I see these sour beers on the shelf and think to myself, what a terrible idea, not for me, no thank you. Then what happens? One comes in my beer of the month club selection. I guess they didn’t get the memo. What memo is that, you ask? The memo that reads “NO SOUR BEERS, NEVER, EVER.” The science of fermentation helped brewers clean up the souring bacteria and wild yeasts in their brewhouses, now we are letting them back in.
So now I have one in the fridge, a cranberry one no less. I always thought cranberries were for thanksgiving and urinary tract infections, not for beer.
But I got thinking about old Dr. Seuss* and his book designed to get kids to eat foods they didn’t think they liked but had never tried. Sam-I-Am trying to get you to wolf down a plate of green eggs and ham. “You do not like them so you say, try them, try them and you may.” And I think to myself, or maybe rationalize since I have one in the fridge, that maybe I will like them. Maybe they are like green eggs and ham. They are quite popular these days, sour beers that is not green eggs and ham.
So I pour myself a cranberry sour Wild Bog. The haziest brew I have ever seen. I was looking for cranberries floating in the thin white foam on top of the marsh that is my beer glass. A very tart aroma with a hint of cranberries in the mix. First swig was sour tart. Super sour suds. I couldn’t taste the cranberries for the sour. I think I pulled a face muscle it was so sour. Ok, I am a firm believer in not judging on the first swig. So I keep drinking this sour mash and I do believe it got more sour if that is possible. One or two swigs had a faint hint of cranberry trying to fight their way through the sour patch. I choked this brew down for the sake of a review, and I recognize that some people may enjoy these things, but I have better things to do than spend any time at all acquiring this taste.
Curse you Sam-I-Am.
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