Pairing Fruited Sour Ales with Craft Chocolate
By David Nilsen
Click the picture to learn more about my book Pairing Beer & Chocolate!
Sour ales are a fantastic platform for fruit flavors. The acidity of the base beers dovetails with the brightness of the fruit and can help sell the flavors of the fruit more authentically. In some cases, if a sweeter fruit addition is added, that tartness and sweetness can contrast nicely.
A wide range of sour beer styles are brewed with fruit additions, ranging from simpler styles like Gose and Berliner Weisse to longer-aged, more complex styles like Kriek Lambic. The sheer variety of expressions can lead to challenges when offering pairing advice.
For example:
Some fruited sour ales lean heavily on their fruit additions, while some use the fruit only as a subtle accent to the character of the base beer.
Bodies can range from full and sweet to light and dry.
ABVs can be anywhere from around 4% to 8-9%.
Let’s break down some of different common formats for fruited sour ales and discuss how to pair each with craft chocolate.
Fruited Quick Sours
The German sour ale styles Gose and Berliner Weisse were mostly unknown in the U.S. until the early 2010s, when suddenly they were all the rage. These specific historical styles have mostly receded into the shadows once more, but their basic format—quickly-produced, low to average ABV sours with simple, bright acidity—provides an easy foundation for a wide range of fruit additions. In many Central and South American countries, beers of this type are being brewed with local fruits (Catarina Sour in Brazil is an example). These beers are relatively easy for the brewery to produce, and easy for the consumer to understand and enjoy.
Challenges: The challenges here come down less to finding the right bar for a specific beer as they do recognizing the beer you’re working with in the first place. There is a ton of variety in this category. Some beers are quite sweet, some are quite dry. Levels of fruit range from bold to subtle, and acidity can vary from puckering to subtly tart. Anytime we’re working with fruit, our brains can distort our perceptions of sweetness and acidity based on what our brains have come to associate with the flavors of various fruits. All of this means we need to understand the beer we’re tasting in order to dial in the chocolate pairing.
Seek Out: For drier beers, a dark bar made with chilis will really pop against the fruit and acidity of the beer. For sweeter, creamier beers, direct harmony is better, with milk to low-percentage dark bars made with a complementary fruit providing easy companions. Some mild earthy spice can round out the pairing. With the right beers, bars with smoke or herbal inclusions can harmonize nicely.
Avoid: This is unlikely to be the place for single origin bars. High percentage bars will rarely work, unless they have fruit inclusions and you’re working with a drier beer. For drier beers, avoid any milky or creamy bars.
Example:
The savory and weathered meets the bright and fresh in this pairing.
Urban Artifact is a Cincinnati brewery that brews exclusively fruited sour ales, and their Teak Tropical Fruit Tart is brewed with pineapple, pink guava, and key limes.
Chequessett Maushop’s Smoke is a 65% dark milk bar made with elderberry, oat milk, and smoked Lapsang Souchong tea. The bar brings wood smoke, tea leaves, and soft berry that blanket over the pops of vibrant tropical fruit and tartness in Teak. Contrasting berry and lime/guava flit over a foggy bank of driftwood campfire smoke, the acidity tempered by the smoke and cream. Lovely.
A Note on “Smoothie” Sours
“Smoothie” or “Milkshake” Sours combine assertive fruit with vanilla and lactose to turn a quick sour ale into a fruity dessert. These beers sometimes get dunked on, but they can be delicious when made well.
These beers have the sweetness and body to reach out to a wide range of chocolates, but they can do surprisingly well with bars that have earthy or savory inclusions with subtly sweet leanings—beets, smoke, mushrooms, etc.
Long-Aged Fruit Sours
While the “quick” sours above can be produced in a pretty short period of time and generally have a pretty simple, clean sourness, long-aged sours can take months or years to produce and often have greater fermentation complexity. The Belgian Lambic family, as well as Flanders Reds and Oud Bruins, provide the foundation for a range of American-produced beers that spend time in barrels and slowly develop character. Many of these examples are brewed with fruit.
Challenges: The complexity and unusual flavors of these beers offer pairing opportunities few other styles provide, but they can be tricky. The bold sourness of many of these beers can clash with many chocolates, and the very dry bodies will not support sweeter flavors on the chocolate side, and might even amplify the astringency of some higher percentage bars.
Seek Out: These beers offer some of the only pairing options for bars with mushrooms or earthy herb inclusions. Dark bars with dehydrated fruit inclusions are also pleasant. These beers can also handle more fruity, acidic single origins. With the rare sweeter examples of these long-aged sours, chili chocolates can fit well.
Avoid: “Chocolatey” single origin bars, anything creamy or milky, and bars with spice inclusions.
Examples:
Jolly Pumpkin La Roja du Kriek from Michigan is a cherry-infused version of their classic La Roja, their interpretation of a Flanders Red Ale. This is a blended sour ale made with cherries, and it balances tart cherry Jolly Rancher flavors with a touch of oak, a hint of Juicy Fruit gum-like spice, and a moderately dry finish.
Amadei Toscano Red is a 70% dark chocolate made with dried cherries, strawberries, and raspberries.
Together, the fruity acidity of the beer seems to breathe new life into the bar’s fruit inclusions, lending the impression of chocolate-covered berries.
Odious Cellars Rubied Perspective from Chicago is a sour ale aged on Balaton and Montmorency cherries and Ceylon cinnamon and aged in wine barrels for 12 months. It's funky and fruity in equal measure, with notes of dill, earth, and sourdough layered over the warmth of the cinnamon and the cherry meat itself, with a bone dry body and medium-high sourness.
Pair a beer like this with a chili bar, like Manoa Ghost Pepper 60% Dark Milk. The triangle of heat, acidity, and fruit in the pairing is similar to the effect of mango with tajin, albeit warmer and deeper from the cherries and cinnamon. The prickles of ghost pepper heat shine through the warm cherry notes like rubies in the dark.
Wild Card:
This is a curious example that blurs some of the [already loose] lines we’ve drawn above. It’s a barrel-aged, mixed-ferm sour, but it’s assertively fruited and moderately sweet.
Upland Prim is a barrel-aged sour brewed with cardamom and plums, and it’s a spectacular exploration of flavor. It balances tart and sweet throughout the sip, with layers of icebox plums and candied plum tinted with gin-like prickles from the cardamom. It’s a very cocktail-like beer, like a brighter but also somehow cooler twist on a Dark & Stormy with the fruit and spice playing off each other.
With a complex beer, it’s best to offer simple pleasures from a chocolate to pair with it. I went with Map’s Bilberry Soup bar (yes, I still have bits and pieces hanging around…but not for much longer) made with bilberries (European blueberries), sourdough crumbs, and cinnamon.
The pairing is both rich and gentle, with notes of blueberry and sweet pickled beets forming the foundation, accented with cinnamon, cardamom, and clove, but all laid-back and inviting.
Final Thoughts
A question that comes up when pairing any beer style with chocolate: To single origin or not to single origin? Single origin dark chocolate is the spiritual backbone of craft chocolate, but its variability from origin to origin, maker to maker, and even batch to batch can make pairing guidance difficult. For this reason, I generally don’t suggest single origin pairings when I’m giving style guidance.
That said, individual bars can absolutely be found that will pair well with particular fruited sours ales. In my experience, lower percentage dark single origin bars with a moderate to high fruity acidity can sometimes work with long-aged sour ales brewed with cherries fruits that have a touch of savoriness or earthy spice to them.
Let me know what pairings you discover between fruited sour ales and craft chocolate!