“Sour Fest 2017” Brings New Taste To Town

Tipping a glass of orange-red beer into her mouth, Elizabeth Nearing realized she wasn’t in New Haven anymore. She was back on the playground with her third-grade class, sneaking mouth-puckering warheads candies before the end of recess.

A voice jolted her back to Court Street.

“So, what do you think?” bartender Todd Tesla asked.

Nearing was on a quest to learn more about sour beer. This week many New Haveners will be getting their first tastes of the brew.

Nearing first discovered sour beer six months ago when The Beer Collective opened on Court Street. Tuesday afternoon, she met up with A Broken Umbrella Theatre actor Lou Mangini, writer Daisy Abreu, and La Voz Hispana publisher Norma Rodriguez Reyes to test out five sour libations on tap this week for Sour Fest 2017 at The Beer Collective. The event runs through Saturday.

The event’s goal is twofold, said co-owners Taurean Davis and Craig Sklar in an interview. First, they want to spread their enthusiasm for sour beer — the beverage over which they met at a bottle share in New York City several years ago.

Second, the two want to bring attention to sour beer itself, a movement that has spread through American breweries and bars over the past five to 10 years.

Before sour beer was cool, said Davis, the British were trying to brew and preserve beer in wooden barrels, where there was natural yeast growing. The beer would sometimes sour unintentionally, with whole batches going to waste.

Then Belgians caught on to the idea that these wild bacteria, floating around in the air and in barrels, would make their beer a little sweeter, tarter, and funkier. They began to experiment, ultimately producing lambics and Flanders reds similar to what might be served today. Fruit, which has its own natural yeast, got added to the mix, as did lactobacillus, pediococcus, and saccharomyces yeasts, all of which impart a tart flavor on the beer. By the time the craze came to the United States, the process — ​“difficult but controlled,” according to Davis — became popular in small batches with craft breweries, which found that there was an audience for the beer it produced. Many breweries since have stuck with the Belgian method, brewing the beer with fermenting grapefruit, plums, and apricots in old wine barrels, to add an oaky, dry taste. 

Davis’s only request? ​“Come in with an open mind,” he said. ​“People need to be ready to take in a beer knowing that it’s going to be different than what they think beer is.”

Sloop Sangria Red: Holiday Hooch or Memory Lane?

Opening their minds, three tasters (Rodriguez Reyes had not yet arrived) Tuesday evening prepared for their first beer: the Sloop Sangria Red, brewed out of Sloop Brewing Company in Elizaville, N.Y. A succinct ​“cheers!” and clicking of glasses was followed with a foray into the land of sours: wide eyes, just-puckered cheeks, hesitant smiles. With characteristics of both a dry, just-fruity red and crisp cider, two participants were feeling it.

“It makes me nostalgic for the third grade,” Nearing said. ​“Do you all remember sour warheads? It’s like that.”

“Not third grade,” Abreu said. ​“It’s like I’m a little kid at New Year’s Eve. Remember when your parents gave you sparkling cider?”

Mangini wasn’t swayed. ​“Well, it’s definitely sour,” he said, adding that it reminded him of tart candies he would suck when trying to change weight classes for high school wrestling. ​“It’s like … if you left old grapefruit [juice] and vodka at a college party out for a few days. Or that champagne and ice cream concoction you have at the holidays.” 

“Or is it sherbet?” Abreu asked.

​“Yes!” Nearing said. Another Sloop‑y sip took her down memory lane once again. When she was younger, she said, she’d worked at a theater that made batches of that mixture, usually a foamy pink-orange, around the holidays. ​“We called it holiday hooch,” she said. The Sloop Sangria had a more complex flavor profile, but she could see the comparisons. Though this, she added, she would drink again.

Lips Of Faith: Soapy Grapefruit?

As tasters contemplated their childhoods and teenage years with the last drops of the Sloop Sangria, Rodriguez Reyes appeared to cheers. She was just in time for the New Belgium Lips of Faith Le Terroir, delivered to the table with a ballet-like flourish. Dry-hopped in wooden barrels by New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colo., Tesla said the beer is what he recommends as a starter sour, for its mellow and slightly peachy flavor.

That wasn’t the flavor Abreu got when she took a big sip. ​“Soapy,” she proclaimed. ​“Soapy … grapefruit?”

Mangini, who had waited to try the beer, took a gulp and uttered a mrrmm of agreement. ​“I wouldn’t be surprised if it were made out of that,” he said. ​“It has a very tart aftertaste.”

Rodriguez Reyes, though, said she wasn’t ready to give up on it so easily. While she hadn’t tried the Sloop Sangria, she said that the Lips of Faith was taking her back through New Haven’s hoppy history, to Hull’s Brewery on Congress Avenue and New Haven Brewing Company, which closed in the 1990s.

Besides, she added, it was a good beer for cold and flu season. ​“It clears your nostrils right out,” she said.

“Yeah,” Nearing chimed in. ​“If pirates drank this they wouldn’t have scurvy.”

Alvinne Cuvee Freddy Special Edition: Tastes Like Fun

Two sours in, the group was divided on the exercise. Mangini and Rodriguez Reyes were skeptical of sours. Abreu had finished the New Belgium Lips of Faith and proclaimed it ​“not so bad.” Nearing was coasting on the explosion, looking toward the bar where Tesla was preparing the next pour.

But the Alvinne Cuvee Freddy Special Edition Dedicated To Sofie, a traditional sour out of Picobrouwerij Alvinne in Ingelmunster, Belgium, offered enough conciliatory flavor to bring them back together.

“Oooh!,” said Nearing, making a small, crinkled O with her lips at the first taste. ​“This tastes like fun!” Pressed for more detail, she paused for a moment, taking another sip. ​“It’s lighter, buoyant,” she said. ​“It seems like a more mellow sour beer.”

“I think this Sophie is a fun person,” she added.

Abreu wasn’t immediately wooed. ​“This is going to sound weird, but you know how water smells when you’ve left flowers in it for too long?” she said. She found the words she was looking for: decomposing plant matter (of which sour beer actually has a fair amount). But she declared herself neutral on taking a swig, and then another, and then a third, until the beer was gone.

“It stays on your throat for a while,” said Rodriguez Reyes. ​“But I like it. I’m the type that can get behind anything.”

Resident naysayer Mangini, though, said he was coming around to it. ​“Going in, it tastes like old fermented apples,” he said. ​“But if this were chilled, and I were drinking it on a hot day, it’d be sort of refreshing. Like a crisp cider.”
 

Birrificio del Ducato Ottobre: Ready to Fight

Down to the last two sour beers of the festival’s menu, tasters were getting restless, checking their phones for the time. As if on cue, the barrel-aged, Italian Birrificio del Ducato Ottobre arrived at the table.

“It leaves the taste lingering in your mouth, on your tongue,” said Rodriguez Reyes

“I love that it’s got the ruby color,” said Abreu. ​“It’s dryer — I think it’s my favorite. It’s an Alka-Seltzer, fizzy feel that I like.” She took another sip and scrunched her nose.

“Yeah, it’s in the back of the mouth … punchy and rich,” said Nearing. ““My soft palate is like ay‑o!”

“I think this beer wants to fight,” Mangini said.

OEC Artista Zynergia Plumtastic: Hooky? Or Baby’s First Stewed Fruit?

Tesla said he’d saved a favorite of his for last: the OEC Artista Zynergia: Plumtastic, a blended sour beer with a rarity that comes from its expensive, small-batch manufacturing process. While Tuesday’s other samples had come from across the United States and Europe, the OEC Artista Zynergia is the product of international collaboration, bringing together Italy-based LoverBeer brewery, Italian plum breeds, and different sour beers from OEC, which is in Oxford, Conn.

“It smells like sliced plums,” Abreu said. ​“And tastes like sliced plums.”

Nearing took a big whiff, and then a sip. ​“I definitely taste the plums,” she said. ​“It’s smooth, almost smoky.”

“And like a Gerber baby food smell,” suggested Mangini.

Rodriguez Reyes said that the beer, a surprisingly sweet sour, gave her hints of maví, a blend of water, bark, ginger, cinnamon, and sweetener a DJ at La Voz Hispana’s WNHH radio station makes in the summertime. And in that, it tasted a little like home. 

Sour Fest 2017 continues at the Beer Collective, 130 Court St., through Saturday. Available while supplies last. Click here for more information.