Oak-Aged Chocolate Sour
Lonesome Valley Brewing

More like a soured porter than a typical "sour" of conventional expectation, this Lonesome Valley one-off—aged seven months in oak—is a novel, unexpected, and ultimately quite successful offering. It's has nice, bodied malt sweetness, with a good, mild-bitter crispness and a heap of cocoa-nib notes, along with subtle inflection of medium-roast coffee—the latter being a little stronger in the aromas than the actual taste. Completing those coffee elements, in the nose, are Belgian-sour odors: a kind of clean, dry-citric musk, as well as juicy-lemon fragrance and wild-yeasty funk. Those bright, flush scents of lemon-juice and musk are reflected in the flavor—reminiscent even to a certain extent of some of the better European sours (such as the Cuvée des Jacobins Rouge—though not nearly that good) that possess a bursting juiciness of tart and bite. Likewise, these flavors are—alongside the aforementioned chocolate-coffee porter elements—ultimately predominant in the overall taste-composition of this ale, creating a strange, inviting chimera: a sort of dark-chocolate-spiked hard lemonade, which, despite such a description, doesn't register as crap to the tongue.

Combined with the porter-like texture, which hedges pleasantly to the side of thinness, this is a right quaffable dark-malt sour; the only strain that doesn't ring out is much oak-wise, though the aging overall certainly seems to have helped the sum total. It poured nicely—with a solid but quickly-dissipating creamy, almost cherry-taupe head—from my Whitetail Wheat howler into a Three Floyds tulip-pint. Not for everyone, it's nonetheless a nice stab at blending two disparate styles, and a study of the oft-under-utilized elasticity of "the sour" and sourness as a prevailing quality. If you're a sour fan, and along that stretch of AZ-69 or AZ-89, it's worth a try.

And, indeed, I'm glad I gave this particular beer a longer try: after first tasting a one-ounce sample of Lonesome Valley's (ostensibly more conventional) Power Sour, I'd made a face, and the bartender naturally assumed I didn't like its sourness. On the contrary, it was a very malty, barely sour offering; but her suggestion that I then try a short-pour of the chocolate sour—something I might otherwise have missed—payed good dividends.