THE SOUR SIDE

Beer writer and newly Certified Cicerone (pronounced pronounced "sis-uh-rohn" – like a beer sommelier), Denise Garland, explores the fruity versatility of a quenching sour brew.

Sour beers are always my favourite summer style. They can vary from fruity and slightly tart, to mouthpuckeringly sour – and hit every note in between. Sour beers provide brewers with the chance to be experimental; to try new flavour combinations using a sour beer base, and to give drinkers the chance to experience flavour combinations that are difficult to find in other styles.

BERLINER WEISSE

The most common style of sour beer sold in New Zealand is the Berliner Weisse –traditionally an incredibly sour beer of under 4% ABV founded in Berlin, which could be flavoured with sweet syrups to make them more palatable. Here in Aotearoa, the style tends to be a little stronger – often as high as 5% ABV. And while you can still find plain and very sour versions of the style, most brewers add fruit or dry hops to provide drinkers with more flavour in every mouthful.

The sour beer market has grown significantly in the past few years thanks to the Berliner Weisse, with its quick and easy method of souring in the brew kettle, allowing breweries to create sour beers quickly, cost-effectively and on a large scale. Until the style’s introduction in Aotearoa in the mid-2010s, finding a sour beer on tap at a bar was a rare occurrence, while supermarkets like New World say a few years ago the idea of a supermarket stocking sour beer was almost incomprehensible.

But in 2015, Warkworth’s 8 Wired brewed the country’s first large-scale batch of a Berliner Weisse; a dry-hopped version called Hippy Berliner. 8 Wired’s owner and brewer, Søren Eriksen, says he decided to brew it because there weren’t really any available in New Zealand. “Back in those days most of the beers that we brewed were beers that you couldn't otherwise really find, and that's how most of our beers really came about in the beginning,” he says.

Denise Garland is a journalist and a Certified Cicerone with with a love of all things beer. She has been writing about beer for a decade and was the winner of the 2019 Brewers Guild Beer Media Award. She has previously worked in hospitality in Christchurch, Wellington and Edinburgh. Denise home brews – though not as often as she’d like – and has been a judge in several home brew and commercial beer competitions.

“We wanted something sour in the market and especially in those days, the whole kettle souring thing was new – not many, if any [breweries] in New Zealand were doing it, but I had heard about it from overseas. So we thought we should try that, and a Berliner Weisse was an obvious first choice.”

The success of Hippy Berliner inspired other breweries to try their hand at the style, and now, less than seven years on, most craft beer bars will offer a sour beer on tap all year round, and sours are taking up more space on the shelves of offlicences, now with six-packs available at supermarkets and liquor stores.

FLAVOUR COMBINATIONS

Most sour beers on the market these days will be brewed with fruit; berries, passionfruit and citrus are particularly popular ingredients. Because the basic kettle sour beer is pretty plain – essentially tasting like a sour lemon with bread-like notes – the addition of fruit gives the beer a unique character, and it allows the fruit flavour to really shine through.

8 Wired Cucumber Hippy

At 8 Wired, they’ve continued to release seasonal kettle sours under the Hippy moniker, with the style a perfect base to showcase produce when in season, like mandarins, or even slightly unusual flavours, like celery salt. Eriksen says they’re a hit with consumers. “I think if you add up all the different varieties of Hippy that we do, it’s probably almost the biggest selling beer we have.” He adds that their Hippy beers sales always increase over summer.

8 Wired’s Søren Eriksen

The increased popularity of sour beers over summer probably has something to do with their high acidity; there are few beers on the market that can quench your thirst like a sour. Eriksen describes kettle sours like Berliner Weisses as “a quaffing kind of beer.” The wide range of sour beer flavours – from peach to feijoa – is also more varied than any other beer style on the market, making each sour beer on the shelf taste very different to the one next to it, encouraging drinkers to keep trying new flavour combinations.

FRUIT FORWARD

Deep Creek in Silverdale, just north of Auckland, also finds their kettle soured beers sell best during summer, and at their peak, they are just as popular as their stalwart pale ales. Brewery co-founder Paul Brown says the strongest sour sales tend to coincide with the hottest weather. “I've actually found in the past they sell best in January and February, rather than in November and December which is typically where most things sell strong,” he says.

Deep Creek’s sour beer trio

The brewery has recently changed their approach to how they produce their kettle sours, and rather than adding fruit during the fermentation process, they’ve released a fruited sour trio where the fruit is added to the beer after it has finished fermenting.

Brown says that results in an even more intensely juicy, sweeter and fruit-forward sour beer. “We like to add fruit in [the sour beer] because it gives us some extra interest and flavour. We've made some straight Goses [salted sour beers] and straight Berliner Weisses before, but I just find that your general consumer wants a little bit more of an added flavour.”

Deep Creek’s Paul Brown

Those tart, fruit-forward flavours result in a beer that is nothing like the lagers, pale ales, or IPAs that make up the biggest chunk of the New Zealand market. And that’s one thing that makes them so popular – they’re so different, that they actually have qualities more similar to a cider or kombucha, than the flavours found in more common New Zealand beer styles. As a result, people who don’t generally like beer, can often have their minds changed when they try a sour.

VERSATILITY

Brown says some people do get a surprise when they try a sour beer, because they are often expecting more typical malt and hop flavours – so he has advice for bars and restaurants wanting to stock sours: “When we first started making [kettle sours], some people just got a bit of shock from the completely different flavour profile. At that point in time, I was just saying, ‘Look, just think of a cider before you drink it, because it's got more tartness and is a little bit crisper like a cider’. And I found that you got a completely different response to it when you took that preconceived ‘beer’ notion out of their mind.”

As Brown identified there, sour beers are unique in that they tend to be enjoyed by people who don’t consider themselves beer drinkers, providing a great loweralcohol option for those who tend to drink wine and RTDs for their fruitier flavours or sweetness.

Sours are also incredibly versatile beers, in that they are a great option to just drink on their own, or to have alongside a meal. 8 Wired’s Søren Eriksen says the tartness in these beers makes them a perfect partner for a wide range of foods. “It works really well with a lot of different things because it cleanses your palate, so any kind of fatty food or spicy food. I wouldn't have it with a dessert… because it would clash too much, and nothing too heavy – you wouldn't have it with a stew or something like that, but in between, there’s a wide range of foods.” He says Thai food and Asian flavours in particular would pair well with a sour.

One thing to watch out for when partnering sour beers with food, however, are those extra flavours – usually fruits – added by the brewer. A sour with citrus or tropical fruit is likely to be easier to partner with a lighter dish like seafood, salad or chicken, compared to a berry sour, which will likely pair better with pork or red meat dishes.

The versatility of sour beers though, is something that tells me there is much more growth to come in this area. The style has always been a space where brewers can experiment; sweeter icecream and slushie sours have become more common recently, while pomelo, rosewater and avocado have all been featured ingredients in sours over recent years. But there’s scope for much, much more fun – from both a brewing perspective, and as a bar perspective.

As traditional cocktails continue to make a comeback, it provides the opportunity for our country’s brewers to try their hand at creating sour beer versions of those highly Instagrammable beverages – particularly those with a citrus or other sour fruit kick. While some have dabbled in this space, there is huge room for more of this. But not only that, sour beers also provide the perfect base to create a bar’s own unique cocktails with. A gin and Berliner Weisse showcasing citrus or cucumber would make a delicious twist on a traditional gin and tonic, while a heavily-fruited sour with a splash of rum could provide a twist on a fruit daiquiri. ■