You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg. I do communications at Binny's. In the room with me, Pat, Director of Spirit Sales. Hillary, I like things on Instagram. Roger, beer marketing. Roger, this is part two of a multi-part series that you kicked off a couple of months ago. What are we covering today? Sours, part two, Electric Boogaloo. We started talking about Sours last time. The world of Sours is one of those misunderstood beer styles. People that are really into it argue that it isn't a beer style. It's a flavor profile. Who says that? Tons of people. Jeffers Richardson was always adamant about that. These are the kind of guys who argue the difference between death metal and Swedish black and crust metal. The kind of people that argue about the pronunciation of Guise. I believe you're referring to Hjulza. Yes. There's some validity to it. The valid point which we are going to get at today is the misunderstanding about what goes into making kettle sours versus barrel-aged sours. From a price point standpoint, there's a quite substantial difference in price. Unfortunately, we're seeing some fading interest in the barrel-aged sours. I think unfortunately, part of the reason is that people aren't educated as to what it takes to produce a well-made barrel-aged sours. A lot more time and effort involved. There are some great kettle sours. It's unfortunate when the two get pitted against one another and people are like, oh, kettle sours are all garbage. I only drink barrel-aged sours. To be fair, there's a lot of garbage kettle sours out there though. There are, but I will say, in general, they've been getting better. A few years ago, there were some atrocious. The brewing process for making a kettle sour, if done incorrectly, if you don't properly limit the amount of oxygen exposure, you can get some pretty horrific off flavors. Yeah, real footy, sweaty, gym sock type of thing, just rotten gross. I was afraid this episode was going to be Roger trashes the new kettle sour brewing scene, but I guess it's going to be Pat trashes the new kettle sour. Kettle sour brewing scene. Hate, hate, hate. If you had to describe the difference in brewing in just one sentence for each, what would it be? Kettle sours are fast and quick, little one-dimensional, barrel-aged sours, long and slow, lots of different flavors. Nuanced flavors. That's the difference between an ale and a lager. It's about the amount of time that the wild yeasts have on the beer as it ages. It can get pretty complicated with the barrel-aged sours. When you're doing a kettle sour, you're mainly talking about one organism, and that's lactobacillus. You might remember it from those fun Activia commercials with What's Her Face. Now, I picture this in the Simpsons Troy McClure voice where it's like, hi, I'm lactobacillus. You may remember me from such probiotic yogurts. Lactobacillus is what we can thank for making delicious pickled things like sauerkraut, yogurts, things that have that refreshing tartness to them. But we're really focused on just that organism, whereas in barrel-aged sours, it's usually a bunch of different ones. You're looking at lactobacillus, pediococcus, spirtanomyasis, acetobacter to some extent. There's even a few other pretty esoteric ones. But what's interesting is that you can think of the barrel-aged process as a timeline or a life cycle. So like pedio, for example, can make the beer get what's referred to as ropey. So think of Ghostbusters when Slimer slimes everything. The beer can literally get so thick, it like leaves trails. And you can see rope-like structures of yeast and microflora that are kind of floating in suspension in the beer. Gross. Yeah. Well, that's part of the thing with barrel-aged sours though, too, is that all different yeast and bacteria have highs and lows. And that's part of the reason they take so long, is some of those off flavors and off notes or things like that ropeiness go away with time or are reabsorbed by dead yeast cells at the time, or the oak flavor kind of takes over. So those flavors aren't, you don't know they're there after a certain amount of time. And there's no, you can, we're going to taste some excellent kettle sours here that these breweries can make consistently on a consistent schedule. And that is just not possible with great barrel-aged sour beer. You could taste the barrel-aged sour. It's kind of PDO heavy and slimy. But once Britannomyces cleans it up, it can produce, not only does it change the mouth feel, it gains nuances of different kinds of, you know, it's either the perceived of ester or phenol becomes more apparent. Like Pat said, it's just this, it's a laborious process and it's a waiting game. And these different bugs and microflora work at different temperatures on different timelines. And all you can do is, you know, hopefully you taste it and get it bottled at the right time. It just sounds so messy. Like as a brewer, is this a challenge for them? Yeah. Oh, this is a bit, because you're allowing any clean brewery's worst nightmare to like hopefully make great beer in a fairly uncontrollable environment. The other thing too, which has kind of saddened us over the years is that there's an inherent risk in making barrel-aged sour, where sometimes it just doesn't turn out and you have to sometimes just dump the beer. Sometimes breweries would even in Belgium, that beer would be destined for vinegar. But we see with a lot of American sours, the beer is just past the point of return and they might try to blend some of those flavors away. You might have to dump that batch into a different batch that's in bourbon barrels that has fruit. Kettle souring is something that you could follow the instructions, practice and get pretty good at quick. Barrel-aged sours is kind of like trying to go from a cook to a chef right away, you know, you need to really kind of hone your chops and you need to practice and get a feel for it. It's not something that you're going to become great at overnight. So, you want to taste a beer? Let's taste a beer. So, one of the best, I think, cattle-aged sours that we've had as of late, and the public seems to think so, too, is from Dogfish Head. It's a beer we've talked about in the past. This is Sea Quench. Making its triumphant return to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, Dogfish Head Sea Quench. Yeah, this beer's pretty damn good, huh? You know what it reminds me of? I haven't had it since we did it last summer, but that recent Founders release, which is what? Massagave? Yeah. Which is barrel sour, kettle sour that they barrel aged? Yes, Founders, Imperial Goza, Massagave. Of course, Founders has to take it to 11 and screw with the style. I'm not aware that Imperial Goza is a real thing, but it is now. Well, in the common thread here is definitely the lime. That beer was designed to taste like a margarita, and this beer is just designed to taste like a fresh little lime soda. What's neat about this, that there's a lot of really interesting things about this beer, to be honest. But adjuncts are commonplace now, everybody's really obsessed with them, but Dogfish Head is actually their thing from the beginning. They've been real thoughtful about what they're putting in beers. They've also put some pretty ridiculous things in beers like lobster, Scrapple, the list goes on. But in this one, it was a middle finger to Germany, the Reinheitsgebot, the famous German Purity Law that said you could have three things in beer. It was well intentioned, but it obviously can stifle creativity. So Sam Caglione wanted to take three classic German styles, two of which don't really abide by the Reinheitsgebot. So Goza, the famous beer from Lipzig, Berliner Weiss. Those are the two sour components. And then Kuhls, which is from Cologne, which is not a sour beer. So it's a blend of three different beers together. And then it's flavored with lime juice, sea salt, and then black limes, which this is kind of the ace in the hole bizarre Sam Caglione thing. Black limes are basically desiccated limes. They're dried out in the sun until they turn jet black. It's gross. They literally weigh about the same as a ping pong ball, and you grate them. That's how little is left. Tastes like dried fruit. They turn into powder. Yeah, you really think of it more as like a spice. It has like an earthy character to it. It's a Middle Eastern thing, right? Correct. So the salt component of this, the salt's harvested from Maine and Chesapeake Bay, hence the sea quench. Nice tie in there. It's not just a clever name. Sea spelled S-E-A. Correct. Yes. Thank you. The other thing which we should broadcast here because Sam's not allowed to, a big bent behind this beer was to make a beer to drink after activity. Essentially like a beer sports drink. Sam literally talked to the people who created Gatorade, like the original Gatorade guy, and they talked about electrolytes. Electrolytes. What plants crave? This beer literally was designed with that in mind, and Sam swears by that. Unfortunately, because of liquor or alcohol laws, you cannot put any claim on an alcoholic beverage that has any kind of health benefits in any way. But I've talked to several people who love drinking this beer when it's hot out, after they've been doing some sort of activity. It's a super refreshing beer. I think Men's Health, yes, I will quote Men's Health again, called it the most refreshing beer ever made. Hey, that's Coors Light. Right. But it's a really good beer. It's really interesting. It is super refreshing. It's lower in ABV. I mean, it's an American Session beer at 4.9. It's relatively low calorie. It's 140. It definitely fits into this new category that's emerging. That's these, I don't know that they really agreed upon a name yet. They're being called lifestyle beers. That's- Douchebag beers. I don't know what lifestyle beers mean. That's Michelobulcha. Basically, like- Michelobulcha is the lifestyle beer, right? People that are active, like active life. Active is the missing but implied word. Skinny people. That's why I don't understand. Right. Beer has this negative stereotype as all the big fat guys that love beer, but- Well, we do love beer. There are three of us in the room right now. Right. These are obviously some of them lower in calorie, but refreshing, definitely don't fill you up like with this beer. It's not a heavy beer by any means. It's the flavorful Michelobulcha. Let's pop the next one. This is a just straight Goza from Dogfish Head. This one's called Super Eight, another delicious beer with another crazy backstory. Its name is a double entendre here. It's made with eight different super foods, and it also with slight modifications, it can develop film. Nothing says drink this beer like film processing chemicals. So, okay, let me get super foods. Now, I had the unfortunate experience, Hilary walked into this room today and handed us all packets of high protein super food crunch, which is a cocoa flavored sprouted buckwheat cereal, which tastes like cocoa pebbles if they totally sucked, and Well, luckily, most of these super foods in this are juices and fruits. So, those are usually the more exciting of the super foods. Like blueberries, acai. Buckwheat is exciting. They did sneak some quinoa in there or canoa. Quinoa. Into the beer? What's a canoa? No, it's what's a quinoa? Quinoa. Oh my gosh, there's an Hawaiian sea salt. It's real fancy. Sea salt is the accent. That's not a super fruit, but I wish it was. I wish salt was good for me. Can we talk about how this beer looks like strawberry Kool-Aid? Yes, I mean, it's strikingly pink. It's like fruit drink. It's got prickly pear, cactus fruit. Mangoes, boysenberry, blackberry, raspberry, elderberry. That's a lot of berries. Kiwi and quinoa. Fresh berries or they use like dried fruit? They probably use frozen. They probably use purees, I would think. They don't specify, but yes. Boysenberry, that's pretty cool. How much is this? This is $12.99 a six pack. Again, this is one of the big draws of the Kettle Age Sour. This is a delicious beer. It's tart. It's refreshing. It doesn't have any wild yeast in there. There's no Brett in there. Brett, famously, we'll get to it later, can have some pretty challenging flavors and aromas at their best. They can be tropical, rustic, earthy. On the other end of the spectrum, they can make you think of barnyard and farm. This one compared to the last one though, I think it's less tart than the Sea Quench. And less salty. Yeah, and less salt. Like this is a very mild gulza. I feel it's just as salty. I don't know. It's fruit forward. Maybe it's a fruit that you kind of like, your mind focuses definitely on all the bright, jammy kind of fruit characteristics. I mean, there's only lime juice in the other one. Do you think people are intimidated by sours and cans? I think barrel-aged sours and cans are just starting to become a thing. Almanac's starting to do that, the brewery out in California. That is a recipe for exploding cans. I know. It's real tricky. They've assure us that it's something they've been obviously working on for a long time. I don't know. It's a very delicate dance. If you're going to have most what we're going to get into with these barrel-aged beers is that most of them are bottle-conditioned, which is a thing in the past. Half are going to explode all over, Roger? Yeah. I learned my lesson last time opening the Cezanne. I don't know if Brophy opened most of these. One of the things that I was talking about on the Cezanne Podcast, bottle-conditioned beers are something that I don't think enough people are exposed to, understand the difference or appreciate. So think of carbonation in beers as soda pop. So when they produce the beer, they put it in a tank and then they force carbon dioxide into the beer, into suspension. So that's like a forced carb beer. The majority of beer on the market is forced carved. The alternative, and it's usually easy to think of it as maybe like if you know someone who homebrews, if you've ever homebrewed, you're bottling the beer, packaging the beer with living yeast still in the beer. And then that yeast is going to consume a small amount of sugar that's in the container and produce natural fermentation or carbonation because of that. And you obviously need to make sure you know how much yeast you have and how much sugar is in suspension. Otherwise, the bottle could blow up, the can could blow up. But when you look at this and you try it, the carbonation is much finer, smaller bubbles, delicate. It kind of like dances across the tongue. It can be mousse like. Stop right there. This is one of the best American made sour beers I've ever tasted in my life. You mean from right now or from your history of tech training? From my history of drinking tooth enamel burning acidic beers. This is awesome. It smells like a combination of citric fruit, which is really pleasant, and then like that horse blanket-y. Yeah, but there's enough lemony quality from the bread. So this is Logsdon Spontane Wilde. Did we say that yet? No. All right, so this beer we're trying now is Logsdon Spontane Wilde. They call it a Method Van Lembique, so traditional lambic style brew. So the wort is inoculated naturally with wild microflora in a cool ship loft above the brewery. It is then aged in oak for one to two years before being blended and bottled here. It is also brewed, important to say, with some raw wheat, which is a traditional lambic thing, and aged hops. So you get these aged cheesy hops. You're not looking for hop flavor. You're just looking to get a little bitterness and some of that preservative quality out of the hops. I've never heard of aged hops. Oh, yeah. They're funky. There's a few breweries around the Midwest that have used some of them. Remember that time that Pat got excited about the beer we were trying on a Roger podcast? Yeah. Way to not bring boring old man stuff, Roger. This is awesome. Brophy's been a big supporter of this brewery, and it's a brewery that deserves more attention. The one thing I want to emphasize with it is that you sometimes hear the word farmhouse ale, and it's pointing back to old traditions, but rarely is it really talking about being made on a farm. This is one of the rare examples, and there's starting to be more of them, of breweries that they have a legitimate farm. When you're going to do something like a true lambic method where you have that cool ship and you're depending upon what's floating in the air to land into it and ferment the beer, having a farm where you have a bunch of orchards, and you have fruits there. Fruits are immensely important for being somewhere for those live yeast to live and thrive. So I think part of the reason that this beer is so well-made is you're really tasting terroir and beer with this brewery. Fruit King Adamson Strikes Again. We have another one from them, right? We'll pop that one hell. Is it going to explode? Only one way to find out. Hillary is pointing the bottle away from her face. Well-made beer, well-bottled, no explosion. That's pretty good, man. How much was the Logsdon we just tried? I believe that's $13.99 for a small bottle, let's say $3.75, and it is worth every penny. Holy cow, this beer was phenomenal. We recently just got these, right? Like a year ago? They come in fits and starts. They're not at all Binny's, but they're around, and they're worth hunting down, more importantly. They have very kind of bucolic, old school, they kind of look like Riesling labels, and I like them, but I also like a lot of old person things. Get past the labels if you're young and hip, and you think they look like grandma's house. They do. Like get over it. Like the plates she collected. Yeah. I mean, it's not a can with some colorful sticker on it, but it is phenomenal juice. Anybody who takes sour beer seriously, and it's truly considers themself an aficionado of the style, you owe it to yourselves to try these beers. That last one really did taste like a lambic. I mean, rarely will people even write lambic-esque out of respect for that lambic should really be made around Brussels. I mean, that's a beer where they can write lambic. Can I go, yep, that deserves to say lambic-esque on it. This next Logsdon we're trying is The Conversion Series 2, Organic Northwest Sour Farmhouse Ale. The beer's so nice, they named it eight times. My first impression is like, it smells like milk and cereal. Do you know what I mean? Like that sweet. Yeah, I could get some of those. There's some grain character coming through. So this started out as a wit beer, so a Belgian style white beer, wheat beer, brewed in the farmhouse tradition and opened to fermentation from a variety of wild yeast and lactic bacteria. A lot of the first beers that Logsdon became famous for were things like Cezanne's that they would maybe introduce some wild yeast to, like pretend meiosis, and those tended to be more, you talk about them as a wild ale or a funky beer. They weren't so much sour as they were, they had added complexity, they're dry because they're well fermented, but they didn't have that lactic tartness. So the conversion is when they're starting to convert into these beers that had more pronounced sourness. Because you got to remember, there's sours that some American producers are making that are often compared to sour candy, they're so crazy sour. They're like, these are brewed for the mega Warheads generation. Oh, I love Warheads. A lot of the original Logsons are more wild, sophisticated, yet the number of people that knew those styles and appreciated them was so small. They're starting to branch out more now and have these beers that have more of a pronounced acidity, so more people can relate to it and think it's cool. More approachable. This conversion, back to the second beer real quick. You can tell it started life as a wit beer. It's got this soft fluffiness to it. It's a little hint of an orange peel thing. I like that the coriander is in the back seat. Sometimes wit beers are just, I think, a little too overspiced. More often than not. More often than not, they're overspiced. Fine. I was putting it nicely. But this is a gorgeous beer and this is soft and easy drinking. It's not as assertively tart and sour as the Spontane Wilde was. But this is a great wine drinker's beer. Somebody likes those tartar, more citric forward white wine styles, like Sauvignon Blanc or something. I think you'd really dig this. Yeah. Super refreshing. I mean, we're coming on summertime now, and this beer, especially the first one we tried, it's a little more challenging, a little more intense. This one, I mean, you could sit down and have a nice big glass of this and be ready to have another one. What's the shelf life for something like this? What a great question, Hillary. Bottle-conditioned beers, that is another major benefit of bottle conditioning. It greatly increases the shelf life, the cellar ability. A lot of people like to cellar beer. A lot of people talk about cellaring their barley wines and their Imperial Stouts. The thing with a lot of those kind of beers is that they're not bottle-conditioned. As they age, they're just slowly oxidizing. So if you want to have a kind of a time capsule where, okay, I bought this beer in 2019 and I want to be able to drink it four years later, that's cool. You might, you know, if hopefully it's going to develop a little bit different flavors, but it's not going to change all that much. We're at least not in a benefit, you know, in a positive way. When a beer is actually actively still alive and it has yeast in the bottom, it's the best kind of beer to age. Even beers that aren't even that high alcohol, we saw this with the Cezanne DuPonts on the last podcast, they can just be tremendous with time. Pat should speak on this, he has a massive beer seller that's mainly sours. Yeah, I mean, I keep sour beer and not things like stouts and barley wines anymore because sour beers, I think too often I would have, I would keep a beer for a few years and then when I go to taste it, it was very obvious that it tasted better before. The last time I tasted that beer, it was better. And so it's just like, man, I'm holding on this beer and it's not improving. I have pretty ideal seller conditions, like it's in a really cold, cool basement, away from all light, all kinds of stuff like that. And but sour beer, I've had some, I've had some sour beers in Belgium that are 30 years old or more. And I, sure, they're different. And some would maybe say, well, if this was fruited, that, you know, it should be drank earlier because the fruit is more vibrant. But there are lots of other flavors that continue to develop with bottle conditioning. And especially with wild fermented beers and barrel-laced beers. And I think, you know, if you're gonna, if you're really interested in holding beer for a while and observing changes, there's no better way to do it than with wild beers like this. So furthermore, the really thing that should be emphasized with many of these wild beers is that they're really batch-to-batch beers. They are unique each time they're produced. And whereas a lot of the brewing industry is concerned about consistency, one of the beautiful things about some of these barrel-aged sours is that they truly are different each time. And that's a good thing. And then furthermore, when you age them, they're going to age differently as well. You can age Bourbon County Stout each year and it's cool when people do verticals, but it's the same beer basically each time, year to year. And you'll notice some different changes subtly, but I've had, you know, Lambics, Guises, American Styles, like that. You age one batch, try a couple years later, try a different batch. There's some noticeable differences and usually in a very nice surprising way. And by the way, this Logsdon Conversion Series 2, you can age a 750 milliliter bottle. That's a big bottle for $12.99. $12.99 a bottle. I mean, I mentioned earlier about a good wine drinker conversion into beer drinking here and kind of introduction to sour beer. You know, wine drinkers, most wine drinkers aren't going to balk at a $12.99 bottle of wine. This is the same size. And this is, you know, just as complex and refreshing and interesting. Can you imagine this with some like good seafood? I mean, this is, this is a beer that just begs to be, begs you to drink some more. You guys want to go on a break? Yeah, I mean, we really should have brought in some cheeses. These are the, everyone always says beer and cheese is a classic pairing. It really doesn't get much better than wild ales with big, rich, creamy cheeses. So your blue cheeses, your breeze, your triple creams in particular, it can be fantastic. The acidity from these sours just cuts through the rich creaminess of those cheeses. It really is beautiful. It's every bit as complex as your wine and cheese pairings. Moving on, making its second appearance on the Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, third? One of our favorites, yeah, maybe third. Well, I mean, we still have this beer and it's still worth talking about, and that's Firestone Walker Paw2 Prints. That's a beer, you know, I had a bit of a role in kind of developing and brewing, and this is a great beer. It is on sale. So, for the unfamiliar, again, we're making pawpaw a household word here. This is the Midwestern tropical fruit, the Quaker's Delight, the Hillbilly Mango, the Indiana Banana, the Hoosier Banana, the Banango, pawpaw the fruit. The fruit that was only edible for around three days before it spoiled. Yep. It's a nice, custardy, tropical fruit, and it made this wonderful sour beer. This is the standard Firestone Walker Bread of Vice, which is their mixed fermentation, barrel-fermented Berliner Weiss, that then has pawpaw fruit added to it, and it was blended with wild wine beer hybrids that were brewed with Sauvignon Blanc and Vignier grapes. It has a little depth of fruit complexity to it. It's not just a one-note pawpaw punch. It's been on our shelves at this point about six months, and it's actually picking up some tertiary complexity. You guys get the spearmint. I did not get spearmint on this one before. Maybe that's what I'm smelling. You smell it? I mean, I only got it in the back of the palate. I smell like- Like ripe bananas and other tropical fruit. Like a basement, but the fruit. A little bit of mustiness, but not in a bad way. That's what Roger's basement looks like, the fruit basement. They know it tastes good, just smells good. Yeah. Well, this is another perfect time to bring up one of my favorite fruits, and that is jackfruit. You get a little juicy fruit bubblegum flavor to this. Yep. That's it. That's jackfruit? You should tell that story about juicy fruit being modeled after that fruit again, Roger. So weird. Hey folks, jackfruit, once almost unobtainable, is now available at several different produce. I buy it at my local grocery store as a meat substitute for pulled barbecue. There's no way that is anywhere close to as good as pulled barbecue. Yeah, but it's not about the meat. It's about the sauce. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The barbecue sauce. It's still really good. It's the opportunity to try something you're never going to get again. Just real quick, what did you guys do at Firestone to help out? We blended this beer. So we introduced them to PawPaw Fruit. They were like, what the hell is that? No one's ever heard of this. And then thankfully Roger was able to track down, there's like two suppliers around that flash freeze ripe PawPaw so you can actually use it. And Roger tracked these guys down, sourced the fruit for Firestone. They brewed the initial beer that the PawPaw was aged in and brewed with. And then we went out there and we tasted the PawPaw beer with a whole bunch of other sour beers of wine hybrid and other fruit types to make the final blend. Roger's got the fruit hookup everywhere. He is the fruit king. I've always been intrigued by weird, especially tropical fruits. But this one, of course, like I said before, a lot of these breweries that are interested in barrel-aged sours, they're also very interested in the idea of local terroir flavors that meld with the environment. And sours are often feature berry fruits, tropical fruits. California, they have great access to so many different kind of fruits. So we wanted to find something from the Midwest that wasn't your average thing, so. Mission accomplished. Exactly. There's also a Paw Paw Festival that we need to go to. Where? It's in Ohio. It started as this little teeny, it's so popular now, it's like three days long. Full King Strikes Again. All the Ohio locals are like, Paw Paw Festival a-holes coming to the town. They've got Paw Paw Beer, they got Paw Paw Ice Cream, Paw Paw Bake Goods, more Paw Paw than you can handle. Roger, get me the dates, man. I'll go with you. I really think it would be fun. We could take a bunch of this beer, let people try it. Anyway. Just a couple of guys walking around with one of those long coats full of beer. You want to try some beer. All right, moving along. From the West Coast all the way back here to Chicago, we have one of the most venerated wild and sour producers here in Chicago. This is a beer from Off Color called The One Percent. Why does it smell like chapstick? This is a really interesting beer. It's not really like any other beer that I've tried. A lot of the times when things are aged in oak, they're aged in wine barrels or big large oak fooders. This is a blended beer and the time it spends in oak is in bourbon barrels. It's going to pick up some pretty interesting kind of the coconut and vanilla flavors that you get from a barrel aging. Then the base beer itself is a wit beer. They also do put salt in here, so it's kind of on the cusp of a goza slash a wit beer. Barrel aged partially, fresh beer, and then they add cherries to it and let the co-mingling age with cherries. This is an interesting beer and there's a lot of different flavors in there. I don't know that it totally works, not really my jam, but I think the whiskey flavor from those barrels takes away from the fruit notes personally. I think what they were going for is that if you say to somebody, do you like whiskey cocktails? The chances of what are they going to respond with is old-fashioned or Manhattan. I mean, that is like- This is a very old-fashioned-y beer. Yes. I think it's trying to cater to that interest and I wish people would branch out more with their whiskey cocktails. Approaching it that way, I like it a little more. Thinking about it as orange, cherry, whiskey, what beer- That's what I think they were going for, personally. Pretty interesting. Interesting, I don't know if I can have more than one of these. How much is this? This comes in four packs and 12-ounce bottles for $14.99. Probably a pretty fair price, but they can't be making much for it. They couldn't have made more than a tank of this. No. Again, part of this is barely aged. That's adding cost and there's fresh fruit. Oh, for sure. I mean, I think it's pretty reasonable. I'd say it's closer in flavor and palette appeal to like a Mai Tai. Like your Mai Tai drink here would go for it with the cherry and the pineapple. Yeah. No, I like that comparison as well for sure. Yeah. Again, what's funny is that the sour market is all over the place. We've seen local producers put these beers in single bottles and charge the same amount of money. So Off Color is actually trying to actually in doing a lot of format changes down to four packs. I like that movement. I think it's giving you less to commit to in one drinking session and four different goes at something for essentially the same price that many people are selling a single bottle for. So I kind of commend them that they're also putting a lot of their sours in little teeny like eight ounce bottles now. So similarly again, drinking sessions, not just committing to a big $750 all at once. Hillary just cracked the last one, and that means we made it all the way through this thing without any explosions. Yes, speaking of Big 750s, this beer is threatening to overflow its bottle, but it's really just like little foamy cap coming out. It just looks exciting. It's crowning. Oh, wow. So what is this beer we got here, Roger? So this is from The Rare Barrel. Oh, it sounds rare. That's a big deal. The Rare Barrel lives up to its name. This is the kind of beer that people would trade for in the past, or line up at the brewery. So this is Wales, bro? It's Wales, bro. From the brewery called The Rare Barrel, it's not just a clever name, they decided to focus exclusively on barrel-age sours. They don't brew any clean beer. They're very into the uniqueness of vintage batches of beer. They're big on blending different beers, which is a very important part of good sour wild ales, is blending different barrels together. This beer is a blended beer, not just of different barrels, but two different beers. It's a blend of a dark sour with raspberries and then a golden sour. All the other beers on the table right now range from crisp, transparent yellow to soft pink peachy fuzz to shocking pink, in the case of that eight, Super Eight. This one looks like a heady brown ale. Yeah. It is called Wise Guise. I'm going to play on words. Guise spelled G-U-I-S-E. This beer is pretty good. It sounds as good as that first Logsdon though. But again, you're approaching it I think from, dare I throw the old man right back at you, old man. The first one that you love so much tastes like a true and true traditional lambic, which a lot of people don't know what that is or appreciate it. Also known as the best beer on the planet. What everybody is very excited about these days are fruited sours and this is actually kind of borrowing more to the Flanders. That's exactly what I was going to say. It's like a less acidic Flanders. It's a Flanders with no acetic, no vinegar, which is kind of neat. Because Flanders ales, it's always been acceptable for them to have that acetic component, which depending on, that can be really tough for people to enjoy. They just drink it and they think, this is like drinking vinegar. Some people literally drink vinegar, so they're all about that. About that Vinny life. Yeah, it can be great for you. Back to the probiotics. This has kind of a neat, obviously, it has the raspberry, the jammy fruit character, but it has a kind of a cocoa powder element that's neat. I always said that making a good dark sour is one of the most challenging beers to make. The mistake a lot of breweries make is using way too dark of malt. Then you're trying to match sourness with bitter malt flavor. Roast. Yeah, which is kind of like trying to make a good hoppy, dark beer, bitter hops, bitter malt do not go well together, just like sour, acidic beer and bitter malt do not go well together. Again, you're astute pointing out that it's not super dark, it's more like a brown, dark amber. It's really good though. It's very complex. Yeah, I like it. I like that it's a soft acidity. I mean, for a lot of things like this, fruited, barrel-ade sours from a lot of American brewers, I expect a pretty bracing level of acidity. And this is actually soft and approachable. The fruit doesn't dominate. I like that. I like that you still get this wild barrel character. And the raspberries are there, but it's not by no means what I even call this a raspberry beer. No, if anything, it tastes a little figgy. Yeah, totally. What's cool is I would guess that there's some chocolate malt in here because of the chocolatey character. And then because it's so soft and creamy, it reminds me of like a dark chocolate cake, real dark with some raspberry like sauce or raspberries on it. Sure. What's ABV? It is 6.7 percent. That's not bad. Oh, gosh. And how much does this cost? It's a little more expensive. But again, this is a blending of different batches. And again, it's vintage. It's vintage dated, like the finest French champagne. All right. 25.99. 25.99. Well, you know, it is rare from a barrel. And that equals expensive beer. Rare Barrel, Wise Guise. Are sours probiotics? To some extent, the ones that are living still, like bottle-conditioned ones, have living- You can pitch it. So literally the type of bacteria that makes a beer sour is the same type of bacteria in a general way that makes pickles or kimchi or your yogurt that is good for the gut. Yeah. Lactobacillus in particular is that strain. Usually with the strains in these beers, it's kind of like a million different ones. So it's somewhat good for you. Yeah. There's definitely vitamins in here too, for sure. They can't say it, but we can. Yeah. Lee, you brought this up before, the what? ATBFBAC. Yeah. The powers of the B. Says no nutritional claims on alcohol products right now. There you go. None of these really made me pucker. The logs done a little bit, but- Yeah. There was a campaign by, we mentioned, Jeffers Richardson. He was one of the people of Firestone Walker that made the Paw Paw Beer a reality. He was really big on trying to have titratable acidity as a rating on beers. Unfortunately, that's pretty far down the Geek Street. I wish there was a more easily digestible and understandable way to communicate to the consumer how tart something is going to be. It's obviously subjective and it definitely depends on what else is in the beer. I've said this with cider a lot. These beers can be very fruity and sweet and also sour. If it's very dry and sour, that's a very different sensation and mouthfeel and perception of sourness than if something is both sweet and sour. So it gets really complicated. Some of the American sours are like drinking battery acid. They're just like you get, Greg said this before, you get instant heartburn. And I don't feel that any of these today were like, oh God, like this is too much. Because we're pouring some of the most well-made examples out on the market today. Way to pick them. Thank you. Roger, this was a good one. Yeah. People were digging on the style still. It sounds pretentious, but there's some validity in it. Think of it less as a style and as a flavor profile. And try gauzes, try Berliner Weisses, try lambics, try gauzes. Really try to read the label, see what it says on there. Does it say wild fermentation? Does it say mixed fermentation? Does it say kettle sour? This is something to geek out on and enjoy it. The time spent kind of understanding it and trying them and diving a little deeper. These are some of the most complex and rewarding beers we sell. It's time for the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where we answer your question for our $20 Binny's gift card. Write your question at commentsatbinnys.com or hit us up on social media at Binny's Beb on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our question this week comes from Mason. This is true. I think Mason was on vacation in San Diego. Love that town. Yeah. You guys should stop complaining about hazy IPA and tell me how this beer is possible with a picture of Manitap Golden Stout by Belching Beaver. It has all the mouthfeel and flavors of a stout, but it looks like a lager. Coffee, macadamia, and white chocolate are pretty wild. What the f*** is a golden stout? And how is this new devilry possible? Well, through the use of Roger's favorite word, adjuncts. Yeah. So first of all, it's a cremail, but just like they call everything on the market an IPA, they know that no one wants to buy a cremail, so they're just making up a new kind of stout, because they're like, oh, people like stout, so this is a stout Yeah, this is becoming more of a thing. So they make a cremail, so a ale brewed with lactose sugar, with milk sugar, to give it a little more sweetness, and more a round, unctuous body type of thing. And then they also add vanilla, and they might barrel-age it, but they add these flavors to it. Chocolate, they add flavors, there's coffee, they add stout-like flavoring to a rounder, fuller-bodied golden beer, and they call it a golden stout or a white stout, and really it's just a flavored cremail. Unlike cremails, a lot of them use oats, and I suppose oats and stout's a thing, so. But yeah, calling it a stout is just to help it sell better. Yeah, there are ways to make a beer fuller-bodied, and they take advantage of those methods, whether that is mashbill-type stuff like oats, or additives like lactose sugar, and then through adjunct-type flavoring for it. Like, you're not going to find a white stout that doesn't have adjuncts added to it. I've never seen one. They almost always have at least vanilla and trumpet. It's usually fruit around here. Yeah, and vanilla. So, and I, and yes, we'll try to stop hating on the New England IPAs. Everybody loves them. I don't, you know, whatever. I'm not in charge of telling people what they should drink. I just try to let them, try to make sure we provide what they want. And, God knows, we have plenty of hazy IPAs in the store. Depending on the day. Yeah. If you like that style, I suggest you also look for coffee cream ales. There's a couple of those floating around. There's an awesome one at From Outside Ales up in Michigan. That's something that, like a white stout, seems perplexing. They're, like, very coffee forward, very creamy, some sweetness, but they're completely light in color. Yeah, crystal clear. Yeah. All right, cool. Mason, thanks for writing in. That sounds like a good beer. Bring us some back. Yeah. $20 Binny's gift card coming to you. Everybody else can email your question to comments at binnys.com or hit us up on social media on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, at Binny's Bev. Roger, thanks for bringing this lineup of Sours Part 2. My pleasure. Sours Part 3 is coming in four days. Thanks for not boring me to tears this week, Roger. Actually, this is a pretty good lineup. No, these are great beers. Again, like I said before, Sours is a big category. You got to give it a chance. There's a lot to talk about, a lot to learn. More coming soon. We'll be back in your feed next week with another episode of Barrel to Bottle. Until next time, I'm Greg. I'm Pat. I'm Hillary. I'm Roger. Keep tasting. What did you mean when you said moose? So just really delicate and creamy to the point of like, think of drinking a sparkling water, how that gets that snappy kind of like, it really like cleans your tongue. Yeah, but why moose? Moose like really soft and smooth. Because it really reminds them of the pelt of the world's largest species of deer. Like chocolate moose, like creamy. Oh, moose. I totally thought you meant the animal. Moose. I don't eat a lot of moose. You know, on the other side of the world, they call moose elk because they don't have elk. Oh, they got to come to Oak Grove in Oregon. Where we call bison buffalo because we don't have buffalo. This is turning into a great episode. Sorry. It's all right.