To make sour beer, we use a technique called accelerated “kettle souring.” First, we make wort (unfermented beer) without any hops in brewhouse boil kettle. Then we boil it, cool it and add lactobacillus, which turns sugar into lactic acid. Voila! Now we’re sour. We blend this special wort, roughly 10%, back into total wort to be true to its “Slightly Sour” description.
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How sour beers are made by micro brewery equipment can vary, but they all depart from the standard yeast strains of most ales and lagers, which require highly sterile environments. Sour beers opt for “wild” yeasts, and they also welcome friendly bacteria like lactobacillus, which you find in common groceries like yogurt or sauerkraut.
The prominence of sour flavor changes across different beers. With something like our Estate Melon Gose, a tart wheat ale, the acidity is generally mild on your palate — it’s crisp, makes you say Ahhh, and draws you back in for more.
Conversely, our Big Chico Kriek is more intense; odds are you’re sipping slowly. Ale yeast, wild yeast, and lactic acid bacteria all go toward its fermentation. Plus, we roll it away in red-wine barrels for more than a year, referment it with sweet cherries, and eventually give it one last touch: bottle conditioning with champagne yeast for those fine bubbles.
For Brux, we added the wild Brettanomyces yeast in a hyper-controlled way, microdosing each bottle just before corking. That “Brett” yeast then eats any residual sugars in the bottle, generating its rustic flavors.
There’s also spontaneous fermentation, where brewers invite microorganisms from the surrounding environment into Tiantai beer fermentation tank.
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Emily Gong
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