Style family
Sour & wild
Beers whose acidity is intentional, produced by bacteria, wild yeast or deliberate souring rather than by contamination.
What unites this family
Acidity as a designed feature. The methods differ enormously — kettle souring in hours, mixed fermentation over months, spontaneous fermentation over years — and produce genuinely different beers, so the family is united by intent rather than by technique.
Mixed fermentation. Brewer-selected cultures beyond a single yeast — typically Saccharomyces plus Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and/or Pediococcus — often over months in wood.
The distinction between a sour beer and an infected beer is entirely one of intent and control. The same organisms that define a gueuze will ruin a pilsner, which is why BeerHQ’s fault records name the styles where a given character is correct.
9 styles in this family
- Berliner Weisse
A very low-strength sour wheat beer: sharply lactic, bone dry, lightly sparkling and enormously refreshing.
- Gose
A lightly sour German wheat beer with added salt and coriander — tart, savoury and unusually thirst-quenching.
- Lambic
Spontaneously fermented Belgian wheat beer, matured in oak for years — funky, acidic, dry and unlike any other beer.
- Gueuze
A blend of young and old lambic, refermented in bottle — intensely complex, bone dry and Champagne-like in its carbonation.
- Fruit lambic
Lambic refermented on whole fruit — traditionally sour cherry or raspberry — producing a dry, tart, intensely fruity beer.
- Flanders red ale
A deep red sour ale matured for years in oak foeders, balancing sharp acidity against dark fruit and a vinous depth.
- Oud Bruin
An East Flanders aged brown ale, maltier and less sharply acidic than Flanders red, with raisin and caramel depth.
- American wild ale
A broad New World category of mixed-fermentation and barrel-aged sour beers, often fruited, with no fixed base style.
- Kettle sour
Beer soured with Lactobacillus in the kettle over hours rather than months, then boiled and fermented normally — usually fruited.