Sour Beer, Explained: What It Is, Why It Isn't Scary, and Where to Start

Sour beer is the one people point at and say "I couldn't drink that." It's also, more often than not, the one they end up ordering a second time once someone's explained it properly. So here's the explanation.

What actually makes a beer sour

Nothing has gone wrong with it. That's the first thing worth clearing up, because a lot of people assume sour means spoiled.

Ordinary beer is fermented with brewer's yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol and not much else. Sour beer brings something else to the party — usually lactobacillus, the same family of bacteria behind sourdough and yoghurt, sometimes brettanomyces, a wild yeast with a mind of its own. They produce acid alongside the alcohol, and that acidity is the tartness you taste.

It is one of the oldest ways of making beer there is. Before brewers understood what yeast was, nearly everything had some sourness to it. What we call sour beer now is a deliberate return to that, done with control.

The styles worth knowing

Berliner Weisse. Light, low in alcohol, sharply tart and refreshing. Often the gentlest way in. Germans traditionally cut it with a shot of fruit syrup, which tells you how approachable it's meant to be.

Gose. Similar territory, but brewed with coriander and a pinch of salt. Sounds strange, tastes like a lime and soda on a hot afternoon. Very easy drinking.

Kettle sours and fruited sours. The bulk of what you'll meet in modern taprooms. The wort is soured quickly before boiling, then fruit goes in — raspberry, cherry, mango, passionfruit. Bright, jammy, a bit like a shandy that's grown up. If you like a dry cider you'll get on with these.

Lambic and gueuze. Belgian, spontaneously fermented with whatever wild yeast is drifting through the brewery air, then aged for years in barrels. Complex, funky, dry as a bone. Not a beginner's pint, but worth working up to.

Farmhouse and wild ales. Aged in oak, often blended across batches, somewhere between a beer and a natural wine. This is where sour beer gets genuinely interesting.

Where to start if you've never had one

Order a fruited sour. Almost everyone gets on with them, and they do the job of showing you that acidity in beer is a flavour rather than a fault.

If that lands, move to a gose next, then a Berliner Weisse. Leave the barrel-aged wild stuff until you've found your feet — going straight to a three-year-old gueuze is like starting your wine education on natural orange wine. You might love it. You might never come back.

And ask for a taster. We'd far rather pour you a small one of something you end up liking than sell you a full pint you leave half-finished.

Sussex does this well

We only pour beer and cider made in Sussex, which might sound like a limitation when it comes to a style this specialist. It isn't.

Burning Sky over at Firle is one of the most respected producers of farmhouse and barrel-aged sour beer in the country, not just the county. People travel for it. Having that on our doorstep means we can put genuinely serious sour beer on the bar without breaking the rule that everything comes from Sussex.

Our taps rotate constantly, so what's on when you visit changes. The tap list on this site is live from the bar — it updates the moment we change a keg, so it's worth a look before you come down.

What to eat with it

Acidity cuts through fat, which is why a sour works so well with something rich. A fruited sour against one of our XXL hot dogs is a genuinely good pairing — the sharpness resets your palate between bites in a way a heavy stout never will.

It's the same principle as a squeeze of lemon on fried fish. Nothing complicated about it.

Come and try one

You don't need to commit. Come in, say you've never had a sour and don't know where to start, and whoever's behind the bar will find you something and let you taste it first.

Worst case you don't like it and you have a lager instead. Best case you've found the thing you order for the next ten years.