It’s no secret that we love all kinds of fruit in our Modern Sour Beer and that we have a rather heavy-handed approach when it comes to our additions.
We love to work with nearby farmers to bring fruit from our local area into our beers and ultimately to your glass. However, there are a few fruits which don’t grow so well in Scotland (I’m looking at you pineapple!) which we have to source from overseas.
When it comes to our beers, we usually focus first on the flavour profile and build our brews around this. Occasionally we are offered a fruit so unique that we can’t say no and create a single fruit sour to highlight the unusual character such as our Tayberry Sour, Honeyberry Sour and Dragonfruit Sour releases in 2020.
To bring things closer to home, reduce our footprint and to showcase the amazing soft fruits and berries grown right on our doorstep we started the Farm to Fermenter series which will make a return this summer. Timing our brew days with local farmers harvest window to take the fruit from farm to fermenter in under 24 hours!
Combinations are no less important to us and some of our most popular beers / staff favourites have been crazy combos of different fruits and other ingredients. Whether it’s a big smoothie inspired Silly Sour with Guava Kiwi Melon Mango or a Serious Sour of herbaceously balanced Blackcurrant with Lemon Verbena the focus is always on balance. Sweet, tart and fruity – just like ripe fresh fruit.
Our House Mixed-Culture provides the perfect sour base beer to let the fruit additions shine. Delicate and spritzy with an underlying stone-fruitiness and some residual malt sweetness finished off with our characteristic sherbet-like zing of acidity. From this base, berries pop, currants mellow, tropical fruits sing and in combination we are able to create something really special in our Modern Sour Beers.
When it comes to adding fruits in our beer we don’t shy away or hold back in any sense of the word. Usually dosing at around 300 grams per litre so about a quarter of the beer in each bottle is fruit. We’ve even stretched this as far as 999 g/l specials to pour at festivals and yes, we are 1000% stoked to recreate these ridiculous brews to bring to festivals when we hit the road again!