Beer style is fashion.

When the three of us started drinking craft beer in the mid 90s, we drank reds and browns, pales and stouts. Those were the days before IPA became the de facto style—seems like forever ago. We’d buy the occasional lambic, but it was for novelty’s sake more than anything. They were overly sweet, highly carbonated, and—to our younger palates—not very beer-like.

Fast forward twenty years, and the beer world has definitely changed a few times in the interim. The 90s craft movement crashed, only to smolder and come back burning brighter than ever in the late 2000s on the strength of higher quality and creativity. We traded those brown ales for IPAS, got a schooling in Belgian styles from better access to imports (as well as American breweries who embraced those styles), and broadened our approach to craft beer.

Then we started noticing a peculiar shift in beer—the brewers we respected, and who brewed the hoppy styles or Belgian abbey styles, started throwing beer in barrels to intentionally sour it. It tasted strange, and we passed over those bottles in the liquor stores at first. But eventually, while drinking with friends, we all tasted a sour beer that clicked with us. Whether it was the bright acidity of a pale sour that reminded us of white wine, the estery citrus fruitness of a gueuze, or the dark cherry and leather notes of an oud bruin, we finally had a way in.

That love of sour beer hasn’t let go of us for the past few years, and we hope that this issue will help open that door for you, too (if it isn’t open already). We’ve put together stories from some great writers with a deep knowledge of sour and wild beer (and the brewers who make it), from Tom Wilmes’s sours primer (page 60) to Charles Cook’s piece on how Belgian brewers add fruit to their lambics (page 66) to resident homebrew expert Dave Carpenter’s take on spontaneous fermentation for homebrewers (page 76).

There are almost as many ways to make sour beers as there are brewers who brew them, but that’s what makes today the best time in history to be a consumer or maker of great beer. Whether your goal is to brew a batch of great sour beer for yourself or to learn more about the rich history and techniques that create the variety of sour beers we enjoy, we hope you enjoy this issue. We made it for you.

John, Jamie & Steve

Cofounders Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®