Food & Drink: Sours are perfect beer for cocktail lovers

Sour beers get their flavor from microbes. In Old World beer, tanks are left open to wildly ferment using the microbes that have been used in that particular brewery for centuries to give the beer a particular flavor. At 54-40, Minister uses a kettle sour technique. This is a controlled process where Nancy’s yogurt is added after the normal brewing process to the kettle and the lactobacillus in the yogurt sours the beer.

Minister explained, “The way we do it is we run off our beer into the kettle, as usual, and then we boil for about five minutes to kill anything wild that may be there; so, we can try to control it there. Then we cool it down to about 115 degrees, and, then we go and get Nancy’s yogurt, which is full of probiotics — those are the bugs we pitch in there. Then we leave it for about two and half days. We usually do these on a Friday and then on Monday we put the kettle on and at that point the ph has dropped down to the sourness level that we want. Then, we turn on the kettle, we kill all the bugs and then we ferment it as usual with our normal yeast. Then we add hops and downstream of that we add fruit. It’s a very American way to do sour beers.”

He added, “There are definitely brewers who are the old school, the old guard, who think this is a bastard way to make sour beers. But, it’s a lot of fun and people really take to them.” This unique flavor (some liken it to Sour Patch Kids), makes this a good beer for people who don’t think they like beer; particularly, people who prefer wine or spirits.

On my visit, I tried a guava gose called Go Go Gadget Guava Gose. A gose is a sour beer that has a bit of salt (this gose has only 12 ounces of salt added for 10 barrels of beer). In this case, the salt is a pink Himalayan Sea Salt. The beer has a lager color to it, but as I brought it to my mouth, I smelled the guava. The beer was sour, with a touch of salt, and a kick of tropical guava at the end. The salt enhanced the other flavors, the way a flaky sea salt does on a chocolate chip cookie.

After getting a sour beer education from Minister, I decided to try some other local sours. I went to Heathen Brewing’s Feral Pub and sampled their Mojito Sour Ale. It looked like a beer; but, it tasted like a Mojito — with zesty notes of lime and mint. This is the perfect beer to convert a cocktail drinker.

I also tried Trap Door Brewing’s Blackberry imPEACHment — a blackberry and peach sour. It was tongue-tingling sour with just a hint of fruit. It’s as if someone melted a bag of Sour Patch Kids (minus a lot of sugar) and added alcohol.

Sours have many names — Lambics, gose, Flanders Red Ale, Berliner Weisse, and American-Style Sour Ales. If you’re seeking something different to drink, I encourage you to seek out these tongue-tinglers at our Clark County breweries.

Rachel Pinsky can be emailed at couveeats@gmail.com. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @couveeats.