Beer - #588 - Wild Beer - Sourdough

Indeed. Wild Beer Sourdough. Strange beer, strange music, strange scores and strangers at a gathering.

Collaboration with Hobbs House Bakery. Sour ale based on a Berliner Weisse.

This is a 330ml bottle,  and the beer is 3.6%ABV, that would be 108 calories in the serve, and it is .97 of a drink unit.

Brewed by Wild Beer in the style that is  Sour/Wild Ale and they are in the fine town of Shepton Mallet, England

Beer and Bread have been showing off the magic of yeast for thousands of years, we decided to combine the two.

[caption id="attachment_10928" align="alignleft" width="300"] Wild and sour.... and that's just me[/caption]

The old and the new, contemporary ideas and historical techniques and ingredients, a very special beer that combines all these things and more. 
6 months before we even had a brewery we started talking to Tom Herbert about the Hobbs House Bakery’s 58 year old Sourdough yeast, and whether we could use it to ferment a beer. Tom was excited, we were excited! 

After a year of trials (each trial took a really long time to develop) we decided to loosely base the beer on a Berliner Weisse style - a historical Sour beer style from Northern Germany, but with a Wild Beer slant to it.

We have used the 58 year old sourdough culture and a little brettanomyces and put the beer straight into oak barrels for its primary fermentation. 
It has been slowly fermenting, maturing and souring for 4 months in the barrels and will continue to evolve and develop in the bottle.

There is a lovely gentle rounded fruity sourness to this beer. It isn’t harsh, and its low alcohol makes it the perfect brunch beer to enjoy with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on some Hobbs House Bakery Sourdough.

Serve chilled.

What could possibly go wrong with that then? I'm pretty chilled most of the time...

Summer is doing that lurching into Autumn and Winter thing, one day it's shorts the next day raincoats and jumpers. Today was a bit of everything, soaked in the rain and got a 6km exercise in in the sunshine.  Anyway.

This smells of sour, which came as no surprise.

The pour was of clear like lemonade clear, until of course I poured the whole bottle and then it clouds up, it's now cloudy lemonade looking. Does look nice, even if I can't get a head on beers it looks nice.

There is a nose of sourdough bread, of course this could be just me thinking it so, but it is that sour yeasty aroma.

And gosh it's very sour, more so than I expected having read the blurb, i though it was going to be lower is all.

So after that shock, the quick nose and the sudden shock of sour I'm taking stock.

What to think though? The beer itself lacks anything that you could describe as 'body' there isn't a lot of things going on

The pdubyah-o-meter rates this as 8 a of its things from the thing. If you like sour beers this is quite interesting, not as sour as some that I've had, and at the same time this is more sour than I expected.

The double dip review

1. Am I enjoying it? After the initial shock this is quite a good sour beer and I enjoyed it.


2. Would I have another? I have some of the other Wild Beers to try, I'll come back to it maybe, maybe not.


3. Would I share with a friend on a porch and set the world to rights? I don't know, these are very specific beers, and I don't think they're for sharing and being open about, unless you're in a place where they are, if that makes sense.

Musics: Well Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds took my fancy, This is a track called "The Ballad of the Might I"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzQYtpjMjSo

The album is called 'Chasing Yesterday' I've had it on rotate for a few times and it gets better. You can find it   Here on the Spotify and the everywhere else probably

SOUR/WILD ALE

Sour ale is a broad spectrum of wild ales, from the fruity and acetic Flanders Red Ales and Oud Bruins, to the experimental ales gaining popularity in the United States which use lactobacillus, brettanomyces and pediococcus in new and wild ways.