Traditional sours vs. Pastry sours

Traditional sour beers with their full-on tartness and funkiness are a little bit like durians or stinky tofu. Like many foods with a rich culture behind them, they're an acquired taste. These sorts of beers aren't for everyone. And frankly, the first time I tried a traditional Lambic sour beer, I winced from the acidity.

Lambic beers which originate from medieval Belgium, are an incredibly sour style fermented by wild yeast and bacterial present in the environment, often relying on lactobacillus to bring out a rich acidity in the beer. Yup, that's the same species of lactobacillus used to make yogurt, Yakult and sourdough bread.

As competition rose, modern craft beer breweries looked beyond IPAs and porters to seek  creative means and ways to appeal to a wider range of mainstream customers, not just to the most hardcore hopheads. And because traditional styles like Lambic are often also made with fresh fruits like raspberry (framboise), peach (pêche), blackcurrant (cassis), grape (druif), or strawberry (aardbei), American breweries could delve into these highly marketable fruited beers without straying far from beer tradition and committing heresy. 

While traditional fruited beers (like fruited Lambics) were more marketable, they still remained somewhat on the fringes due to their intense acidity. So why stop there? New styles of beers were developed. Traditional styles were further adapted for wider appeal, and beer brewing was combined with appealing culinary concepts associated with chocolate or coffee or other desserts (e.g. coffee stouts / chocolate porter).

Enter the "pastry sour". These are beers inspired by pastry-like sweet tooth items such as apple pie, molten lava cakes, other desserts, snacks and candies. You don’t have to be a beer geek to appreciate stouts that taste like molten lava cake, IPAs that remind you of apple pie, or even a beer that pulls off notes of jelly beans. 

Making a pasty sour isn't that straightforward. Of course, if we're making a blueberry pie pastry sour, actual blueberry puree would be added, but it's certainly more complicated than just throwing an actual blueberry pie into the mix to get notes of blueberry pie. These beers are often sweetened with lactose, the sugar derived from milk. Vanilla is also often added to compliment malty flavours and elevate pastry-like notes. Oats could be added to create a thicker mouthfeel and a runny, syrupy texture.

If you're not careful you might end up with a sickeningly sweet cloying abomination, or a sour beer that is still too tart for a mainstream audience. Since the goal is really to proselytise the gospel of craft beer, your Word should be as easy to swallow as possible. Drinkability therefore also became a culinary lodestar for these brewers seeking to expand the community of craft beer drinkers. 

We'll be sipping Brewlander's newly released Blueberry Lemon Marshmallow Pastry Sour, one of the 12 surprises from the Brewlander 2022 Christmas Advent Calendar.

Brewlander's Blueberry Lemon Marshmallow is intended as a subtly tart and sweet dessert reimagined as a craft beer, and is made with the addition of fresh blueberries, raspberries, lemon zest, and vanilla, oats and wheat for a finish and texture of marshmallows.

Let's give this a taste!

Blueberry Lemon Marshmallow Pastry Sour, 4.5% ABV – Review

Colour: Semi-transparent Merlot red 

Nose: Vibrant, clean and fresh with a lot of berry-like sweetness. The aroma opens with mild and appealing top notes of blueberry jam with its sweetness and slight tartness.

Undertones of an expressed lemon peel amid the blueberry jam.

Palate: Rich, medium bodied, jammy and restrained. 

The palate opens with a burst of sweet blueberry jam mixed with sparkling Ribena (a British blackcurrant drink), quickly followed by an intense citrusy note of lemon peel – this is very lemony and citrusy without the mouth puckering sourness from lemon juice. 

Layered notes of barley and malt begin to show up in the middle as the berry sweetness subsides. 

Finish: the finish is medium-long with a mild vanilla woodiness, dry lemony aroma and an undertone of lightly toasted marshmallow.  

My thoughts

Sour beers (whether they're traditional sours, modern fruited sours or dessert sours) are a challenge to make and to pull off. The introduction of wild yeast and ambient bacterial could result in uncontrolled fermentation and spoilage of the beer. 

And even well-made sours could be a hit or miss with people – especially if they aren't familiar with this genre of beers. If you're someone just getting into craft beers, they could be unacceptably sour or too sickly sweet for your liking. Balance must also be met – some pastry or dessert sours are so intense in their overwhelming dessert notes that the resulting drink is no longer recognisable as a beer. 

I’d say that this Blueberry Lemon Marshmallow is a decent introduction to the sour beer genre. It is fresh, clean and finds a good balance between the contrasting vibrant berry notes and dry toasty barley notes. I also like that the brewer had an eye on the sweetness, ensuring that the beer isn’t too sweet that even my Asian dad would accept it. The touch of marshmallow in the finish is an interesting note, although I do wish that this note was developed much further. 

Overall, though, this is a very approachable sour made accessible to new drinkers and that leaves you wanting more. 

@CharsiuCharlie