beers based on those methods, even when they don’t bother to reference either of those styles.