Sour Beer In Des Moines

Sour beers are something I'm particularly passionate about, among their ranks are many of my favorite beers, and beer styles. They are at once both the most direct connection to ancient brewing traditions as well as the most sophisticated beers being brewed today. As little as two years ago I could not point to one single sour beer available for purchase in the Des Moines area, at least not with any frequency. Forcing the beer lover out of town (and many times out of state) for a puckering beer. A few have trickled in and fizzed out over the last couple of years but there are three that I've been seeing around quite a bit lately.

Two of them are from the Flemish Red or "Sour Brown" tradition of Northern Belgium, the other comes from the Lambic tradition kept alive in the area in and around Brussels.

Two of these beers are from Belgium and one is from "New" Belgium.

Lindeman's Cuvee Rene Gueuze:

Gueuze is a style very dear to my heart, a blended beer fermented solely by wild yeast naturally occurring in the air and the brewery, aged in oaken barrels for up to three years, the older beer is blended with younger beer.

You might recognize the Lindeman's name and label from their very popular line of very sweetened beers the Framboise and the Kriek are particularly well loved in pubs, restaurants, and stores all over the city. You'll find none of that strong sweet fruit flavor in Cuvee Rene, rather quite the opposite. This is the beer that Rene Lindeman the owner of the brewery drinks, and has become the only product I consume from them with any great frequency as well.

This golden colored beer pours with a big white head. A whiff of this beer is certainly odd to one unfamiliar with traditional lambic presenting the olfactory with notes of cork, farmyard, oak, and a floral character usually associated with dry white wine. The flavor is equally as sharp and complex. The beer is dry and sour, puckeringly so, with a bit of blue cheese rind, a nice earthy oakiness, and very tart cherries. The beer will taste much more like dry white wine than most beers. Elegant and complex just as a Gueuze ought to be.

Monks Cafe:

While the beer may be from Belgium, it's named after one of the first pubs in the United States to specialize in Belgian beers. The house ale of Monks Cafe in Philadelphia has seen distribution well outside the city of brotherly love and is a welcome addition to many a beer shelf in Des Moines.

Monk's is a Flemish sour brown ale, now there are a lot of beers in this style and really there are no hard and fast rules about how they are produced or taste. These beers range in color from pinkish red to deep brown and can be moderately to intensely sour. Something that ties them together more often than not is long maturation in oak casks whereby microorganisms in the wood provide complexity and sourness to the beer within.

The deep reddish brown beer gives off a dusty... almost dirty aroma with hints of balsamic vinegar and dirty socks. Sounds disgusting right? Honestly these beers are not for everyone but when balanced properly those aromas that are singularly pretty bad meld into something pungent in the best way possible. The flavor of this beer is lightly sweet with some distinct tannic character akin to a red wine. The sourness is ever-present in this beer but plays more in the back-ground allowing dusty maltiness and a nice spiciness to balance it all out. This all rounds out with a nice tart cherry fruitiness on the finish.

La Folie:

Our third example is a one of the beers that first got me really excited about beer. La Folie used to be a little known product from a very well known brewery. These days a bottle can be had at any reputable beer store or even at Hy-Vee, and I'm cool with that. La Folie made by New Belgium (yes the makers of Fat Tire) is a Sour Brown (or Flemish Red) style beer, stylisticlly akin to Monks Cafe but far more bracingly sour. Historically this beer is a benchmark for sour brewing in the United States and while it's lost a bit of it's elusiveness in the past couple years it still enjoys a devoted following.

This beer used to come in corked champagne bottles, and it seems like every single time they change the labeling/packaging on it there are droves of folks on the internet beer community declaring that "IT'S NOT THE SAME". This is my first sampling of the 2010 vintage, so we'll see if anything has changed that I can detect.

The beer pours with that same classic mahogany hue with that old familiar pungent tart aroma that includes notes of farmyard, balsamic vinegar, and pronounced toasty maltiness. The flavor is that classic dominant strong sourness akin the tartest cherry you can imagine with earthy and woody notes allowing for a light malt sweetness and a wonderful nuttiness throughout. The beer has a dustiness to it, now I know a lot of us don't go around tasting dust, but somehow that's the only way to describe a certain character of this beer, try it and you'll see. Other complimentary flavors that add to the complexity of this beer are a nice light chocolate and a distinct oak woodiness. It still tastes like La Folie, but I will say that the 2009 bottle we opened a few months back seemed a lot more bracingly sour. This is however still identifiably the same beer I fell in love with years ago.