"Beware the kettle sour beer"

Another way to get sour beers is to use sauergut from a bioreactor.

 

At the end of the day, I care most about the product, not so much the process. Some of the best sour beers I have had were kettle soured, others were traditionally soured. The traditionally soured one's cost upwards of $30 or more per 750mL bottle, the kettle soured as low as $7 for a 22oz bottle for something I perceived as equally awesome to each other. Needless to say, I can tell you what I buy more of!

 

Precisely. Would I spend $30 on a Breakside Passionfruit Sour? Fuck no, but at $6 for a 22oz bottle it is a damn tasty little beer that hits the spot when I'm craving something tart and refreshing.

 

He plays the heel well... Right up there with Magee.

 

I suppose my only gripe is when you ask the breweries and they lable it as a "BA sour". There are a few breweries in SD that do the kettle sour thing. Yet they will never admit to it, rather they'll call it a traditional sour and sell it for 13-20 a bottle.

Just call it a berliner and leave it at that

 

I like kettle sours, my favorites right now are Creature Comforts Athena and Westbrook Gose. 6pk of Athena is $10 and 6pk of westbrook gose $11

 

That's pretty bad if they mis-label a kettle sour as a barrel aged sour. I can see avoiding the word "kettle" on the bottle, but to use "traditional" or fake a barrel age would be horrid.

 

One point people forget, most traditional sours are also blends. You might be drinking 75% young beer...and paying the price of 100% aged beer

 

I don't even see the pricepoint being a problem so much as the perception. More brewers seem to do it as a means to get in on the sour game without a lot of risk or investment, resulting in a public with a skewed idea about what "sour beer" entails, & a brewery with unearned credibility.

 

Credibility - Did they make a great beer that people loved. If yes, than credibility is earned whether it is kettle soured or not!

Personally, I think it's a great way for breweries to build a market that will eventually crave some of the more barnyard funk that barrel souring typically creates. It's like saying all beers should be naturally carbonated, sure I'd love that, but force carbonation is a shortcut in the process.

 

What if they Kettle sour, ferment in stainless, and condition in a barrel?

James Howat, owner and head brewer at Former Future Brewing Co. and Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales, is known to wear a T-shirt that says “Death to Kettle Sours.”...He acknowledges not all kettled sours are bad. But the ones that are, are putrid with major flaws, producing beers that smell like vomit or hot Dumpsters....
Traditional aged-sours can transform those bad flavors and tastes. Vomit, for example, can become a pineapple smell.
“But that doesn’t happen in two weeks.”

I don't think any brewer worth his mash paddle would try to crank out a sour beer in 2 weeks. The same reason you don't blast out a RIS in 2 weeks. That is what your flagship beers are for.

 

Also Kettle Souring is a great way to not have a plume of lacto, pedio, brett coating every surface of your brew house thus giving even your non intentionally sour beers a risk of infection or this vaguely belgian-esq vibe.

Easy sour Easy clean up and everything is boiled.

 

I've got no problems with kettle sour for Berliners or Gose; but for a saison/wild, forget it. I think people sometimes get caught up on the 'sour' part of it. That's not the primary goal. You can't rush funk and complexity. While it would be awesome for a great wild to be inexpensive (and lambic beer isn't expensive in Belgium, it's jacked up by distributors here), I'm not going to pay a penny for a crappy beer when there are awesome real lambic beers on the shelf for cheaper than most American counterparts (and better).

 

Every time someone uses the word, "worried," in craft beer, it makes me wonder about their true intentions.

 

Which is fine for something like a Berliner. But if you want to get into the rustic saison/wild game, you have to put in the investment. Cutting corners always leads to inferior products.

 

My only beef with the priced accordingly logic is that, for example, lovingly aged Cantillon lambics are like $8-$9 USD at the brewery. There's this mistaken notion domestically that all of a barrel-aged beer (whether it be sour, a stout, or otherwise) is tied to production costs, when clearly that's not the case. Sure, production costs are a piece of the pricing puzzle, but I tend to think we overvalue that piece and undervalue simple stuff like market demand/supply (i.e., people love Cantillon in the US; very little makes it here; ergo, it costs $30-$40.)

In any case, there's a piece of me that says, re: pricing, if folks like kettle sours enough to pay whatever prices are being charged, who are we to stop 'em?

 

Should've clarified - the credibility of having a "sour beer" in their portfolio without actually making a good one.

 

Reading the article, that explains why many Gose (Kettle soured?) has a nasty sulfur like smell to them while many barrel aged wild ales have that awesome barnyard funk smell (well I love the horseblanket smell anyway).

 

Both styles are very old and kettle sours are a style that dates back to a recorded history of the 1500s so the style is probably even older than that.. sour is one of the oldest beer styles dating back 3000 to 4000 thousands years.

 

Gotcha...I think I get what you are trying to say.