Style: Sour IPA
Stats: 5.6% ABV, Close to Zero IBU
We’ve made this beer in the past, but it’s been a couple years so I thought best to start over with the write-up, to take some time to describe what this beer’s all about.
First, on the style:
I’m not sure Sour IPA is an generally accepted style, at least I don’t see it listed in the places I usually look for such things, but a quick online search shows we’re not the only brewery making a Sour IPA. The name does make sense insofar as the recipe I put together is a classic Hazy IPA recipe, but the process involves a souring step. We started with malted barley and malted wheat, and added some oats and unmalted wheat to the grist, which tends to impart a lot of proteins to the finished beer. Then we used a mixed fermentation (a couple of different microbes) which produced alcohol and a mild, refreshing lactic tartness over the course of a couple weeks in the fermenter. Then we dry-hopped.
Why a Sour IPA, and what’s it taste like?
Sour beers sell much more briskly in the warmer months, and that makes sense: the tartness makes these beers very quenching and refreshing. And we love those hoppy, juicy flavors of modern IPAs, so a Sour IPA just makes sense to us for August in Arkansas. This one’s limited to one tank turn for 2024, and who knows when we’ll make it again.
The beer expresses a variety of clean, citrusy flavors. In fact, we came up with the name for this one after tasting the beer the first time around, settling on Citraspective because the beer seemed to be lemony, orange-y, have hints of tangerine and finish it’s sojourn across the palette with strong notes of grapefruit all in the same beer. This year’s version is quite true to the original flavor profile and moniker.
The nose is classic American IPA – some citrus with piney, resinous notes to the fore. Lemon is pretty easy to pick out of the aroma, with an orange note that reminds me of those tiny clementine oranges that show up annually in small boxes in the supermarket. The flavor is at first like a hoppy version of lemonade: a little sweetness, and a palette-cleansing sourness that has a definite lemony edge to it. It’s very refreshing! The beer finishes a bit more like ruby red grapefruit, there sweetness chased by a hint of bitterness.
Not Gluten-reduced
Apologies to our gluten sensitive fans out there, but this one does not employ the enzyme we use for reducing the glutens in the majority of our beers. We brew this one to be hazy, using both malted and unmalted wheat, which tends to pump a lot of proteins into the final product (gluten being one kind of grain protein). Those proteins are small enough to stay suspended in the beer (bigger proteins would settle out), but aren’t really entirely dissolved in the beer either. I like to think of these haze particles as little hooks on which I can hang tasty hop flavors, those hop essential oils being another substance that doesn’t really want to dissolve in beer. In other words, the haze can act as a flavor carrier, allowing us to pack extra hoppy flavors into a beer.
Other Notes:
Strongly bitter flavors don’t tend to pair well with sour flavors, so we avoided drawing much bitterness into the beer by adding all the kettle hops after the boil was over. The idea was to add flavor and aroma, and a bit of tannic balance, but not the sharp defining bitterness that typically contrasts sweetness in a beer. Normally dry hopping won’t add IBUs to a beer, but it will increase the perceived bitterness just from different hop compounds that end up in the final beer, but by the time we dry-hopped, the pH was already below 3.8. With the pH as low as it was, the increase in bitterness was extremely mild, yielding the grapefruity notes mentioned above.
Happily, the tartness provides its own balance. As I mentioned in tasting notes above, the beer does bring some sweetness to the plate, which in a typical IPA would be balanced by the bitter flavors derived from hops. The bitterness here is quite low, as is the mouthfeel. The initial sweetness is sliced through with that quenching, somewhat lemony tartness. The flavor doesn’t have those mouth-coating, lingering hoppy flavors we expect (and love!) in a typical hazy. The beer is more like a bright, intense burst of flavor that recedes like water poured on sand. Gone almost as quickly as it got there.