81/100) 2015 Sours

I have set myself the goal to review three beers or ciders every week for 100 weeks. I will be learning about beer and ciders more as I do this, and if I am successful in this venture, I will have tried about 300 unique drinks. If you're curious how I'm doing, the number in the post's title tells you which week I am in now.

Barrel & Bog, La Folie, Love Child No 5

First off, Merry Christmas! I know this is a bit non-traditional, but this was my way of indulging as Christmas approached.

The thing with sours is that you can never guess whether they are perfect now or ought to have been aged longer. It's like the conundrum: "Is poison past its expiration date, more or less poisonous?" The same can be said of sours, but without the terminal implications. Although, for the uninitiated, a sour beer can certainly be the death of their taste buds. As for me, I really like sours.

Barrel & Bog) The zing of a sour beer, from what I hear, only gets better with time, while all the other flavors will be subdued. This "funky sour" was either opened far too soon or far too late. It was one of the worst beers I've ever had. It finished bitter, but not in a hop bitter more like a medicine, spoiled food, or stale herbs way. I don't want to give you my friend's descriptions of it, because I fear that your appetite will be spoiled. Suffice to say, it was bad. The only positive I can come up with is that the mouth feel was light, and I'm trying to maintain an hopeful optimism that my other bottle will improve the longer I forget it in my cellar. ☆

La Folie 2015) First of all, if you haven't had one of these sours, you can find them just about anywhere now that New Belgium has begun releasing it twice a year. La Folie, or 'the folly,' is a blended sour so from one bottle to the next the flavors are pretty consistent too. This 2015 was a great mix of barrel and cherry like flavors with a lot of layers of complexity that all lead up to a burst of sour. I'm not even going to be nice and say tart with this one. It was straight up sour and though I loved it, it was a palate wrecker making it hard to sample anything after it. ☆☆☆☆

Love Child #5) This barrel-aged sour, as you can tell by the name, is the fifth in the series. The sixth just came out recently, so I've been holding onto mine for a bit I guess. They're a bit expensive and hard to find so people tend to grab them as soon as they're available. This one was eerily similar to the La Folie, but mostly because of the lemony tartness. It was a bit milder though and the barrel aged aspects were just a bit more muted. ☆☆☆☆