Marin Slanina wants to know what’s in your refrigerator. White wine? Fruit? Which kind? What flavors? How do you feel about sherry? And, obviously, beer?

“When you go to the store,” she asks, standing behind the bar at B52 Brewing, where she serves as the brewpub’s general manager, on a recent Wednesday evening. “What do you buy?”

She’s listening to your answer — even as she turns away from you to consider the maxed-out tap wall behind her. Then, when she’s satisfied that she knows what will work best for you, she returns with a snifter glass containing one of the brewery’s 28 beers on tap.

And spoiler alert: It’s probably a sour.

There are two types of sour beers: kettle sours and barrel sours. Kettle sours are created when the brewer adds bacteria, such as lactobacillus, to her wort before moving the beer to the fermenter and adding yeast. They take about 24 hours to produce. Barrel sours can take years; first the brewer creates a drinkable beer, then she moves it to wooden barrels before introducing the bacteria.

For the most part, both methods lead to beer that tastes exactly like their names would have you imagine: pucker-worthy. And though that’s about as far away on the taste spectrum as you can get from Houston’s ever-popular bitter IPA scene, this style of beer is growing at a clip, both nationally and locally.

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Sour sales are up 45 percent this year over last, according to Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association. Nationally, Watson notes that a lot of that increase can be attributed to the popular Seaquench sour released by Delaware-based Dogfish Head Brewery. Here in Houston, the growth is fueled by something else entirely — the need to catch up.

“I think parts of the country where wine is really big were getting into sours before we are,” says Sean Bednarz, co-founder and brewer at Great Heights Brewing Co. in Houston’s Garden Oaks neighborhood.

“There’s an acidity to wine, which is an acquired taste, and it’s similar to the acidity in sours, so maybe there’s a palate for it there. And there’s also barrels there that are more accessible,” Bednarz says. “But, yes, it’s been slow to come to the Houston scene compared to the rest of the country.”

At Great Heights, Bednarz and co-founder Patrick Christian waited until they’d been open a year before introducing their first sour last spring. And though both owners are fans of sour beer, they had a very specific reason for waiting: economics.

“Barrels are expensive, and you’re sitting there, taking up valuable real estate for maybe a year,” Bednarz says.

“You have all of those cost outlays upfront, and you don’t see any return on it for a year,” Christian adds.

When they opened Great Heights, Christian and Bednarz had to focus on beers they could turn out to cover the bills on Day 1. Experimenting had to wait. And they think this contributes to the fact that Houston’s nascent beer scene lags behind the national sour trend. Though Bednarz and Christian say they’d love to invest in a barrel-souring program, they — and most other Houston brewers — are currently focusing on kettle sours to add variety to their tap lists.

Then there’s B52. Set on six wooded acres in Conroe, the 5-year-old brewery has the luxury of affordable square footage and more years of experience than the additions popping up inside the Loop. Of the 28 beers being poured on any given night, about half are sours. And though kettle sours including Berliner Weisse and Goses served in the city scene market themselves as low-alcohol easy-to-drink beers, the barrel-aged brews at B52 pack a wallop.

“Sours are usually lower-ABV. But Justin proves you wrong on this,” Slanina says of her husband, B52 brewer Justin Slanina.

“And that’s his favorite thing to do is prove you wrong. Like a traditional Berliner, it’s like 3 percent,” she continues, while pouring one of her favorite options, the Super Fruited Imperial Sour: Strawberry Lemonade, a barrel-aged sour that weighs in at 11.2 percent alcohol by volume. “Yeah. We break all the rules. Read the book, throw it out, do something crazy, and make it a huge sour.”

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Of course, an 11 percent beer that tastes like a boozy trip to a strawberry patch isn’t for everyone. Sours may be growing steadily along with a shift away from the big, bitter IPAs of a few years ago, but data from the Brewers Association show that 30 IPAs are sold for every sour.

“Sours are an interesting niche that will grow,” Christian says. “But it’s never going to explode to be an IPA.”

That said, B52 is focusing on churning out two new flavors each week, with a heavy emphasis on sours. And other breweries in Houston are following their lead; earlier this year, True Anomaly opened in the city’s East End, boasting the first Inner Loop facility with a dedicated room for sours. And though Christian and Bednarz can’t commit to launching a barrel program at the moment, they note that if they ever expanded, it would be one of their first priorities. Other breweries, such as Buffalo Bayou Brewing, have expressed similar desires.

“I’m wondering, in other parts of the country, what’s the average time span between opening and having the dedicated resources to have a sour program,” Bednarz says. “And it could be that we’re such a young industry here that, like we said, we want to do it. It’s just going to take a little more time.”

maggie.gordon@chron.com

twitter.com/MagEGordon

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