Elfreth's Barrel-Aged Sour
Yards Brewing Co.

I picked up a 64 oz growler of this by mistake when stocking up during the lockdown. I’ve never known Yards for their sours, and I didn’t feel too optimistic that I’d be overly impressed with this one. I didn’t realize it was a barrel-aged sour till coming to BA, and I don’t know what type of barrel, but this is an excellent ‘wild ale’ that checks all of my favorite aspects of this style. It has a unique color to it that stands out in the sunlight - a darker amber, brilliantly clear and accentuated by bright streaks of orange and a thin white cap. The nose is deceptively subtle, even as it warms, with the faint sweetness of summer fruit (berries?). Later into the beer I started to pick up on more earthy and delicately yeasty aromas. On first sip, my impression was that I had lucked into a refreshingly effervescent and uniquely sour ale that had some real depth to it. Nothing better to be sipping on a hot summer evening in July when there’s no place to go and nobody to see. Just sitting out back listening to the birds and cicadas about an hour before sunset. As for the smell (which I might have mistaken for cherries and now raspberries), the dank earthiness doesn’t come to the front of Elfreth’s till it warms. All the way through on the taste side however, there is a dominating, lingering dry sourness that I found really pleasant. It took a couple of sessions, over a weekend to get through 64oz., but the beer didn’t change much for the worse, by the last of it. It just changed in it’s complexity as a quick dose of oxidation under constant refrigeration took place. But make no mistake, this is a beer that is best served fresh and cold, and most anyone would find it immediately refreshing. For me, this is just a great beer to sit back and relax with. It’s a sipping beer and massively assertive at first, but as your palate adjusts (like when popping in a sour candy), the beer warms and loses some of its fizziness, and then the more complex character of this beer comes through. The downside is that once most of the cap is gone, the beer starts to feel thin, but this is just the thing that makes this beer more appealing for most when cold. I like it when it’s right out of the fridge, I really like it when most might be thinking, ‘did someone drop something in my beer when I wasn’t looking?’ In other words, there is very little on the sour end that I find offensive unless a beer has obviously gone bad (like the 5+ yr. old Tuck Stout I had to drain pour last week). If that’s not you, then enjoy a cold, smaller pour, first. If that is you, then pour a nice 0,47 in your favorite glass and sit out back, or just by a window, and watch the world around you while slowly letting Elfreth open up to you. I found that I can sometimes learn more by just being still and observing.