Alvarado Riot Punch - rich, sweet, juicy
Great Notion Blueberry Muffin - sour with blueberry - nicely balanced, not too sour with a little sweetness, actually tastes a bit like blueberry muffins.
3 Likes
Strawberry Shortcake by Great Notion Brewing (Portland, OR) - Fruited Sour
As with most Great Notion sours - you get what it is written on. Sweet-tart strawberries with some cake and vanilla flavor but well balanced by the tartness of the sour. Also a very nice artwork (like most of the times with this brewery)
3 Likes
Our New IPA Needs No Introduction – Ultra West Coast IPA - Trzech Kumpli brewery - Poland. 9% 100 IBU
100 IBU! Alcohol is well hidden. I dranks a 6,9% NEIPA yesterday that tasted more alcoholic than this one. Clear taste of grains. Bitterness and resin can be felt immediately. Today I am able to say WC IPA has become one of my favourite styles. Until maybe a couple of years ago I could not drink it due to the soapy taste I used to detect. No idea what’s happened but all the recent WC IPA’s from the US and around the world that I tried have been awesome.
Manta Ray - Double IPA - Ballast Point - SD, USA. 8,5% 70 IBU
“Smells really nice” is my thought as soon as I start pouring into a glass. Smells sweeter than it tastes. Highly aromatic. Ripe apricots, melon, pineapple, tangerine and of course, lots of pine and resin. Lip-smacking bitter and crisp. Tasty! Move.Over. AleSmith. Manta Ray is my new favourite (D)IPA.
Back from walking in the woods and seasonal goodies from a farm (fresh kale and squashes).
Death By IBU - double west coast IPA - Pulfer / Maskeron collab - Croatia. 8% 100 IBU
I00 IBU! Now this gets my attention, all right! So perfume-y and hoppy smelling. Creamy and full-bodied. Bitter level is absolutely perfect (the partner can manage no more than one sip… “too bitter”). Highly resinous. Not too sweet, very balanced. So smooth, the hoppy and dry finish is long lasting. Such a nice, intense beer! And it’s not even my favourite style. Well, now it is.
Girardin Gueuze Black Label - Girardin brewery - Belgium. 5%
Whilst the hype drives price of Cantillon through the roof my bottle from 2010 still tastes like a top notch classic gueuze. Musty stapleyard smell, hay, brett, sour apples.
Takes me 2 days to finish this 750ml bottle. You don’t want to drink too much in one go or your stomach will hurt.
Madonna of Sori - Session IPA - Sori Brewing -Tallinn, Estonia. 5,3% 50 IBU
Pungent lemony. So much that’s borderline artificial. Mosaic hop can’t save this one.
Hobgoblin Gold - golden ale - Wychwood brewery - Oxfordshire, UK. (Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Co.) 4,5%
Easy drinking malty, mildly zesty and hoppy. Some hay and toast, too.
Tonka Tonka - Imperial stout - Van Moll brewery - Netherlands. 10,5%
Brewed with barley and rye malts. And tonka beans.
Creamy, bitter, full-bodied, and not too sweet. Tastes and smells a bit like coffee but it’s not really coffee. Long, powerful, bitter and “coffee” tasting finish. Very nice!
New Garash Cake - Stout - Imperial stout/Double pastry - Collab Beer Bastards Brewing (BG) & Σόλο/Solo (GR). 10%
Brewed with chocolate, walnuts and pistachios. Garash is a Bulgarian chocolate cake with walnuts and is usually topped with pistachios. My first time drinking Bulgarian beer. I’ve been to Solo brewery in Crete and enjoyed almost every beer I drank there.
Very smooth and soft. Barely sweet. I can actually taste the nuts and the 10% ABV. Would be even better if more chocolatey but rather it like this than sweeter. I think I like the beer version of the cake as I’m not a cake eater or baker.
3 Likes
Big Mother by Mother Earth Brewing Company (Vista, CA) - Triple IPA
Very smooth IIIPA with a lot of grapefruit, orange and some sweetness at the beginning, followed by some malts and a lot of resiny dank towards the end with medium bitterness (despite quite high IBU). Nearly creamy mouthfeel but not overly sirupy despite the high ABV - very easy to drink
4 Likes
Vice Pink Guava by Wild Barrel Brewing (San Marcos, CA) - Fruited Sour
Ripe guava has a nice tropical sweet taste with some mild tartness in the background. In this sour the tropical flavor is surprisingly mild and more in the background and the tartness of the fruit combined with tartness of the sour makes a beer a bit unbalanced. Not horrible but also not great.
2 Likes
Vice Nectarine Cherry by Wild Barrel Brewing (San Marcos, CA) - Fruited Sour
Excellent combination of sweetness and bursting fruit from the nectarines which is nicely balanced from the tartness of the sour. The cherries add a really interesting flavor to the tartness in the finish - outstanding sour.
2 Likes
Animal Instinct - IPA - Tanker (EE) / Van Moll (NL) Collab. 6,2% 64 IBU
Brewed with Belgian wild yeast. Estonian/Dutch collab.
I drank this beer many times both in bottles and on tap, also in the Estonian capital Tallinn where Tanker beers are quite common.
Aromatic, full of ripe tropical fruits especially mango and pineapple, but also peach. Bretty. Juicy and hoppy finish. I could drink this every day.
Breakfast Oatmeal-Stout - Ceaux brewery - Netherlands. 7%
Brewery is no longer in business but I have a forgotten bottle from some years back.
A standard, decent oatmeal stout. Not much else to say.
Enjoyed in my private Biergarten
Redlight Ale - Bitter- BRLO brewery - Berlin, Germany. 5% - 50 IB
Zutaten: Brauwasser, Malz (Pilsner Malz, Karamellmalz rot, Karamellmalz dunkel, Weizen hell), Hopfen (Polaris, Amarillo), Hefe (London Ale).
^^ I found some more info about this beer from the brewery: pilsner malt, red caramel malt, dark caramel malt, wheat. Hops: polaris, amarillo and “London ale” yeast.
(NE)IPAs are so popular and still all the rage. But finally, someone in Berlin makes an English bitter. Caramel, (rye) bread, dry, light bitter finish. Pretty nice!
Lancaster Bomber (Bottle) - Bitter - Banks’s Beer (Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Co.) UK. 4,4%
Label state “full bodied”. Well, it’s quite light, and the taste is subtle. Fizzy. Drinkable.
Choco-Lata - Irish Stout - Braukraft brewery - Bavaria, Germany. 6,2%
Micro brewery is no longer in bussiness.
Sweet and thin. Some chocolate and coffee flavour. A simple stout. Too simple.
Rosé De Gambrinus - Raspberry Lambic - Cantillon brewery - Brussels, Belgium. 5%
I remember reading about this one guy alone who decides what labels and names of beers are acceptable for the US market. Apparently he didn’t approve of this label.
I always buy this lambic at Cantillon brewery in Brussels, but this time pack of 3. I think there’s still 1 left in my stash, for next summer. Fine bubbles like champagne. Crispy and musty. Sour raspberries, straw and brett. Dry, lactic finish. Another lovely lambic by the (Cantillon) masters. Classy.
This label got some people’s knickers in a twist. Cork indicates beer was brewed in 2017 and bottled in 2018 (if I remember correctly).
The booklet is included in the tour price. You may wander and look around the brewery on your own. It’s like a big old house, really. I have got 2 booklets from 2 different visits. Guess they changed the colour to blue.
3 Likes
Five years later…,
I am a firm believer that many under appreciated drinks work great at the right time. Even Coors Light!
I was taking a bus across Nusa Tengara in Indonesia and we stopped for a break at a seedy bus stop but there was a vendor across the street selling cheap bottled shandy. Cold.
I drank one at the cart and brought one back to the bus as we pulled away. The antipodeans in the bus were looking at the shandy lasciviously and at me with outright jealousy.
2 Likes
The folks @ Industrial art sin NY will have a word w/them over the label art…
1 Like
Mango Pango by Smog City Brewing Company (Torrance, CA) - Fruited Sour
Nice sour ale with a strong mango flavor but only moderate sweetness from some peaches in background and quite a lot of tartness towards the finish. Interesting balance of extremes but very drinkable with low ABV.
3 Likes
Imperial Guava Gose by Jackrabbit Brewing Company (West Sacramento, CA) - Fruited Sour
Very one dimensional sour - tart, tart and more tart. Guava is more visible in the color of the beer and a bit on the nose but hardly recognizable as a flavor. Unflavored sours can be great but than it should be a much more complex classical sour and not a one dimensional kettle sour.
4 Likes
Pie of the Tiger Apricot by Full Circle Brewing Company (Fresno, CA) - Fruited Sour
Decent sour with surprisingly faint apricot flavor upfront (no cinnamon taste anywhere) and a lot of tartness throughout. Another one-dimensional, relatively unbalanced sour.
3 Likes
Honkman, what is an approachable, well balanced sour in your view? I found sours by buying a small (400ml?) bottle of Hannsen’s Oude Geuze a few years ago and loved it. The cost meant it was something i only treated myself to once in a while, then my dealer discontinued it.
I have tried other sours but the only other one i like is from Dogfish Head, the SeaQuench sour. It is a different beer entirely, though.
Any sour suggestions? I am a sour newby so esoteric might not be the best route for me, hence the “approachable” comment. LOL!
Obviously like with every beer style, e.g IPA, sours etc. there is always a great range of variations but I tend to define them by the “extremes”. What interested me at sours were those extremes - on one side the tart (unflavored) natural sour beers like gueuze and lambic and on the other side the (more heavily) fruited sours (but still with a good balance between sweet and sour).
For the gueuze you have already pointed to one from Hannsen and in my experience many of the good ones tend to be from Belgian and are often hard to get in the US (if somebody has good (online) sources I would love to know more.) I tend to look on beeradvocate and Untappd and see what gets good reviews/ratings and perhaps where people bought it to see if they can also be reasonably easy be purchased but it is hard to give any recommendations as those great Belgian gueuzes pop up just randomly in shops in the US. Good guezues from US breweries are rare in my experience and so great ones like Duck, Duck, Gooze from Lost Abbey are similar hard to find. US breweries tend to use more kettle sours which are much faster to make but taste very one-dimensional tart (and boring in my opinion) if they are not fruited.
Which leads to the other sour “extreme” - fruited sours where US breweries tend to have a large selection but many are (at least for me) either not fruited enough (and you taste too much of the one-dimensional tartness) or too fruited (and as my wife jokes shouldn’t be called beers any more as they are just smoothies with some alcohol in the background - but you should try one of the fruit-bomb sours just to see where your personal preference falls - 450 North Brewing is a well distributed brewery for such sours with many different flavor combinations). For the well-balanced fruited sours there are a few breweries who are good at fine tuning the flavor profiles. Not sure where you live in the US but on the west coast Great Notion is by far the best for such well-balanced sours. Other breweries worth looking for are Alvarado Street Brewing, Untitled Art and Wild Barrel. On the east coast/Boston I can highly recommend Mighty Squirrel Brewing.
Sorry not being able to give you more detailed recommendations but in my experience sours are the most controversial/hard to predict beers and it is best to test some larger variety to identify the style you like most.
One thing I found out is that fruited sours, similar to IPAs, are more sensitive to the brewing date and how they are stored in shops and at home - if the brrwing date us more than 6 months and mot stored in fridges at the store and/or home the fruit flavor tends to disappear and the sours start to get quite unbalanced.
2 Likes
Summer Oasis by Pizza Port Brewing Company (Carlsbad, CA) - IPA
Good, classical west coast IPA with citrus notes and very faint tropical aromas upfront, followed by balanced piney notes and a dry, medium bitter finish. Good, middle of the road IPA.
2 Likes
Vice Pineapple Pomegranate by Wild Barrel Brewing (San Marcos, CA) - Fruited Sour
Another very good sour from Wild Barrel even though not as good as the last two. Overall leaning more towards the tart side as pomegranate and pineapple add to the tartness but some sweetness helps to still keep it balanced enough.
4 Likes
Excellent summary for a sour newby like me! Thank you for taking the time to put this down!
Typically i am not one who likes fruity beers but i think i need to explore that end of the sour spectrum regardless.
You have given me places to start tasting first, this is going to be interesting. 
NEIPA - Lobik P.O.B. brewery - Slovenia. 6,5%
Creamy, juicy mango and pineapple loaded NEIPA. Nothing to fault. This Slovenian brewery nails NEIPA.
Amantik Coffea - flavoured sour - Zalaz brewery - Brazil. 4,8%
“Wild” ale infused with roasted coffee that had been fermented in wooden barrels.
A strange combination. Smells very much like a lambic. Funky stapleyard, wet hay. There’s a lactic taste that’s not unlike Sauerkraut. Dry and pleasantly tart. The coffee does not dominate at all but it’s clearly present. Odd flavour combination but it’s not an abomination either. At the end of the day, I still prefer plain Belgian gueuze/lambic.
The bottle cap comes off but there’s a plastic part underneath with something that lools like a pull tab which needs no strength pull out of the bottle. Belgian sours have a tremendous pressure they need corks and sometimes also cages.
2 Likes
Post Road Pumpkin Ale by Brooklyn Brewery (Brooklyn, NY) - Pumpkin Beer
Malt and biscuit heavy pumpkin ale with some pumpkin spice flavor in the background. Luckily not too overwhelming/dominant and a stronger focus on a crispy finish. Overall like a classical ale with some light spice addition.
3 Likes
Honkman listed a bunch of great breweries but most of them are regionally distributed. I’ll add a couple others on the list depending on what part of the country you live in
Florida - Tripping Animals
Upstate New York - Mortalis (my personal favorite)
Great Notion - Portland
Burley Oak - Maryland
Dewey - Delaware
Drekker - Nevada
1 Like
