Brewing Gose: Sam Adams & Early Wisconsin Immigrants

This is interesting. Sam Adams now has a label for their Verloren Gose. ("Verloren" is German for "lost".) It is apparently set to be the next entry in their Single Batch series which comes in 22oz. bottles. It's not a popular style, as you can guess from the beer's name. I have had one German version - Leipziger Gose - and one domestic – from Gordon Biersch at the Great Taste of the Midwest in 2010.

Gose is an obsession with beer expert and blogger Ron Pattinson so, if you want to know all about Gose, check out his blog. Here his brief description:

Leipziger Gose is one of the world's most obscure beer styles, an isolated remainder of northern Germany's pre-lager traditions. About the only similar beer still brewed in Germany is Berliner Weisse, though Gose seems to have at least as much in common with sour Belgian wheat beers.

It's a pale, top-fermenting wheat beer, flavoured with coriander and salt. There's a hefty lactic acid content and was probably once spontaneously-fermented. A description in 1740 stated "Die Gose stellt sich selber ohne Zutuung Hefe oder Gest" ("Gose ferments itself without the addition of yeast"). I've always suspected some sort of link with the gueuze of Brussels, though not because of the similarity of the names. That, I'm sure is pure coincidence.

From what I can tell, German Gose bier is generally less than 5% ABV so it would seem that Sam Adams is following the American trend of bigger beers. Still, it's nice to see an American brewer brewing this style. Even better is that it is the country's largest craft brewer which means that it will get pretty wide distribution. Hopefully this can help dispel the myth that all German bier styles are lagers and that all German bier is either a pale or dark variation of that style.

I have wondered if any Wisconsin breweries have historically brewed Gose or other lesser-known German bier styles. The Reinheitsgebot was strictly a Bavarian law until 1871 which means that most of Wisconsin's earliest German immigrants, who came from Baden Württemberg, did not come from a beer culture laboring under the Reinheitsgebot laws. Shortly after the Civil War, northwestern Germany became the epicenter of emigration to America until around 1885. Again we have a wave of immigrants coming to Wisconsin from areas of Germany that were not covered by Reinheitsgebot. The last great wave of German immigration to Wisconsin lasted from roughly 1885 until the outbreak of World War I and it was people from northeastern Germany that dominated it. The Reinheitsgebot was in force during this time but it is likely that many of these immigrants were well-versed in the bier styles of northern Germany which were quickly dying out at this time.

On top of this, Köln (Cologne) had its own Reinheitsgebot for much of the 19th century which outlawed bottom-fermenting beer.

Jerry Apps' history of brewing in Wisconsin, Breweries of Wisconsin, basically said that German immigrants brewed lagers. (At least that's how I recall it. I don't have the book in front of me.) While I don't doubt that they did brew primarily lagers for one reason or another, some German immigrants from outside of Bavaria must surely have brewed an ale commercially at some point. Is it really true that immigrants from Köln who came from a brewing tradition where it was illegal to brew bottom-fermenting biers never brewed a Obergäriges Lagerbier? No one from Münster or Düsseldorf ever brewed the version of alt that was popular in their respective city? Not a single Gose, Broyhan, or Kirschbier? This just seems implausible to me.

Of course the brewing culture from which these immigrants hailed is surely not the only factor which determined what kind of beers they brewed. Availability of equipment, ingredients, and the local tastes also played a role. Still, I find it very difficult to believe that each and every German immigrant brewed lagers and only lagers.