Beer Geek’s Guide to Sour – Beer That Makes Your Gums Tingle

There’s this one beer style that nine out of ten dentists wouldn’t recommend.
Sour beers are still very popular, and we do recommend them.

There are in total five different categories for sour beers in the Pint Please app. In this post we’ll get to know a little about the history and characteristics of these different subcategories.

Especially when you’re adding a new sour beer to Pint Please, take a glance at this post, if you’re not sure which category to choose.

Sour / Wild Ale

Sour or wild ale is the name that is typically used for a sour beer. It’s easy to determine where the name ‘sour ale’ comes from. But what about ‘wild ale’? Actually these two styles do have different kinds of aspects that set them apart. 

The term ‘wild’ refers to the wild yeast or bacteria used during the fermentation process. But all wild ales aren’t simplistically sour ales. Though most of the wild ales are sour, sourness isn’t still guaranteed. Sour ale instead is always sour, but it’s not always brewed using wild fermentation. 

It’s good to remember that wild beer is actually a historical category, since every beer used to be wild-fermented before we could make it ‘clean’ with our improved hygiene standards.  

The best beer in this category, according to Pint Please stats, is Blueberry Chocolate Coffee & Vanilla Sour, brewed together by Collective Arts Brewing, a Canadian brewery, and Stillwater, a nomadic brewery. Its average rating in Pint Please is 3.73. More than a traditional, this sour rather a pastry sour. 

Sour Red / Brown

There’s an own category for sour beers depending on their colour, but that’s not the only thing that matters. Red and brown sours are unique categories for Belgian sour ales. They all come from the Flanders area, and on the strength of that they’re protected by UNESCO as part of the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.

What makes Flemish ales so unique is the particular bacteria used in the fermentation that gives the beer its acid character when aged for years. Red and brown ales are very similar, when compared with each other,  in aroma and flavour, but also in appearance. So you can’t really distinguish which one is which by tasting.

If there are some differences that you can point out between these two styles, it’s because of the little dissimilarities during the fermentation. For example, Rodenbach, a Flemish red sour, is aged in oak barrels or foeders, while Liefmans, a Flemish brown sour, is aged in steel tanks.

However, according to Pint Please stats, with an average rating of 3.72 the best-rated sour in this particular subcategory is Rodenbach Alexander, brewed by Brouwerij Rodenbach (Swinkels Family Brewers). Alexander is actually a mix of beer aged for two years and much younger beer that has been subjected to maceration with sour cherries. 

Berliner Weisse

As the name goes, Berliner Weisse is a German beer style, originally from Northern Germany, but nowadays brewed around the world. It’s actually a version of wheat beer. It has been produced since the 16th century with a fermentation that uses a mixture of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. It has more sourness than wheat in its taste, and the alcohol volume is typically quite low. 

Berliner Weisse, or champagne of the north, as Napoleon put it, is a pale and unfiltered beer style, very light and dry in its flavour. The style is also suitable for added taste, like fruits and berries, which makes it even more refreshing to drink. 

The best-rated Berliner Weisse in Pint Please is Fizzy Lemon, brewed by Swedish Morgondagens Bryggeri, with an average rating of 3.81. It includes red berries and lemon, which makes it soft and sweet in its taste. That’s why it’s actually called Triple Fruited Candy Weisse. 

Gose / Grodziskie / Lichtenhainer

Gose is another sour beer style that originated in Germany. Its typical characteristics are lemon sourness, herbal flavours and maritime saltiness. Gose has usually a moderate alcohol content. It’s nowadays quite popular again, but it has a history as long as a thousand years. 

Grodzkie instead is a historical Polish beer, made from oak-smoked wheat malt. Because of its high carbonation levels, the beer style is also called Polish Champagne, but unlike in Berliner Weisse, sourness isn’t actually a main character. 

Lichtenhainer, instead, is kind of a mixture of the two earlier named styles, since it has sour as well as smoky flavours. It also comes from Germany, from the middle part of the country, called Thuringia. 

The best-rated international beer in this subcategory of Pint Please is a gose called Torm, brewed by a well-known Estonian brewery Põhjala. Its average rating is 3.62. Torm is quite sour in its flavour and has notes of honey, citrus, lingonberry and heather.

Sour IPA / Wild IPA

A lot of beer styles are nowadays going through an amalgamation process, where different kinds of beer styles are mixed with each other, because beer enthusiasts are always craving for something new.

That’s how Sour IPA or Wild IPA was invented, I guess. In a Sour IPA, the tartness of a sour ale and the fruity hoppyness of an IPA are combined together, and they actually get along very well. The difference between a sour and a wild IPA is the same as between a sour and a wild ale. 

This category is the newest one mentioned in this post, others being rather historical beer styles. But there are still quite a lot of sour and wild IPAs on the markets. The best one according to Pint Please users, at the moment, is an English Pompelmocello, brewed by Siren Craft Brew Ltd. It’s a tart and juicy IPA seasoned with grapefruit juice, zest and lactose. It’s average rating is 3.60.