Sour Beers At Jimmy's No. 43

WFMU's Beer Hear! with Bob W. and B.R. from 8/18/2011

Every Tuesday at about 7:30pm JIMMY'S NO. 43 hosts a beer tasting with a different theme or angle each week. It's only $10 and usually includes roughly 5 to 7 different beers. The tastings are organized and lead by Mike of UNION BEER, a local distributor of craft beer.

This past Tuesday, the theme was SOUR BEERS. While B.R. was busy judging a homebrew contest at the Heartland Brewery, I dropped by to find some regular non-beer-industry folks to talk to and see what they thought of sour beer.

Now, in general "sour" is not how beer is supposed to taste, and when most beers become sour, it's considered one of the worst possible flaws. It typically means that the beer has been contaminated by bacteria. But there are a handful of styles that, in fact, are supposed to be sour, and they achieve sourness by intentionally allowing certain bacteria strains to interact with the beer.

The beers featured were:

Jolly Pumpkin Weizen Bam (on draft)

The Bruery Saison De Lente

Orval

Jolly Pumpkin La Roja

Jolly Pumpkin Oro de Calabaza

Cantillon Pure Kriek

 Instead of talking to some expert about the beers, we thought that it would be cool to talk to some non-industry, non-beer judge people. One such person whom I had arranged in advance to talk to was WFMU's Liz Berg. Unfortunately, the the event sold out before Liz arrived, so she didn't make it in. But I recognized two people at the tasting from the street hockey league that B.R. and I play in -- Mike and Heather. So, after a little persuading, they became our guests!

 They were great to talk to, because they definitely were outside of the local inner beer scene, BUT they were not total novices when it came to craft brew. They're just getting started in homebrewing, they hit the occasional craft beer event here and there, and, most importantly, they love trying new and different styles of beer.

Our conversation about the sour beers that we sampled is part two of this week's two-part podcast. Part one, and interview with Kelly of Heartland and Kelso, is HERE.