Although it was not a cover story piece, speaking to brewers Chad Yakobson of Crooked Stave; Paul Arny from The Ale Apothecary and Dan Carey from New Glarus, Brewer had more than enough info to write a great piece on coolships in the July/August 2018 issue.
In digging through notes for this week’s “Cover Story Notebook” we went back through those interviews to share Dan Carey’s thoughts on why calling Sours, ‘sour’ can be such a misnomer.
Carey, for one, doesn’t feel the term is adequate or defining enough.
”I don’t like calling sour beer, sour because we don’t refer to a Pilsner or an IPA as a ‘Bitter beer,’ he explained. “When we say IPA or German Pilsner we understand what that means. We understand the hopping levels.
”I have for years tried to cajole the Association on their style guidelines. It’s very illogical to me that they would define a category by saying it has to be a certain color, a certain alcohol content and a certain bitterness, but then when it comes to sour beers they don’t define the level of acidity.
”When I discuss this with them, people dismiss it and say, ‘Oh well, how would you measure acidity?’ “
Carey pointed out that anybody who makes wine at home knows how to measure acidity.
”It’s really easy it’s a hell of a lot easier than measuring IBUs,” he said.
He gave an example of someone talking about a sour.
“Are you talking about 0.2 percent Lactic Acid or are you talking about 1.5 percent because they’re both sour beers but one taste like battery acid and one is nuanced,” he said. 
Then there is the type of acid: Lactic and Acetic.
”They should define what the definition is,” Carey said. ”They should say a Lambic — for example — to be in the range of say 0.5 to 1.5 percent Lactic and less than 500 parts per million Acetic acid, or volatile acidity as they call in the wine industry.”
These are very very simple things to measure, he pointed out, and noted that the problem with the whole Sour genre is what does someone mean by a sour beer?
The other important thing Carey pointed out is there’s a whole world of sour beers.
“Are you going to make a European sour or are you going to make an American sour ale,” he pondered. ”Maybe something inspired by the Russian River Brewing.
”Are you going to make a Flanders-style brown beer. Are you going to make a Lambic-style beer. Is it going to be without fruit or with fruit. Is it a Berliner Weisse-style beer, et cetera, et cetera.
”So there’s a whole world of sour beers and each of them will require a different production method.”
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