Hello Sour Beer Friends!

This past month marked the second anniversary of our first post on Sour Beer Blog! Over these two years, the American sour beer scene has experienced record breaking growth both in the number and quality of sour beers being produced. When creating Sour Beer Blog, one of my goals was to amass a collection of well-informed flavor-based reviews that took into account qualities specific to sour beers. In addition to being useful to consumers, I feel that such reviews can serve as important guides and teaching points for sour brewers looking to hone their palates. However, one of the things that I had not expected was the fantastic response and readership that our brewing and educational articles would receive. With this feedback in mind, myself and the other authors have decided to develop new article formats that will always feature some educational brewing content, even those that also review sour beers! We hope that you will continue to find our content both entertaining and educational, and we look forward to continuing to meet and communicate with all of the wonderful folks in the sour beer brewing community!

Recently, Cale and I had the pleasure to taste two delicious special-release sour beers from Upland Brewing Company of Bloomington, Indiana. We took the opportunity to get in touch with Caleb Staton, the director of sour beer production at Upland, to talk about his sour brewing and barrel aging program as well as the creation of the beers in question, Vinosynth Red and Vinosynth White.

Founded in 1998, Upland Brewing first began experimenting with sour beers in 2006. In Indiana, this was a time when a number of craft beer enthusiasts were interested in the lambics and other sour beers of Belgium, but American sour beer culture and the production of local sours were virtually non-existent. Caleb got started homebrewing after graduating college, later pursuing a formal brewing education from the Master Brewers Program at UC Davis. He joined the Upland team as a Cellarman in 2004 and by 2006 he had been promoted to the position of Head Brewer. It was this year that Caleb and his team traded 8 cases of beer to acquire their first 4 white oak barrels from the nearby Olivery Winery. To fill these barrels, the team researched the lambic production of the Senne Valley and employed techniques such as turbid mashing, using aged hops in a long boil, and fermenting in oak with organisms isolated from traditional lambic beers.