The March Meeting of the Twin Cities Perfect Pint Beer Club.

When: Friday, March 12, 2010
Cost: $35
You must be a member of the club to attend. Go to the Twin Cities Perfect Pint Beer Club to join and RSVP.

You only thought the beer club was wild. We’re about to get really wild. I’m talking wild fermentation, baby.

Sour beers were once enjoyed the world over. Even English porter was once a blend of fresh beer with “stale” or sour beer. Guinness still adds a small amount of soured stout to their beer to give it a slight acidic tang, a holdover from that earlier time. Over the years sour beers dropped from favor until only a few examples remained, centered mostly in Belgium where old brewing traditions die hard. The traditional lambic breweries of the Senne Valley have continued to hang on despite declining consumption at home. Enter the American craft beer scene. The discovery of sour beers in the United States has spurred a revival of these styles. American beer fans now provide the main source of support for those very same traditional Belgian breweries, and dozens of American craft brewers are turning up the funk in home-grown barrel-aging programs.

Sour beers are among the most mind-blowing, uniquely complex and delicious beers in the world. These are beers that will forever shatter your notions of what beer is. Acidity, not normally a component of beer evaluation, is what these beers are all about. They inspire flavor descriptors like “horse blanket”, “barnyard”, “old cheese”, and “dirty socks”. Tart, cidery, vinous, fruity, funky and delicious, these are some of the best beers in the world.

For this month’s meetup we’ll dig deep into the wild and wooly world of wild and spontaneous fermentation. Get gaga for gueuze. Luxuriate with a lambic. Delight in a lightweight Berliner Weiss (I may even be able to locate some raspberry and woodruff syrup to drink it the way the Germans do). We’ll do fruity Flanders reds and full-on funky 100% brett fermented beers. With fermentation agents like brettanomyces, lactobacillus, and pediococcus how can you go wrong? Bring a roll of Rolaids and let’s get funky.

And take my advice – learn to look beyond the sour.