Tart, Fruity and Dry

With the onset of spring, it’s time for fruit beers! And, the finest and most complex fruit beers of all are sour fruit beers! The addition of fruit to sour beers elevates them to a whole new level. Even sour beer purists find fruited versions a guilty pleasure that can be hard to resist. Not surprisingly, Belgian brewers, who have brewed sour beers for centuries, have led the way with fruited sours. Interestingly, modern fruit sours have not been around all that long. The Belgians first started adding tart cherries to the sours in 1930, calling them Krieks. By the 1950s, Framboise (sour raspberry ales) were being made, and by the 1980s, peaches were added to produce Peche. Today, almost any fruits you can think of are finding their way into Lambics and Flanders ales. These include grapes, plums, apricots, strawberries, blueberries, apples, bananas, coconut and blackberries, just to name a few.

Shifting Customer Preferences

Traditional fruited Lambics are made by adding whole fresh fruit directly into casks, where the simple sugars in the fruit fully ferment out, leaving the beer with natural fruit flavors and a dry finish. By the 1980s, however, traditional fruit Lambics were losing popularity. A range of sour beers, made with fruit juice concentrates and syrups, were immediately pasteurized when the fruit products were added. The resulting beers were quite sweet, many of them excessively so, with a strong cloying finish. The chart below shows which Lambics are sweet and which are traditional and dry.

Barrel Room with Sour Beers

What Makes a Fruit Sour Good?

A well-made traditional fruit Lambic or Flanders Ale has intense fruit aromas and flavors, but they do not overpower the other ingredients. They instead add a depth of complexity that is balanced and harmonious, with a dry finish. These days, with sour beers being brewed extensively in Belgium, Germany and the United States, there are more to choose from than ever. While many American breweries make excellent traditional fruit sours, the proliferation of kettle sours has resulted in many people rejecting sours in general. That’s not to say that all kettle sours are bad. Good ones are subtle and can add a nice bump of tartness to fruit beers. But many kettle sours are one-dimensional, overly acidic, and harsh, which is a turn-off. Not surprisingly the Belgians do not produce kettle sours.

Bruz Fruit Sours

Bruz Da’Vine Revenant

Bruz Beers has been making fruit sours for some time now. We prefer to use traditional Belgian methods, and have achieved some amazing results. Last year our Oak Marionette with Peaches took the Gold Award at the European Beer Star competition for barrel-aged sour beers. Our most recent traditional fruit sour is Da’Vine Revenant, a rustic ale made with wheat, barley and whole fresh Marquette grapes. Its release date is May 3rd and it will be available in corked and caged bottles and on draft in our taprooms. In the coming months we will also be releasing Oh Blackberry, a golden strong sour with blackberries.

Ask about the selection of fruit sours available at your favorite beer stores and welcome spring and summer with a tart and refreshing glass of fruited beer.

Santé!