Complex Numbers

The Way It Gose

After a bunch of wine celebrations, finally, a day about a beer.

    International Happy Gose Day  

Gose, pronounced GOZE-uh, is a tart wheat beer of German provenance.

It disappeared for a while, from what I've heard. Died out, ceased production, joined the choir invisible. Didn't get resurrected until people started drinking real beer again.

This German sour beer is customarily made with coriander, which gives it notes of flowers and citrus, and with salt, so it is usually quite salty.

"But what about the well-known German beer purity laws?" Gose was an exception, and besides, one needs to be very, very careful when promoting anything that has the words "German" and "purity" in it.

Lactic acid is often added, which makes it even sourer.

This is not nearly as disgusting as it sounds. Gose may not be my favorite style, by far, but it's not like it's fermented goat's milk or anything.

But the popularity of gose and International Happy Gose Day is not limited to Leipzig or even to Germany. The beer has been gaining in popularity in the United States in recent years.

Sour beers in general (there are other styles besides gose) have taken off. I suspect it's at least partly a backlash to years of bitter, overhopped IPAs, which themselves became popular in a backlash to mass-produced, flavorless, rice-adjunct lagers.

Americans, it seems, don't seem to believe in middle ground. Gotta take everything to an extreme.

I remember the first time I went to a brewery that specialized in sours. They offered a sampling of their entire tap list, 12 beers arranged in 3-ounce tasters on a platter, like a clock face.

When I was done, the tap lady asked me what I thought. I was just drunk enough to tell the truth: "Sorry, I like my beer to taste different going down than it does coming back up."

Harsh? Sure. But that's how I felt about sour beers at the time.

Since then, I've found some that I actually like, including a gose here and there. My favorite local brewery, for example, makes a good fruited one.

I don't know why they call today International Happy Gose Day. It's not even a pun. If it were Happy Gose Lucky Day, sure, I could get behind that. Or Day Gose By. Or Gose Fishing. Okay, I'll stop now.

And the article speaks of toasting with "Goseanna!" which I've never heard of before, and so I'm going to assume they're trolling until I get confirmation of that.