The Session #116 Round-up

Despite only five participants in this month's Session on the Gose style, the discussion was lively. I led things off with a critique of sorts of what American brewers are doing to the Gose. While I've enjoyed a few modern examples of the style, I'm just not a fan of most of the untraditional fruit additions and extra hopping American brewers are injecting into their Goses.

It seems I've found a kindred spirit with Alan McCleod, who isn't a big fan of what brewers are doing with the Gose these days, either. With his typical biting wit, he decries the worst examples of the style as "Gatorade alcopop" or "salty SunnyD" and notes that what's called a "Gose" these days has little resemblance to the original examples of the style. But it's not all bad, as Alan states, "In the hands of a thoughtful brewer with a sense of tradition there is a memorable play of wheat, salt and herb that satisfies."

On the other side of the pond, Boak and Bailey largely disagree. While conceding "a few more straight Goses without fruit and other sprinkles would be nice", they prefer having a few non-traditional Goses to none at all. They particularly like "Salty Kiss" from UK Brewer Magic Rock, brewed with sea buckthorn, rosehips and English gooseberries.  Describing the contemporary Gose style, they declare, "...in general, what German Gose isn't in the 21st Century is a deeply profound, complex, challenging beer: it's a fun refresher, no more tangy than a can of Fanta, no saltier than a Jacob's cream cracker, and with coriander present but hardly obtrusive."

Josh Hubner over at Lost Lagers muses on the style's history and how modern brewers are experimenting with the Gose without taking any sides. He notes, "...there is something about a gose that makes it the perfect summer beer, and maybe that's why it's found a foothold here in the U.S. It is simultaneously tart, refreshing, light, and - hopefully - just a tad bit salty. Add some fruit to the mix, as is common among craft brewers, and also traditionally (mit schuss, as is also common with Berliner Weisse), and you have the perfect beer for a hot, sunny day."

Finally, the Beer Nut will have none of this debate.  He's just enjoying a "This Gose" brewed with lemongrass from Fyne Ales, which sent him a sample of along with a smoked salmon as a food pairing. The heavily smoked salad overpowered the Gose, so he found the pairing didn't work, though the Beer Nut seems to have enjoyed lemon grass addition, which created "...an out-of -character lemon flavour, like lemon meringue pie.....It sits rather oddly next to the other savoury elements of the flavour, but not at all unpleasantly."

That's a wrap. At this point, I'd normally direct everyone to the next host for the upcoming Session, but I don't find one listed. A year ago, Alan McCleod rescued the Session off life support, but with only five contributors this month and no host for next month, it looks like The Session is back in the emergency room. The Session's had great run, stimulating all sorts of great beer discussion and ideas for years from some of the best beer writers on the planet for years. If this is the end, it was a collective thing of beauty while it lasted.

The Session #116: What happened to the Gose?

When I first discovered the Gose style three years ago, its sour/salty yin-yang balance was a refreshing antidote to the glut of so many IPAs. I knocked back quite a few Anderson Valley's  "The Kimmie, The Yink, & the Holy Gose" and also became a pretty big fan of the slightly soapy tasting Golden Gate Gose from Almanac Beer. From near extinction in the last century, this quirky sour, salty wheat beer brewed often spiced with coriander, traditionally brewed in and around the German city of Leipzig quickly became an unexpected American brewing success story.

But then, American brewers started doing what they do, fiddling around with other country's styles. Anderson Valley added blood orange to their Gose.  "It gives the beer a cool name!", enthused Anderson Valley Brewmaster Fal Allen when I interviewed him about it. Sure enough, blood orange gives Anderson Valley's Gose an extra dimension, but I'm not sure it was needed or improves upon the original version.  Anderson Valley tried a number of other spice and fruit additions to their Gose. They rejected tamerind, as sour on sour is just too much sour, but in the past year released Briny Melon Gose. I can't say I'm a fan of it. There's not much sour, there's not much salt, with the slightest hint of melon. It's basically a very light fruit wheat beer.

Sierra Nevada made a big splash this year adding Otra Vez Gose to their year around line-up. Sierra Nevada takes the sour salty mix and adds cactus and then grapefruit, and I taste.....confusion.

Recently, I was talking to Calicraft's Blaine Landberg about his Citra Gose, brewed with significant and highly untraditional Citra hop additions. Landberg explained his thought process this way: "I asked myself “How do you make a great Margarita?” rather than “How do you make a great Gose?"" As much as I'm a fan of most of Calicraft's beers, I wish Landberg had simply tried to brew a Gose rather than a Margarita. The Citra hops just clash with everything else in his version.

Now Saint Archer released a Blackberry Gose which I wanted to hate, but couldn't. Saint Archer always seemed more like a marketing construct than an actual brewery, with their acquisition by MillerCoors not particularly surprising. This unfortunately overshadows the fact that Saint Archer makes some first rate brews. Their Blackberry Gose is one of them, the tartness of the blackberry effortlessly harmonizing with the underlying Gose.

I could go on, but I think you're getting the idea. Breweries used to brew light wheat beers with fruit additions, often as "gateway" beers for those more comfortable with mass market lagers.  Now, they seem to be brewing the same beers with a whisper of salt, some sourness, a pinch of coriander and viola', a tired wheat fruit beer becomes a hip and happening Gose. Instead of embracing the sour-salty balance of the Gose, brewing seem to be running away from it. Dead German brewmasters have every right to be spinning in their graves.

Is it too much to ask for breweries to make a good Gose and stop right there?

The Session #116 Announcement : Anything Gose

As the host for the 116th Beer Blogger Session, I'm asking everyone to write about the Gose style, mostly unknown for much of the The Session's nearly ten year history. In just the past 2-3 years, the Gose has become one of the fastest growing beer styles despite its unusual blend of sour and saltiness. Heady times for the Gose style that not all that long ago was nearly extinct.

Speaking of extinction, I notice there are no volunteers listed to host future Session topics. So if you want to keep this Session thing going, consider hosting one. You can find out how to host a future Session at the bottom of this link.

Back to this month's Session, I choose the Gose style in particular since it can be approached in so many different ways. Want to talk about the history of the Gose?  How about how American breweries are taking this style and running wild with it with different spice and fruit additions?  How else has the Gose manifested itself outside its German homeland?  Is the Gose here to stay or will it go the way of the Black IPA, once the hot style but slowly becoming a largely irrelevant curiosity?  (OK, that might not be your opinion of the Black IPA, but you get the idea.) Of course, we're all on the look-out for a good Gose, so if there are any you particularly like, we'd love to hear about them.

Just post you contribution the first Friday of October, the 7th and leave a link in this post's comments section. Or you can e-mail the link to me at photon.dpeterman[at]gmail(dot)com.  A few days later, I'll post the round-up of everyone's contribution.

And make sure you pronounce "Gose" correctly.

The Session #100: Why has the Gose re-emerged in United States?

One of the more unexpected developments in America's brewing landscape is the re-emergence of the nearly discontinued Gose style. With its odd sour-salty balance, this obscure German style seems like quaint historical brewing artifact rather than a modern commercial hit.  Yet a few breweries in the United States have found success reviving this style, two of the largest being Northern California's Anderson Valley Brewing and Kansas City's Boulevard Brewing. So when Reuben Gray asked us to write about resurrecting lost beer styles for this month's Session, it got me asking:  Why has the Gose style come back in the United States?

While I'm afraid I can't give a comprehensive answer to the question, I did talk with Anderson Valley Brewing and Boulevard brewing about the origins of their Gose beer and made some interesting discoveries along the way.

I first spoke with Anderson Valley Brewmaster Fal Allen about his brewery's Gose and learned the beer was largely a product of serendipity.  "We really didn't set out to brew this beer in the first place", described Fal Allen of its origins.  "At the time, we were experimenting with a sour mash and someone suggested we try brewing a Gose."  Everyone around the brewery liked it, and after tweaking the recipe four or five times, they released it to much success in 2014.  Anderson Valley has since followed-up their regular Gose with a Blood Orange Gose. Anderson Valley has another Gose with a different spice or fruit addition in the works to be released within the next 12 months which Fal Allen was not ready to talk about it yet.

Then I gave Jeremy Danner over at Boulevard Brewing a call, Jeremy being one of Boulevard's Ambassador Brewers.  He told me Boulevard's Hibiscus Gose started as an employee Christmas present at the end of 2012.  "We usually brew a beer for the employee Christmas present that normally does not have much commercial potential, but something we want to drink," explained Jeremy of this brewery tradition.  Not only was Hibiscus Gose a hit with Boulevard's employees, they took a couple kegs to the brewery tap room and to local beer festivals and discovered it was a big hit there, too.  "We knew we liked it, but it was cool that the public liked it too," exclaimed Jeremy. Boulevard released Hibiscus Gose in 2014 and it's been one of their more successful new releases.

It's only a couple data points, but notice a couple trends.  Both breweries were engaging in an esoteric brewing experiments that seemingly only a brewing wonk could love, yet discovered the general public also enjoyed it.  The other thing to note is that both beers rely on novel, non-traditional ingredients to stand out.  In Boulevard's case, they added Hibiscus to make the beer pink.  Sure, the Hibiscus gives the beer a nice light citrus and cherry character but they wanted to brew a pink beer. Cranberry was considered and discarded because Boulevard had concerns about the sugar content and how it might re-ferment in the bottle.  While Anderson Valley brews a straight Gose, they've gotten a lot of mileage out of their non-traditional Blood Orange variant.  While the Blood Orange adds great flavors and aromas to the beer, Brewmaster Fal Allen wasn't very bashful when he exclaimed "It gives the beer a cool name!"

(Photo from Boulevard Brewing)

My hunch is that we're going to see a lot more long dormant historical beer styles resurrected in the United States for three reasons.  The first reason is none other than most of these old styles taste pretty good in their contemporary revision.  I've sampled all three of these Gose beers as well as other resurrected styles and enjoyed every one of them. All were made by skilled brewers, which certainly helps, but there was a reason why these styles were popular at some point in history, and all these reconstructions made that seem obvious.

The second reason is because information simply travels faster than ever before. In the 19th century, it would take months for a Gose recipe to reach the United States.  In the 20th century, that time reduced to a few days.  Today with a simple mouse click, any enterprising brewer can find a historical recipe in seconds.

Lastly, let's admit that most of the 3,000+ breweries in the United States are looking to do something new and original to stand out from the rest. Only so many beers can be brewed with bull testicles  or smoked goat brains before those gimmicks get pretty stale.  So why not go into the past and find some fresh and original from a centuries old forgotten style?

As the modern brewing revolution continues to push the limits of what beer is, a fortunate by-product is further discovery of what beer was.