On some level, what you’re about to read is the most schizophrenic of all Paste blind tastings. Approaching “sour beers” or “wild ales” for this style of tasting is like venturing into a quagmire of conflicting styles and substyles—you’re just hoping to find your way out again, when all is said and done. Every beer just raises further questions about which other beers should be included. Fruited vs. neutral? Kettle sours vs. barrel-aged sours? Different strains of bacteria and wild yeast? How do you compare all of them to each other? And what of other “sour beer” styles that are now better defined in the American market, such as Berliner weisse or gose?

In the end, the only way is to make a decision and stick with it. This is a large tasting, and a wide-ranging one that includes beers from some of the country’s most sought-after sour beer producers. It includes many styles of beer, brewed with a dizzying array of fruits, spices, barrels and strains of funk-forward yeast and bacteria. Some of these beers bear a passing resemblance to each other. Others are so uniquely bizarre that we barely knew what to do with them.

It’s perhaps easiest to simply state which types of beer were NOT included: Saison/farmhouse ale, Berliner weisse and gose. There are plenty of tart saisons, but as you probably recall, we just blind-tasted 116 of them last month. Berliner weisse and gose, on the other hand, are so well established now on their own that each of them really deserves its own tasting—something that we will address in the August tasting, which will tackle gose specifically.

Everything else that is tart in the world of beer can be found in this tasting. Flanders red ales and oud bruins are alongside dry-hopped American kettle sours, which are alongside oak-aged fruited sours and other beers freshly dumped from whiskey or tequila barrels. You might say that the only other requirement is that the beer must be sour—or at least claim to be. So let’s get started, and let the best tart beer win.

A Note on Beer Acquisition

As in most of our blind tastings at Paste, the vast majority of these sours were sent directly to the office by the breweries that choose to participate, with additional beers acquired by us via locally available purchases and the occasional trade. We always do our best to reach out to breweries we’re aware of that make exemplary versions of particular styles, but things always do slip through the cracks. We apologize for a few significant omissions that we couldn’t acquire, either due to seasonality or market shortages. There will never be a “perfect” tasting lineup, much as we continue to try.

Rules and Procedure

- As explained above, this is exclusively a tasting of sour/wild ales, largely determined by how the breweries chose to label their products. Nothing labeled as “saison/farmhouse ale, berliner weisse or gose” was admitted. There was no ABV limit. When in doubt, we simply allow a brewery’s marketing to define a beer’s style, and expect them to stick to the designation they’ve chosen.

- There was a limit of two entries per brewery. The beers were separated into daily blind tastings that approximated a sample size of the entire field.

- Tasters included professional beer writers, brewery owners, brewmasters and beer reps. Awesome, Paste-branded glassware is from Spiegelau.

- Beers were judged completely blind by how enjoyable they were as individual experiences and given scores of 1-100, which were then averaged. Entries were judged by how much we enjoyed them for whatever reason, not by how well they fit any kind of preconceived style guidelines. As such, this is not a BJCP-style tasting.

The Field: Sours/Wild Ales #s 143-51

This was, at times, a confusing and difficult tasting for our judges. Tackling a lineup every afternoon that has beers made with 10 different varieties of fruit can be a perplexing experience for one’s taste buds, and some of the results were unexpected. There were relatively unheralded breweries that performed exceptionally, and some brewers considered among the best in the world that missed out on the ranked portion of the list. In short, it was a good example of the kind of results that make blind tastings so interesting.

The best beers in this tasting were often the ones with some semblance of balance. There are a disproportionate number of beers in The Field that missed out on the top 50 because on some level they were just too bombastic—often too tart, without any balancing quality to rein in all that acid. Rule of thumb: “bile” is not the kind of quality you want to evoke in a fruited sour. If it seems like something that would be best used to shine up tarnished old pennies, your sour beer might be getting away from you a little bit. But at the same time, there are many ways to make an exemplary beer—balance may be one of them, but others you can’t help but love for the purity with which they channel specific flavors. There are examples here that succeed both with bombast and subtlety.

As ever, the following beers are simply listed in alphabetical order, which means they are not ranked. I repeat: These beers are not ranked.

Adirondack Puree: Tart Cherry

Avery Ginger Sour

Ballast Point Sour Wench

Beachwood Blendery Coolship Chaos

Black Project Supercruise

Boneyard Gooze Cruise

Boulevard Love Child #8

Braxton The Pot Calling the Kettle Sour

Braxton Yesterday’s Headlines

Breakside B-Sides # 4

Brewery Vivant Angelina

Burial Fall of the Damned

Burlington Beer Co. You Can’t Get There From Here (Strawberry Rhubarb)

Burlington Beer Co. You Can’t Get There From Here (Blackberry, Black Currant)

Calicraft Zinfandel Sour Ale

Carton Brewing Co. Dune Fruit

Carton Brewing Co. Monkey Chased the Weasel

Casa Agria Heritage Gold

Cascade Brewing Apricot Ale

Cerebral Brewing/TRVE Brain Transplant

Cigar City Lactobacillus Guava Grove

Creature Comforts Triangulation

Destihl St. Dekkera Vuile Blonde

Destihl Synchopathic Sour

Dogfish Head Alternate Takes #5

DuClaw Sour Me This

Epic Oak and Orchard (Blueberry, boysenberry, black currant)

Finch Beer Co. Tacocat

Firestone Walker SLOambic

4 Hands Brewing Co. Kriek

Four Quarters Brewing Sour 47

Fulton Beer Culture Project Series One

Funkwerks Luminoso

Funkwerks Raspberry Provincial

Goose Island Gillian

Goose Island Lolita

Grand Teton Sour Brown

Great Raft You, Me and Everyone We Know 002 (peach)

Great Raft You, Me and Everyone We Know 004 (pluot)

Green Flash Nouveau Tarte

Green Flash Passionfruit Kicker

Half Acre Pennon

Henniker Brewing Co. Sour Flower

Henniker Brewing Co. Queen Pollyana

Hi-Wire Brewing Blackberry Sour

The Hourglass Brewery Violet

Indeed Brewing Co. Lucy

Ipswich Ale Brewery Bramble On

Ipswich Ale Brewery Cranberry Beret

Iron John’s Copper Sky

Jester King Spon (Apricot & Peach)

Kelsen Lucious Sour Brown

Lagunitas Aunt Sally

Lagunitas Dark Swan

Lindemans Cuvee de Rene Kriek

Lost Abbey Framboise de Amorosa

New Belgium La Folie

Night Shift Ever Weisse

NoDa Boba Brett Sour Project

NOLA Out Tequilya

Odell Brazzle

Odell Green Coyote

Ommegang Pale Sour Ale

Orpheus Brewing Like a White Curtain Blowing in the Draft From a Half-Opened Window Beside a Chair on Which Nobody Sits (Yes, this is the actual beer name.)

Oud Beersel Bzart Lambiek

Perennial Artisan Ales Savant Beersel

pFriem Family Brewers Peche

Prairie Apricot Funk

Quest Brewing Co. Funkscursion

Rhinegeist Hurricane

Rodenbach Fruitage

Samuel Adams Grand Cru

Samuel Adams Stony Brook Red

Short’s Anni Ale 13irteen

Silver City Foxy Lady

Sixpoint Stun Gun

Ska Brewing Co. Pink Vapor Stew

Societe The Thief

Straight to Ale Paramecium

Sun King Afterparty

SweetWater Cambium

Thirsty Bear Isidore’s Transfiguration

Three Taverns Blueberry Inceptus

Timmermans Kriek Lambic

Track 7 Chasing Rainbows

Troegs Freaky Peach

TRVE Red Chaos

Upland Brewing Co. Cherry

Upslope Dry Hopped Wild Ale

Vanberg & DeWulf LambickX

Wicked Weed Angel of Darkness

Wild Heaven Beer Joni

Yards Brewing Co. Pynk

Next: The rankings! Sour/Wild Ales #s 50-26