Beers to make your mouth pucker

Fads come and go in the craft beer community—from IPAs contending for the most bitterness to hops being used at their freshest—and a current trend seems to be catching on slowly but surely in Portland and beyond. The popular culprit? Sour beers.

Rock Bottom Brewery recently released its Sour Patch Pale Ale for American Craft Beer Week. The brewery forecasts many more sour beers in its future and the trend is likely to continue.

Many people give a small grimace at the idea of a sour beer, but that response is changing.

“You tell them it’s sour and it’s surprising actually how many people will drink the beer,” said Rock Bottom brewer Van Havig. “Sour beer is a spectrum of the beer flavor wheel that the public is getting used to.”

Rock Bottom has undoubtedly been spinning that wheel into the public’s awareness since it started brewing sour beers three years ago.

In 2009 the brewery came out with a new blend called Maude Flanders, which according to Havig was “brutally sour.” They expected it to last an entire year, but the kegs were guzzled up in less than five months. Sour Patch, a year-old blend of sour beer and IPA released last week, disappeared even faster.

The trend is extending to beer festivals as well. This summer, Belmont Station will hold the fourth annual Puckerfest, a weeklong miniature beer festival dedicated to sour beers.

Rock Bottom currently has nearly 30 kegs of sour beers in the basement waiting to be tapped next summer. Some will be released at the brewery and others at local beer festivals.

“We have an enormous amount of sour beer in the basement,” Havig said. “A frightening amount.”

Frightening as it is, Rock Bottom is waiting for the beers to peak. There aren’t likely to be many sour beers in its near future, but next year will bring plenty of pucker.

There’s good reason, though, that other breweries aren’t jumping on the idea of sour beers so eagerly. Rock Bottom is lucky enough to have a basement to separate the sour from all its other beers. The two should never be mixed.

That’s because the particular yeast strains needed to give a beer its sourness are especially troublesome. They are almost guaranteed to make their way into anything that’s brewing nearby and turn it sour. That might sound fine to those who enjoy sour beers, but it’s bad news for a brewery that brews a variety of beer styles.

This keeps craft brewers with smaller brewing spaces away from the trend. Rock Bottom has an entirely different building level to keep its other beers safe. Some other breweries are not so lucky.

Along with Sour Patch, Rock Bottom recently released Floreal IV and Syttende Maibock. Though these are not sour beers, the two take interesting twists on old styles by using different yeast strains. Floreal was the brewery’s entry in Portland’s Cheers for Belgian Beers and the Maibock is the only truly strong lager that the brewery makes all year. They’re far from sour, but they’re a tasty alternative.