The Best American Sour Beers of 2019
December 30, 2019
There are certain unalienable truths in this world. The sky is blue. Water is wet. Myles Jack wasn’t down. Among those truths: the two of us absolutely love sour beer. We love them all: from the more nuanced and complex saisons to the full-blown acid bombs that send your face into a contorted pucker, we will chug sours until we have to pause for a run to CVS to get more Tums. Below is a list of the best sour beers we had in 2019. We realize not all of them were necessarily brewed in 2019— and nearly all of them likely were placed into barrels *before* the start of the year— but we’re basing our list on date of consumption, not on date tapped or bottled.
We’re also limiting the list to American sours, because we had hundreds of sour beers this year, that makes our job easier. We’re also limiting the list to one beer per brewery for the same reason. We could easily fill an entire list with sours from Une Annee or Cellador Ales— or even with sours from breweries left off this list entirely!— so know that if you feel your favorite sour was left off that we probably loved it too! But for the purposes of this exercise, we painfully whittled our list down to these twenty, a selection of the year’s sour standouts, the ones that makes our mouths water and lips pucker when we think about them today.
Barbarian Brewing: 2018 Elixir of the Gods
“Not only do they make elite-level hazy IPAs, they make some of the best sour beers in the country. The 2018 Elixir of the Gods is aptly named, an incredible pomegranate sour.” Read more about this beer in our Great American Beer Festival coverage.
Barrel Culture: Summer Jam: Mango Dragonfruit
“The Summer Jam: Mango Dragonfruit is as fresh and fruity a sour ale as you’re likely to ever try.” Read more about this beer and Barrel Culture’s other terrific sours in our Durham, North Carolina coverage.
Black Project: Shadow Factory: Blackberry & Raspberry
Two straight years of visiting Black Project’s terrific taproom, two straight years they make our Best Sours of the Year list. Every Shadow Factory variant is delicious, but the berries makes this the perfect balance of tart and tasty. You’d think you could only find sours of this quality in expensive wax-covered bottles, but Black Project now cans these barrel fruited beauties, which is so awesome that it’s almost unfair.
Bottle Logic: Joule Thief (Strawberry + Watermelon)
Bottle Logic gets its sterling reputation for its bigger beers– its stouts, its hefty IPAs– but their strawberry and watermelon version of their Berliner Weisse was a light, refreshing watermelon Jolly Rancher of a beer that easily ranks as one of the best watermelon sours we’ve had since we started this website.
Burley Oak: Double Carrot Cake JREAM
“The balance between the cinnamon and carrot flavors and the creaminess of the finish both truly must be tasted to be believed.” Read more about this beer in our Best Beers From Every State in 2019 list.
“As parishioners at the Church of Sour, we decided to lavish praises upon the Oro Del Sol, their barrel-aged wild ale aged on golden plums. Plum sours are often hit or miss, but the bright flavor and big-time sour kick make this one a grand slam.” Read more about this beer in our 2019 Summit Beer Festival coverage.
Last year, we said, “Choosing the best Cellador Ales sour beer is like choosing the best John Goodman supporting performance: they’re all so great, it’s impossible to decide.” This year, the same holds true: we gave *six* of their sours the highest marks we can give. Gun to head, we choose Cinque, a vanilla and black raspberry sour that blew us away at their Sour Friends Fest.
“We so rarely encounter a sour stout like Morena that so delicately balances that hefty tart flavor we love in a sour with the dark, fruity, roasty flavors we love in a sour. This cherry chocolate Warhead deserves any and all superlatives it earns.” Read more about this beer in our LA Beer Week coverage.
Equilibrium Brewing: Paradise City (Pineapple, Peach, and Lychee)
“Its effervescent mouthfeel and intense sour bite would have my tastebuds singing “Take me down!” The sign at the booth advertised tasting notes of pineapple mimosas, which is a better description than anything I could conjure.” Read more about this beer in our Extreme Beer Fest coverage.
Fiction Beer: Antiquarian No. 6 With Blackberries
“We have special affinity for their incredible Antiquated No. 6 with Blackberries, because we love our sours extra sour, and this beauty delivers the goods.” Read more about this beer in our Great American Beer Festival coverage.
Highland Park Brewery: Coldbox Cool Ship
“With all this brilliance, the MVP must be given to the Cold Box Cool Ship, a spontaneously fermented wild ale that is tart, funky, and bright in equal measure.” Read more about our love for HPB in our Firestone Walker Invitational coverage.
Modern Times: Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
“The Shrine of the Forsaken Gods is like packing a grenade with raspberry Warheads, pulling the pin, and shoving said grenade into our mouths. It’s designed to make your cheeks implode and your hand reach out for another glass.”Read more about this beer in our Sour Friends Fest coverage.
We said at Firestone Walker Invitational, “Same Tree is an oak-aged saison with incredibly rich nectarine and peach juice. It’s as if you took the ideal brunch cocktail and kicked up the tartness and funk. Maybe Monkish doesn’t need our hype— be that as it may, we’ll be stunned if Same Tree doesn’t make our best sours of the year list.” No need for us to be stunned– we were right!
Ology Brewing: Juice Lab: Passionfruit, Blood Orange, Raspberry
“We’re not sure any single beer at the festival made an impact on us the way Ology’s Juice Lab did. It’s intensely fruity, has real sour bite, and was phenomenally refreshing.” Read more about this beer in our Great American Beer Festival coverage.
Relentless Brewing: Tequila My Vibe
Relentless is a breath of fresh Temecula air– upon our visit this summer, we were overjoyed to discover that barrels weren’t only being used for wine. We had every sour Relentless had on the menu, but our favorite was Tequila My Vibe– as we said in our Temecula hop guide, “The Tequila My Vibe is a golden sour aged in tequila barrels, and you definitely get that unique blend of peach, guava, apricot, tequila, and full-blown pucker-inducing sour goodness.”
We lavished praises upon Sante Adairius, calling their beers among the best at both Firestone Walker Invitational and Summit Beer Festival this year. A number of their sours could’ve ended up on this list– we’ll ultimately side with Like Minds, a barrel-aged buckwheat saison with some light tartness, a dash of funk, and some crisp lemon and pepper flavors within.
Side Project Brewing: Pulling Nails (Blend #9)
Thanks to the Firestone Walker Invitational, we were finally able to experience Side Project Brewing in 2019. Impossible to pick a favorite, but we’ll lean so slightly toward the world-class sour Pulling Nails (Blend #9), which we described as “a blackberry beauty that played our sour receptors like Victor Wooten does a bass guitar.” Read more about our Side Project experience in our Firestone Walker Invitational coverage.
Speciation Artisan Ales: Abiogenesis
“The hype is earned: Speciation is making some of the festival’s best sours— and Abiogenesis, a foeder-aged sour with passionfruit and strawberries, is one of the most impressive jewels in its crown.” Read more about this beer in our Great American Beer Festival coverage.
Une Annee: Le Grand Monde 2019-4
If you’re in Chicago? Make the trip to Une Annee. We’ve raved about it in the past, and we named them to our best sours list last year– so unsurprisingly, we’ve got a second straight year of Le Grand Monde on this list, because, as we said a year ago, “we want sour breweries to drop more acid than Hunter S. Thompson.” This sour is loaded with watermelon, pricky pear, and hardcore enamel-melting pucker.
“I had The Gadget, a beer I’ve had five or six times, at EBF– and I *still* found myself blown away by its absolutely brilliant fresh fruit tartness and its mouthfeel combination of effervescent and nearly-pulpy juiciness.” Read more about this beer in our Extreme Beer Fest coverage.
What were your favorite sour beers in 2019? What are you looking forward to trying in 2020? Please let us know in the comments below! Check out our list of our favorite beers from every state, and keep an eye out for a few more Best of 2019 lists coming in the next few days!
