Sour Beer Styles Explained: Gose, Berliner Weisse, Wild Ale & More

Aug 27

7 min read

Sour beer is one of those categories that sounds simple until you actually start trying to order it. A gose, a fruited kettle sour and a barrel-aged wild ale can all be called "sour," but they can taste nothing alike.

Some of what gets lumped under "sour" is a style. Some of it is a method. Some of it is just what’s on the can. Here's a practical rundown of what you're actually drinking, so you can order with a little more confidence next time you're staring at a tap list.

Gose

Gose is a tart, often salty wheat beer, sometimes brewed with coriander, that traces back to Germany. The salt doesn't make it taste like the rim of a margarita, it just levels out the acidity and gives the beer a bit of body it wouldn't have otherwise at a low ABV.

Most goses today are loaded with fruit, watermelon and grapefruit are popular choices. It’s usually bright, tart, and easy to drink even if you don’t normally order sour beer, which is a big reason it's had such a rising comeback in craft beer.

Berliner Weisse

Berliner Weisse is light, bright, and really refreshing, usually around 3% ABV. It’s a wheat beer with a gentle tartness and very little bitterness, so it tastes more like something crisp and refreshing than an aggressively sour drink.

Traditionally, Berliner Weisse was often served with a small shot of raspberry or woodruff syrup, which added a little sweetness and took the edge off the tartness. So when you come across a fruited version these days, it’s not necessarily some modern craft-beer twist. Fruit and sweetness have been part of the way people have enjoyed this style for a long time.

If you’re curious about sour beer but don’t want to jump straight into something super funky, barrel-aged, or overly-puckering, Berliner Weisse is an easy place to start. It’s usually low in alcohol, light enough for a warm, sunny day, and has just enough tartness to make it interesting without taking over your whole palate.

Kettle Sour

Here’s where the terminology gets a little confusing: a kettle sour isn’t really a style of beer so much as a brewing method. Instead of letting a beer sour slowly over months or years, brewers add Lactobacillus to the wort before the boil step and let it build up the acidity pretty quickly.

Once the beer reaches the tartness they’re aiming for, they boil it, move on with fermentation, and finish it like they would any other beer. It’s a much faster and more predictable way to make a sour, which is a big reason you see kettle-soured beers so often in taprooms and on the shelves.

The method can be used for all kinds of beers, including goses, Berliner Weisses, and plenty of the fruit-heavy sours that have become popular. So when you see “kettle sour” on a menu, it tells you more about how it was made, not so much what it’s going to taste like.

If you want to get a little deeper into the brewing side of it, we covered the whole process in Understanding the Kettle Sour Brewing Process

Fruited Sour

“Fruited sour” isn’t really a traditional beer style on its own. It’s more of a catch-all term for a sour beer - often a kettle sour, gose, or Berliner Weisse - that gets a huge amount of fruit added somewhere along the way. That could be mango, raspberry, passion fruit, blood orange, cherry, peach, or pretty much anything else a brewer decides they want to play with.

For a lot of people, this is the easiest way to get into sour beer because the fruit gives you something familiar to grab onto. The tartness is still there, but it gets balanced out by sweetness, juiciness, and whatever flavor the fruit brings to the mix.

And there’s a pretty big range within the category. Some fruited sours are light, crisp, and refreshing, while others are thick, sweet, and almost dessert-y. So if you try one and don’t love it, that doesn’t necessarily mean fruited sours aren’t for you - it might just mean you haven’t found the right type yet.

Wild Ale

Wild ale is where things start to get a little more unpredictable - and, for a lot of sour fans, a lot more interesting. Instead of relying only on the clean, controlled brewing yeast used in most beers, wild ales ferment with wild yeast strains like Brettanomyces, either on their own or alongside bacteria and other cultures.

That mix can create a huge range of flavors. One wild ale might come across fruity, with notes of pineapple, citrus, or stone fruit, while another can be a lot more earthy, funky, or even a little barnyard-like. Those flavors can also change as the beer ages, which is part of what makes the style so different from a typical lager or IPA. It's definitely not for everyone, but if you've ever had a sour that tasted more funky, or almost "alive" than the rest, the wild yeast is probably why.

Mixed Fermentation

Mixed fermentation beers use, as you can probably guess, more than one yeast or bacteria. That means some combination of standard brewing yeast, Brettanomyces, and souring bacteria like Lactobacillus or Pediococcus, are all working on the beer either at the same time or in different stages.

The result tends to be deeper, more complex, and more layered than a beer that’s fermented with a single culture. You might get tartness, fruit, funk, earthiness, or other flavors developing together over time. These are usually beers a brewery has let sit for a while, since it takes time for all those different organisms to do their thing and for the flavors to come together.

Lambic / Gueuze

Lambic is about as old-school as sour beer gets. Traditionally brewed in Belgium, it ferments spontaneously, meaning brewers rely on wild yeast and bacteria from the environment rather than adding a standard yeast culture.

The beer is then aged, often in oak, where it gets its signature tart, funky, complex character. Gueuze is made by blending younger and older lambics together and allowing the beer to re-ferment in the bottle.

You won't see these styles quite as often in the U.S. as kettle sours or fruited sours, but they're an important part of sour beer history - and worth trying at least once if you come across one.

Smoothie / Pastry Sour

Smoothie and pastry sours take fruited sours and turn the volume all the way up. They feature lots of fruit puree, sometimes alongside lactose, vanilla, or other flavorings, with a texture that can feel closer to an actual fruit smoothie than a traditional beer.

Smoothie sours are usually all about the fruit, sometimes blending multiple kinds together for a thick, juicy body and bright color. The tartness is there, but it typically takes a back seat to the fruit itself.

Pastry sours seem more like a dessert, with flavors like vanilla, cinnamon, chocolate, or other sweet ingredients to create something that drinks more like a treat than a beer.

Both styles are bold, fun, and easy to drink, especially for someone who wants plenty of flavor without much of a learning curve. They're usually sweeter and less tart than most of the other sours on this list, and people tend to either love them or find them a little much. There's not a lot of middle ground.

Barrel-Aged Sour

Barrel-aged sours spend extended time - often a year or more - in wine or spirits barrels, picking up some of the character from the wood as well as from the yeast and bacteria working inside. The result can be vinous, funky, oaky, or a combination of all three, with flavors that develop even more as the beer ages.

These are usually the most complex and least predictable sours you'll find, and even different batches of the same beer can taste a little different. If Gose and Berliner Weisse are the front door to sour beer, barrel-aged sours are way at the other end.

Where Should I Start?

If you're new to sours or just want something easy to drink, start with a gose or Berliner Weisse. Both are light, low in ABV, and tart without being too sour.

If you like your beer a little more sweet and don’t mind a bit of thickness, a smoothie sour could be more your speed.

If you're chasing funk and complexity, look for something labeled wild ale or mixed fermentation. And if you're ready for the deep end, a barrel-aged sour or a lambic is where the real patience pays off.

FAQ: Sour Beer

Why are sour beers usually more expensive than regular beer?

Sour beers take longer to make and carry more risk along the way. Traditional souring can mean months or years of barrel aging, plus the extra ingredients and equipment care that come with introducing bacteria and wild yeast into the brewing process. Kettle sours are a faster, cheaper exception, which is part of why they've gotten so popular recently.

Do sour beers have more alcohol than traditional beer?

Usually less, not more. Most sours land somewhere between 3 and 6 percent ABV, which puts many of them in session beer territory. Some barrel-aged or imperial sours climb higher, up to 8 or 9 percent, but that's the exception not the rule.

Is a fruited ale the same as a sour beer?

Not necessarily. A fruited ale is just a beer, sour or not, that's been brewed or flavored with fruit. A sour beer gets a noticeable tartness from bacteria or wild yeast during fermentation. Plenty of sours happen to be fruited, but a fruit ale on its own doesn't have to be sour at all.

The two overlap constantly in craft beer right now, since a lot of fruited beers are also sours, but don’t assume a fruited pale ale or fruited stout is sour just because there's fruit in it.

Why does sour beer taste different from batch to batch?

Because it's not always brewed with a single, controlled yeast strain. Traditional sours rely on a mix of wild yeast and bacteria that behave a little differently every time, which is part of the appeal for a lot of drinkers and part of why no two batches are ever quite identical.

I don't usually like regular beer. Would I like a sour?

Possibly, more than you'd expect. Sours tend to be tart, fruity, and low on bitterness, which is a different experience than a hoppy IPA or a heavy stout. A lot of people who consider themselves "not beer people" end up finding their way in through a gose or a fruited sour.