Kettle Sours: Your New Favourite Beer?
This week, DeskBeers customers are being treated to Citrus Sour, the latest beer in Brick Brewery’s Sour Series range of kettle sours. But what are kettle sours, and why are DeskBeers so excited about them?
Once Upon A Time, brewing sour beer on purpose was an enterprise fraught with risk. Ye olde intrepid beer maker would have to contend with the unpredictability of allowing wild yeast or bacterial strains into the brew, typically by pouring it into a koelschip/coolship (a big wide trough thing) and letting the local atmosphere (and probably wildlife) have at it. The resulting concoction would then need to be kept in barrels for absolutely ages, before being ceremoniously poured down ye olde drain at the following year’s Harvest Festival or whatever, if it didn’t turn out well.
I’m being a mite facetious, but truthfully the above is a fair description of traditional sour beer production; and although there is a clutch of breweries who make brilliant sour beers the old-fashioned way (3 Fonteinen and Cantilion in Belgium; Burning Sky and Wild Beer in the UK; Jester King in the US), sour beer was for a long time off limits to many brewers — until something called kettle souring came along.
In a previous article on the blog, we wrote about how New England Pales and IPAs were being developed in a spirit of trial-and-error, because nobody really knows for sure where that unique NEPA/NEIPA character is coming from in the brewing process. Well, it’s fair to say that kettle souring has freed up a different kind of experimentation, paradoxically enough by stabilizing the conditions for the production of “sourness”. Basically, kettle souring — adding a measure of Lactobacillus bacteria (for example) to the brew kettle during brewing — guarantees a successful souring process, freeing up the brewer to undertake flavour experiments with a degree of impunity. You can read a more technically in-depth piece on kettle souring over at The New School.
Needless to say, a successful souring process ≠ a successful sour beer, but this development does make sour beers a realistic option for a greater number of breweries. No doubt there is a Campaign for Real Sour starting up somewhere, which regards this new method as a heresy, but as far as we’re concerned, we can’t wait to see kettle souring really take off in the UK craft brewing community.
And taking off it is. Brick Brewery, of Peckham, are leading exponents of the style. Their new Citrus Sour (pictured above) is the fifth instalment in their Sour Series, and it’s definitely a winner. Hopped with Centennial, and made with orange, lemon and grapefruit from food charity FareShare, it’s refreshing, zesty, and bursting with flavour. We reached out to Brick to find out more about their connection to kettle sours:
Our background in sours simply came from the fact that people were starting to look for flavoursome, lower alcohol beer. Given the increased interest and popularity in sour beers, we thought that for Brick creating a sour beer would be a great way to cater to those needs. We started with our Rhubarb Sour and the reaction was simply incredible; things just evolved from there! Having a Sour Series means that we now get to experiment with all sorts of flavours, and it’s also a great way in which we can incorporate locally sourced and seasonal produce to create incredibly interesting, lower ABV beers.
Flavoursome and low ABV: a DeskBeers bullseye. But also, that key word “experiment” is at the root of things here. What’s quite clear is that neither the increasing popularity of sour beers, nor the freedom to experiment with them, would be possible without the guaranteed efficacy of the kettle souring process. We’ll drink to that.
Like the sound of Brick and wanna try their beers? We’re offering 20% off your first Regular Delivery with the code BRICK20. The code will be valid till we’ve sold out of these beers (about a week from the time of publishing), so don’t hang about!
