Over the summer, we opened a new restaurant at my day job. After years of pushing for a better beer list, I finally met with a measure of success at this location. We held a couple of staff tastings with a certified cicerone to educate our servers and bartenders on what they were selling to our customers.
One of the things which jumped out at me was that the beers I liked the most got the most confused reactions from our staff. However, the cicerone had a nice nugget of wisdom: an appreciation for bitterness is the last thing to develop for most beer drinkers. I think that this is true, with one addition. Appreciation for bitterness is second to last, with an appreciation for sour beers being the last.
I personally started with the heavily fruited (Lindeman's being the most widely available here in Chicago) lambics, but tried a true gueze at some point a few years ago and appreciated how different it was. I've slowly been drinking more and more sour beers as of late and really growing to appreciate the complexity of something you have to slow down and sip. The old-world Belgian examples have a lot to offer, but there are some american breweries doing excellent work in this Genre. (Jolly Pumpkin is a Michigan-based small brewery who does exclusively sour, barrel-aged beers and happens to probably be my favorite thus far.)
There's even five gallons of sour cherry brett-fermenting lambic slowly aging away in a dark corner of my basement right now...
I was inspired to post this after reading this article.
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