Pucker up! World of Beer is tapping spring sours

You know spring has officially sprung when World of Beer in the Vista holds its annual sour beers event. For five years, the location has featured sour suds from across the globe, including beers brewed just outside Columbia’s backyard.

This year, the sour selection can be found in a 60- to 70-bottle varietal or seven draft lines (of World of Beer’s 42), all with a varying degree of sour power.

“For a beginner I would start with a gose or an American wild that is not too over-the-top,” said World of Beer manager John Miller. “You have blond sours like Whiskers on Kittens, which would be a good one as well. It’s not an overly powerful sour. I would then try to do a Flemish, or a lambic, something that’s different. Your lambics are very sweet compared to other sours, but it lets them see that sours go from very sweet to extremely sour.”

A few sours worth puckering up for this year are New Holland’s Blue Sunday Sour (a blueberry sour), D9 Brewing Company’s Defying Gravity – Cape Canaveral (a tropical blend with notes of papaya, grapefruit, pineapple and a subtle 14 percent ABV) and Mount Pleasant’s own Westbrook breweries Rhubarb Remix with plenty of, you guessed it, rhubarb notes.

Unsure which to try? In addition to flights, samples will be available.

“There are just so many different ones out there,” said Miller. “There’s a cascade fig sour brewed with figs. A gin and tonic gose, which they put juniper in and allow it to age. You’ve got blood orange gose, watermelon gose… Sours gives breweries a chance to really experiment.”

Greg Windsor, general manager of Nonnah’s, says he’s always been a fan of sour beers.

“When its nice and warm outside, they’re crisp, cleaner. They have that tart that’s refreshing. I associate that tartness, that bite, with warm weather.”

For the event, Miller expects attendees to range from people who are just getting into sour beers, to connoisseurs who are interested in the rare kegs.

“There are breweries that just focus on sours so that they can really capitalize on that. A lot of breweries don’t produce sours or don’t produce sours except for one time a year or separately,” said Miller. “When you’re messing with the wild yeast used to make it, if you get any of that in your other brews, it will sour your other beers.”

This story was originally published March 29, 2017 at 5:01 AM with the headline "Pucker up! World of Beer is tapping spring sours."