Sour Cellars is a sour focused brewery and barrel room established in 2014. Founded after years of experimentation with sour brewing techniques and research on sour beers. The techniques used to produce our beer are a combination of laborious and time consuming traditional methods, combined with modern technologies to create more interesting aromas and flavors.

The barrel room has a few hundred oak barrels used for fermentation and aging. Most of our fermentations take place in the barrel and the beer is allowed to age on the yeast for at least a year. Having our own brewhouse allows us to easily experiment with different mash techniques, open air cooling, open fermentation and spontaneous fermentation. The majority of our production over the last few years has been spontaneously fermented.

All of our sour beers are mixed culture fermentations, meaning that every fermentation has many different species of yeast and bacteria working together to produce ethanol, lactic acid and many of other compounds in lesser quantities that contribute to the aromas and flavors. When working with so many cultures, the beer needs to age for more than year so that certain chemical reactions can take place. The compounds created by these reactions give the beer a very unique character.

After the lengthy aging process in the barrels, we blend multiple barrels into larger tanks and often introduce fruits for another fermentation cycle, lasting a few months to a year. We put much effort into selecting the best varieties of fruits for our batches. We work with several local farmers to try to find those varieties. We employ specialized yeast strains for these fruit re-fermentations to keep the beer from forming off flavors, while extracting as much of the fruit character as possible.

After spending one to several years in barrels and possibly more months or years on fruit, our beer is then packaged in kegs and bottles with a dose of a sugar source to produce another fermentation for natural carbonation. This type of carbonation with active yeast helps preserve the beer longer and is often characterized by a foam comprised of tiny bubbles. This conditioning period can last anywhere from a few months to a year or more.

It may take us several years to make a beer, but all the effort makes a special product that is already superb to drink at purchase or can be aged for many more years to see how it develops.

In addition to the sour beers, we also always have a small selection of non-sour beers available.

For more info, either come by the tasting room or email: info@sourcellars.com