Where the Wild Beers Are

This past Saturday, I joined 100 other fans of wild and sour beers for a memorable event. It was the 4th annual "Where the Wild Beers Are" wild and sour beer tasting. Everyone was required to bring two qualifying bottles of beer and $10. The total ounces you brought, allowed you to taste the same number of ounces. Thankfully, that quickly became an unnecessary restriction.

Eric Johnson was kind enough to alert Jeremy and I about this intimate affair. Compared to the two of us, he is an expert on these beers. As you can see from the photo below, Eric always had his eye on the special bottles being opened around us.

With high ABV and super-hopped IPAs finally hitting the big time, sours and wilds could be the next major trend in American craft brewing and consumption. For the time being it still feels like an underground movement, but with the quality of beers I tasted, it is ripe and ready to explode. 

This was my shining star of the event. It was a 1992 bottle of Liefmans Kriekbier. It smelled like creme brulee and tasted like sour cherry sherbet and cream. Absolutely amazing. The only way we were able to determine the age, was because it was printed on the inside of the cork. 

There was also a homebrew section. 

My favorite homebrew was this sour scotch ale. It was a reject from a scotch ale that someone decided to age. Thanks to the sour revolution, bad beer can become good beer in 8 short months. 

New Glarus is such an awesome brewery. They make my favorite beer of all-time, Enigma. Below is one of the other crazy wild yeast beers that they only sell at the brewery.

 Halfway through the event, we were all ushered inside of Republic for a special seminar on beer blending. Several sour beers are actually blends of different aged batches. A brewery will combine 25% of a year old beer with 75% of a 3 year old beer to craft a specific flavor profile. Most of these amazing techniques are practiced in Belgium. We were able to taste how the Bockor Brewery creates their Cuvee des Jacobins Rouge at 6 different stages of their process. It was fascinating and very tasty.

 Back outside, Dave of Dave's Brewfarm was pouring three of his special saisons. This guy is all for bending the conventions of beer.

 It was a very intimate affair, the organizers could have added more people, but I am glad they didn't. There was enough variety and it never took long to get a new sample.

 Here is the "seconds" table. These were beers that had already been at a tasting station, but were opened for a while. There were no taste restrictions at this table and we could drink as much as we wanted. The quality of the beers here were so amazing and diverse that this could only happen at an event like this.

By the end of the event, organizers still had two coolers of unopened beer left over. Until next year....

This picture represents about half of the cashed bottles.

Such an amazing experience. I will have to drag Ryan Bean along next year. His schedule be damned!