About the Beer: My Blue Heaven

By Greg Carlson

Oh good, another pink sour from the Genius Department at Redemption Rock Brewing Company. Look, if it were up to me, blueberries would make bluebeers, but it’s not, so they don’t. Despite this act of blatant deception, they’re still as good a fruit as any, and pack a flavor particularly well suited for our sour beer lineup, so we let it slide. 

Here’s what we did:

If you’ve been a fan of our sours so far, you can likely tell that the recipes and processes have been similar for each one. Like many American craft breweries, we’re (very) loosely chasing the examples set by the German Berliner Weiss and Gose styles, so we start with a pale grist comprised mostly of pilsner and wheat malts (from our standbys at Stone Path and Valley Malt, respectively). For My Blue Heaven, we also included a small amount of Stone Path’s locally malted Nor’East Munich to boost the malt flavor a bit.

Where we especially align with many American craft breweries (and markedly split from the traditional Germans) is in our kettle souring process. There’s a whole smorgasbord of different styles and processes of beer falling under the enormous and broad flavor descriptor “sour.” But if there’s one consistency among them, it’s that the sourness is imparted by lactic acid-producing bacteria - lactobacillus arguably being chief among them (very creatively named, that one).

Thing is, relying on a strain of beer-souring bacteria to be a major flavor driver in a beer is something of a paradox for any brewer who doesn’t specifically focus on sour or wild/mixed/spontaneously fermented beer. That’s because we’re generally obsessed with cleanliness and sanitation, and introducing what is generally thought to be a beer spoiler into our facilities could pose a problem to said obsession.

Enter kettle souring.

The skinny on this is that once our kettle is filled with wort, instead of boiling, cooling, and pumping it over to a fermenter, we let it sit in the kettle and add our bacteria culture right there. We optimize for temperature and pH and give our lactobois free reign on all the malt sugars they can handle. Once they’ve soured the wort to our taste, we boil and kill them all dead. 

The idea here is that we can get our desired sourness while keeping the bacteria isolated in a hot death chamber away from the rest of the brewery where it can wreak all kinds of havoc (or at least make us worry about it to the point where our aortas explode prematurely). The trade-off is that the flavor isn’t nearly as complex as what can be derived from full-blown mixed fermentation techniques, but it is a lovely and distinct flavor in its own right, and it’s particularly amenable to playing around with fruits and herbs and spices and the like.

Speaking of which, the blueberries we added were indeed Genuine Maine Blueberries, grown on a farm not far from the rocky Maine coast. Which brings me to my next point... 

MILD SENTIMENTALITY ALERT

This beer is basically named for my grandfather. I’m not gonna go full Hill Farmstead and start naming beers after all my dead ancestors (although if any brewers out there want to collaborate, I might name one after one of yours), but I couldn’t resist this once. The man loved music - the classic tune My Blue Heaven was a noteworthy favorite - and spending time with his family, especially during camping trips to damn near the same part of Maine that the blueberries were grown in. And he was a hella good grandfather so he’s easily earned the modest honor of having a fruited sour beer named after him. 

I hope all of you of the fruited sour beer persuasion (and it seems like there’s a lot of you!) enjoy it along with the warm memories of your hella good grandfathers.