This Monday, August 6, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. at the pub in Missoula, Flathead Lake Brewing Company will tap a keg of Montucky Sour Cherry Brown Ale – a beer available only on Mondays while it lasts. Brewer Tim Jacoby will be on hand as a guest bartender to answer all your questions about this interesting concoction.
To create Montucky Sour Cherry Brown, FLBC began with a brown ale grain bill, added the souring “critters” (in this case, a blend of Brettanomyces, Saccharomyces, Lactobacillus and Pediococcus – say that three times fast), put the concoction into an oak cherry port wine barrel with some Certified Organic sweet cherries from The Orchard at Flathead Lake, and let the beer do it’s thing. For quite a while. Ten months, actually, at a temperature ranging in the mid 70’s. Once ready, FLBC naturally carbonated the beer using Champagne yeast.
Montucky Sour Cherry Brown Ale took the bronze medal at the 2012 Norh American Beer Awards in the Flanders-Style Red or Brown Ale category. According to the Brewers Association’s Beer Style guidelines, a Belgian Style Flanders Brown Ale is characterized by a fairly strong sourness and fruity (typically cherry) flavors along with “a cocoa-like character from the roast malt” and potentially some light roasted malt flavors.
Anyone who has brewed a few batches of homebrew – or one really bad one – knows how important sanitation is. Preventing various critters from entering the beer and creating a funk of a mistake is crucial.
Souring beers isn’t a failure of sanitation, but an intentional act of adding some of these wild and funky critters into a beer to create an acidic, tart taste. It’s a practice that requires skill and a strong degree of care to keep the souring beer from infecting the others at the brewery. The fruit and sour characteristics will continue to develop and increase over many years (so long as the beer isn’t pasteurized, a practice sometimes used for quality control).
My journey into sour beers has just begun and I find them to be a fascinating paradigm bender for what we think of as “beer.” I’ve somewhat unintentionally stumbled into opportunities to try them at some of America’s best (Cascade Barrel House and Goose Island) as well as a chance to sample decades old Cantillon offerings. Big Sky Brewing Co. is the only Montana brewery I’m aware of to offer a sour beer in bottles, their Kriek Ale which, in various years, has been very good.
I’m quite interested in trying FLBC’s Montucky Sour Cherry Brown Ale and appreciate them giving us a local opportunity to push our beer paradigms.
