The Best American Sour Beers of 2020
December 14, 2020
There are certain unalienable truths in this world. The sky is blue. Water is wet. Among those truths: the two of us absolutely love sour beer. We love them all: from the more nuanced and complex saisons and farmhouse ales to the full-blown acid bomb wild ales 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 2020. We realize not all of them were necessarily brewed in 2020— 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 didn’t have *quite* as many sours from across the country as we normally do, due to the pandemic shutting down the beer festival circuit. Be that as it may, the sours we had were all from top-notch breweries and are all worthy inclusions on this list! We’re also limiting the list to one beer per brewery to make our lives easier. 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-five, a selection of the year’s sour standouts, the ones that makes our mouths water and lips pucker when we think about them today.
18th Street Brewing: Fallen Maple
“The raspberry in the Fallen Maple is wonderfully tart, but some of the sharpness of the acidity is neutralized by a creamy smoothness that the barrel-aged maple syrup provides. I’ve fallen hard for Fallen Maple.” Read more about this beer in our Carnival of Caffeination coverage.
Aslin is one of our favorite breweries in Virginia– it’s usually on our year-end lists for its big boozy stouts, one of which was named our best beer in the state in 2018. This year, however, they’re here for a standout sour: Apizza! The exclamation mark is part of the beer’s name, but it’s also an exciting concoction of watermelon, mint, and toasted coconut. Not a lot of mad geniuses can pull off that combination… but the mad geniuses at Aslin can. And did.
Arizona Wilderness: Salome Saison
“Usually, you want to reserve judgment before deciding a beer is one of the best of the festival, but I knew the second Salome Saison passed my lips that it’d be on this list. It magnificently balances fresh Meyer lemon juice with a peppercorn kick.” Read more about this beer in our Juicy Brews Beach Party coverage.
The Beer Research Institute: Boom Box (Triple Berry)
We went to a lot of breweries in Phoenix, and we drank a ton of great beer… but while we weren’t sure if it was the scene or if it was a byproduct of the pandemic, there just wasn’t much sour beer that was lighting our world on fire… until we hit The Beer Research Institute. The glass we had of Boom Box (Triple Berry) was fruity, tart, and THICC, as if they’d crushed and juiced the berries by hand into the glass.
Black Project Spontaneous & Wild Ales: Gremlin
Black Project is a staple in our Best Sour year-end lists— Denver is a town filled with delicious sours, yet Black Project finds a way to stand out from the pack with consistently creative, complex, and well-executed wild ales. This year, we didn’t expect “mango chili sour” to be a phrase we’d use, but leave it to these mad geniuses to not only make one, but to make it fantastic. Its lime and mango flavors are strong and sour, and there’s the perfect amount of chili spice at the finish. We’re excited to see what Black Project does in 2021, and we won’t be surprised if they’re back on this list next December.
The Brewing Projekt: Guavaberry Puff Tart
In our travels, we’ve never been to Eau Claire, Wisconsin… but now that we’ve tried The Brewing Projekt, we may have to plan a trip. The Guavaberry Puff Tart is, as Russell posted on Instagram at the time, “one of the best kettle sours I’ve ever had, a fruity Sweettart in a can.” Did we think we’d be consuming pink kettle sour beers in the year of our lord 2020, much less enjoying them? Certainly not. But while in the hands of many, this would be a failed experiment, The Brewing Projekt found the perfect balance of sweet and tart without getting cloyingly sugary. We’ve tried a few more beers from them since, and it’s safe to say they’ve earned the “Instant Purchase” label.
“Bruery Terreux’s Frambulous is an oak-aged sour blonde blend with raspberries, making it a perfect combo of the fruity Framboise style and the pucker-forward Terreux style— and an instant favorite in this house.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
Celestial Beerworks: Berry Rocket
“The Berry Rocket is a fruited berliner weisse stuffed with blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry. This sweet liquid jam takes the Dallas sour crown.” Read more about Celestial Beerworks in our Best Breweries in Dallas article.
“Fuckified, their Masumoto peach pit wild ale… boasts tremendous stone fruit flavor and an absolute smack in the face of sour— we bought a growler full so we could get smacked in the face for the whole week.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
Crooked Tooth Brewing: That’s What Friends are Spore
As you already know by now, we love when a beer can expand our expectations for what a beer can and should taste like– so when we took a trip to Tucson and saw a “barrel aged mushroom sour on the menu at Crooked Tooth Brewing? Best believe it was the first thing off the menu that we ordered. Luckily, it didn’t disappoint: there’s a funky earthy quality to it, with some distinct peppercorn bite, yet the sourness of the beer still delivers in the end. This is the sort of high-difficulty home run that puts a brewery on your radar for good– we’re excited for our next taste of Crooked Tooth.
Dark Sky Brewing: Bake Sale Blueberry
Dark Sky is a small microbrewery in Flagstaff, Arizona, that makes quality beer from lagers to stouts. However, our favorite thing on the menu– is it any surprise?– was the barrel-aged sour selection. Bake Sale Blueberry is a bourbon-barrel aged mixed fermentation sour with a Violet Beauregard sized blueberry kick. The color looks like straight blueberry juice, but the complex flavor and the sheer amount of pucker is straight from the barrel. Anything coming out of Dark Sky’s barrel program is worth a look, the Bake Sale sour variant series is particular. The sky may be dark, but the future for Dark Sky looks bright.
de Garde has made our Best Sours list in the past– and even took home the honor of being named our Best Beer from Oregon in 2018. While we sadly couldn’t make a trip to Tilamook, Oregon for their top-shelf sours (and the city’s top-shelf cheese!) this year, when we saw BottleCraft in San Diego pouring de Garde’s The Kriek, we leapt at the chance to relish a glass. The cherry flavor here is bright, tart, and acidic, and the oak barrels provide the sort of ideal woody funk that only true sour masters can conjure.
Drekker Brewing: Braaaaaaaains (Blackberry and Black Currant)
Although we named Drekker as our favorite beer in North Dakota last year for its amazing hazy IPAs, this year we’re going to give some love to their fruited sours, which easily rank among the best this style of beer has to offer. Their Braaaaaaaains series– and yes, we double checked to make sure we were putting in the correct number of A’s– were the first “smoothie sours” we ever enjoyed. We now order these a bit more often, and the Blackberry and Black Currant is a rich, creamy, and fruity berry jam. Not all fruited sours live up to the hype, but these do.
“We also can’t mention spice without discussing Dry River Brewing’s famous Lady Roja-based michelada, which uses their house botanical saison as its base. It’s the best michelada in Los Angeles, no contest.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
Elder Pine Brewing & Blending: Villeinage
We’re not convinced Villeinage, this exceptional dry-hopped table saison from Elder Pine Brewing & Blending, belongs in the sour list, because it’s not especially sour… but we needed to put it *somewhere*, damn it, because this beer was that good. It’s delightfully effervescent, kicking up notes and aromas of banana and bubblegum amidst a yeasty farmhouse vibe, and then you get some nice citrus hops in the mix as well. And, yes, just enough tart and funk to give us a shimmering aftertaste– and a justification to feature it on this list.
Four Fathers Brewing: Prince of Valpo
We busted Prince of Valpo, this Cascara dry-hopped sour from Four Fathers Brewing, out of our cellar this year during pandemic. This was our first-ever Four Fathers beer, and it was a winner right out of the gate. Too often, hopped sours seem overwhelmingly hoppy, or the sour will outshine and nullify the hop, but Four Fathers features the Cascara hop without rowing back on the sour bite. We’ll definitely seek out more Four Fathers in the future.
“The Good Beer Company’s Grindz is a Horus Aged Ales collab coffee sour— and as strange as that sounds, the execution was absolute perfection.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
“Even though we’re big fans of sour beer, we’re generally skeptical of the “smoothie sour”/“milkshake sour” style… so when we went to Kings Brewing, admittedly, we entered expecting to feel the beer was overhyped. However, one beer made us quickly realize how wrong we were: Purple Rain.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
The Rare Barrel: Soakin Up Rays
“We’ve sung their praises in the past, and here we are again, singing the same song. Soakin’ Up Rays is a barrel aged golden sour with passionfruit and guava, and it boasts the Rare Barrel’s trademark bright pucker.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
“Sour Cellars’s Belly Washer is a barrel aged golden sour with raspberries and orange blossom honey— the honey gives it a splash of sweetness to balance its big tartness and make it one of the sour highlights of the year.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
Southern Prohibition Brewing: The Outlaw Gosey Whales
We only recently got a package of Southern Prohibition from a friend in Mississippi, so this is a late addition to this list– but when we tried this, we knew we had to make room for it. The Outlaw Gosey Whales, in addition to a *great* beer name, combines some really interesting flavors of salt, dragon fruit, and coconut, and others to make something bold, fruity, and distinctive. This won’t be the last time you see Southern Prohibition on these “best of” lists– they’ve given us some of the best beer we’ve tried down the stretch of 2020.
Speciation Artisan Ales: Molecular Self Assembly
For sour lovers like us, it would’ve been a sad year if we’d have had to go a full year without Speciation Artisan Ales. Thankfully, they made Molecular Self Assembly, a pineapple and raspberry sour wheat ale, specifically for the beer shipping company Tavour— if you could’ve seen the joy on our faces when we saw Speciation on the Tavour app. Per usual, it lived up to expectations, deliverying raspberry juice and *serious* pucker. We’re really hoping we get to see Speciation at a beer festival in 2021– or, at minimum, they keep making beer for Tavour.
Stave and Nail Brewing: La Ferme Rustique: Peach
“La Ferme Rustique… delivers a healthy dose of complex funk without sacrificing the fruit flavor or the strong pucker you want from a sour. This barrel program promises to produce best-in-California level sours for years to come.” Read more about this beer in our Best California Craft Beers of 2020 list.
Look, anyone who reads this site should know by now that Une Annee is going to make this list. They made our Best Sours list two years in a row, and they gave us our Best Beer in Illinois two years ago. And we keep trying to top what we said in 2018 about Une Annee– “we want sour breweries to drop more acid than Hunter S. Thompson”– and we keep failing. Le Seul XIII gives us some rich guava flavor with that trademark Une Annee pucker. We expect them back on this list in 2021.
Urban Artifact is another staple of our year-end “Best of” lists, not only making our Best Sours list for the last two years, but also earning the rare distinction of having the best beer in their state for two years in a row. Their Midwest Fruit Tart sours are some of the most distinctive and delicious beers in the country. This particular sour has the usual Urban Artifact tartness and mouthfeel with monstrous and magnificent banana and mangosteen juiciness– it’s another great beer from one of the great sour breweries in America.
What were your favorite sour beers in 2020? What are you looking forward to trying in 2021? Please let us know in the comments below! Check out our list of our favorite beers from California, and keep an eye out for a few more Best of 2020 lists coming in the next couple of weeks!
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