Beer is expropriating one of wine’s most sacred rituals—the high art of methode Champenoise—and coming up with a whole new beer style: Bière de Champagne.
Sourness—or more precisely, tartness—is the defining trait of American Wild Ale. Essentially, it’s beer gone bad, contaminated by the very stray microorganisms that Louis Pasteur discovered were mucking up perfectly good beer 130 years ago.
This insidious practice of cramming a cheap lemon rind atop a luscious, aromatic glass of Hefeweizen—the taproom equivalent of slobbering ketchup all over a perfectly grilled T-bone from Morton’s—has got to stop.