Hermit Thrush Brewing - "Dark @ 4:30" dark sour ale

A few weeks back, we received our first shipment of rather-attractive product from Hermit Thrush Brewing out of Brattleboro, Vermont. Founded by two guys, Christophe Gagné and Avery Schwenk, this brewery is focused on American-style sour beer. They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves - carving a niche in Vermont for funky sours (and really pretty labels.) Their website indicates that they've been around for a few years and have racked up a pretty impressive yeast library.

Wait, "yeast library"?

Yes, it's a thing. The sour style has been around for thousands of years - essentially by exposing unfermented proto-beer (called wort) to wild yeast and stuff that's in the air. Sounds gross, but it's how beer was made for centuries. Today, brewers don't necessarily need to rely on wild yeast since we have ways of making in a lab or cultivating it to get what we want. But each strain of yeast imparts a different set of flavors to a beer, and brewers may want to experiment with combinations of yeast cultures to produce a certain type of beer. So it would make sense that an accomplished brewer would want as many strains at his or her disposal in order to make the beer they would want to make.

So enter today's beer - "Dark @ 4:30", a 6.50% ABV barrel-aged sour dark ale. The can does not give much information about what's under the hood, so to speak, so I called up the brewery.

I reached Nate at the brewery, who clued me in on some of the background to this. Essentially, this beer is a mixed-culture sour ale, which means there's multiple yeast strains in there, including Brettanomyces, saccharomyces, and Lactobacillus. The beer is aged in French oak casks - Bordeaux, I'm told - and according to Nate, the barrel-aging for this beer isn't the main point. The casks are mostly meant as a vehicle for the yeasts to do their thing, not necessarily to highlight the wood characteristics. Also, I should not that souring a dark ale is not particularly common, so that makes this that much cooler.

OK, let's give this a try. Immediately after cracking the can, it generates a very sour nose, with woody notes. Very nice. It's dark red when candled, and is deep reddish-brown color in the glass. No real foam.

Wowzer, OK, very sour. Immediately a burst of sourness, and then come those heavy, sour, oaky flavors with a generous helping of fruit skins. The feeling in the mouth is very full and silky and I'm really enjoying it. There's a touch of good Flemish ale sourness in there, of course a product of the Lactobacillus. Minor notes of oak, nothing particularly invasive, although there's a heavy black cherry note on the aftertaste, kinda like an Atomic Warhead candy, and remains quite sour long after swallowing.

I think I liked this so much because it's a divergence from the usual sour lineup. Overall it delivers solid, full flavors with a sense of balance, as the Flemish vinegar sour and the oak don't necessarily overpower one another. The dark fruit skin flavors grabbed my attention and really held on, which is great. I should say that because of the flavors, I do not believe it's suitable for sour beer neophytes. It's not puckery sour, necessarily, like Two Roads' "Persian Lime Gose", but deep and full. So if sours are your thing, and if like me you're tired of the overly-sweet, fizzy sours that are popular these days, give this a shot. It's quite good, and I'm bummed that I missed a tasting at D'Vines (led by Christophe himself) as they debuted a whole host of interesting new creations.

One note, Hermit Thrush's beers are on the pricier side - D'vines sells this can for $8 for a single pint, and we also sell their "Cuvee 2018" for $13 a pint. So definitely on the expensive end, but definitely worth a try.