Beer Drinkers Are Growing Sweet On Sour Beers


Statistically speaking, sours have become a growing interest for beer drinkers. According to Information Resources Inc., sour beer sales went up 40 percent in 2019, and in 2018, according to Nielsen, sour beer sales rose nearly 43 percent, as beer drinkers purchased a whopping $14.8 million worth of them.

Interest in sour beers is definitely growing, says David Bower, president of Upland Brewing Co., based in Bloomington, IN.

Upland is one of the grand-daddy craft brewers of the sour movement, as the company started fermenting this style of beer back in 2006. “Initially, we traded Oliver Winery, which is down the road from us, some beer for their barrels, and it started as a small experiment,” Bower says. “It’s kind of evolved over the last 14 years into what it is now.”

“We opened The Wood Shop, our stand-alone, sour-specific brewery, in 2016,” says Eli Trinkle, lead sour brewer for Upland. “We’ve been at it for a while, and we continue to make beer that we’re excited about.”

The reason for opening a separate brewery is that sour beers are created by intentionally introducing the beer to wild yeasts and/or bacteria, and that creates the sour taste. “The big difference between sours and clean beer is that we use bacteria in our sours, the same kind of lactobacillus that makes yogurt, as well as a few others and wild yeasts in there as well,” Bower says. “We also age everything in wood, hence the name, The Wood Shop.”

These wild yeasts and bacteria have the potential for affecting “clean beers” so the separate production facility made sense. “We wanted to keep the bacteria and the yeasts separate from our other beers,” Bower says. “Initially, we separated the production into two different facilities in 2012, but we expanded our cellar and opened The Wood Shop where we are today in 2016.”

If the production facilities were not kept separate, these wild yeasts and bacteria had more potential to combine with the brewery’s other products. “The bacteria and the yeast can really get into small parts, crevices in gaskets” and the like, Bower says.

Upland’s very first production was very small, fermenting the beer in just four wine barrels, but today, this brewery makes anywhere from 40 to 50 different, individual types of sours, and they have 11 oak tanks, which can hold anywhere from 30 to 100 barrels.

Some of their flavors include Pawpaw, which is their base sour blonde ale blended with local pawpaw fruit. But they also make flavors of guava, cherry, raspberry, and Komplex, which is a barrel-aged sour ale which is aged for three months on whole raspberries that’s then blended with kombucha made from oolong tea. All of their sour beers are aged for at least a year.

“Nationally, we are known for our sours, but we make IPAs, Pilsners and things like that,” Trinkle says.

In fact, locally, Upland is more known for their more standard types of craft beer, but nationally – and even internationally – the brewery is known for sours. “The concentration of sour drinkers is in more highly concentrated, urban areas,” Trinkle says. Places like Austin, Texas; California, New York, and Washington, D.C. all drink their sours, and their sours are exported to the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia. “We’ve had some local fans contact us to say ‘Oh, my gosh, I found your beer in London,’” Trinkle says.

Every year, the brewery makes around 25 new varieties, which range from large volumes to “only two barrels because we could only get a couple hundred pounds of fruit from that farm down the road,” says Bower.

“We treat these beers like a wine here, with a lot of blending,” Bower says, adding that, like wine, sour beers pair really well with food.

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