Still, lambic brewers remain the coolest family on the block. The rest of us who are now producing sour beers are moving into their neighborhood. Yet this is no cookie-cutter master-planned community. Lambic continues its anchor tenancy in Sourville, resting squarely on its triumphs and single-style successful production details. In many ways, its brewers act more like parents of a college-aged student who has left to find his or her own lot in life. I’m jealous of them. They are like the cool parents whom every kid respects and looks up to without ever knowing why.
Modern brewers are far more helicopterlike in our parenting of our sour beers. We can’t help it. It’s in our DNA. Like parents with their firstborn child, we overprepare and sanitize everything the beer might ever come in contact with. We agonize over details. We plan and have contingencies for those plans.
The Belgians, they make wort, open the rafters in the attic and let whatever blows in blow in. A couple of years later and voilà, they have perfectly soured and aged bottles of beers. They make it look easy, almost too easy. But they have history and methodology on their side.
Our more sophomoric history of making sour beer dates to the late 1990s. During this time, a group of brewers started dabbling in wild-yeast barrel fermentations and dipped their toes in the low pH waters. Today these same artists are full-fledged swimmers making graceful strokes in the waters once dominated by the Belgians. And in moving into their neighborhood, we now share the community pool of sour-beer enthusiasts.
While our strokes may not be as graceful or as classical as theirs, we both share a love of sour beers and the places they can take us. In that way, we hope to share this Sourville neighborhood and coexist. Of course there will be neighborly squabbles (mostly over the role of wood in our beers), but we will respect the boundaries more often than we choose to blur them. And for that, I am thankful that I, too, am living in Sourville. The water’s great. And as an added bonus, there’s no shortage of great beer here.
