The Spice Must Flow: Gose by Delta Beer Lab

Previously on this very blog I chronicled how a botched batch of Moroccan shrimp prompted a purge of my spice rack that would have made Joe Stalin himself envious. The difference is that I didn't replace the spices that met their fate that Bloody Wednesday with a bunch of aromatic apparatchiks. Instead, the replacements were of, at least, good quality. I have now cooked with juniper berries more in the past few weeks than the past many years.

That shrimp recipe called for coriander and so it's a good time to return to the seeds of the Coriandrum sativum plant which were the genesis of this mess in the first place. It also allows me to make good on actually making a trip to Delta Beer Lab, something I figured was a swell idea back in December when I reviewed a cranberry gose and lamented the paucity of the unfruited variety of the beer. While Delta's beer is on store shelves, I've only seen their mango gose and not their gose gose at my local bottle shop. Granted, it took four months but I finally lost my Delta Beer Lab virginity.

The gose is a sour wheat beer that originated in the German town of Goslar at some point in the Middle Ages. Water sources apparently gave the beer a bit of salinity and it was flavored with coriander. What I think of as less reliable sources say the High Middle Ages but ones I trust more dates it to the Late Middle Ages. For a long while it was a local delicacy until the first half of the 18^th century when it made its way to neighboring Leipzig where the inhabitants took to the beer style like a junkie to the needle. While popular for a good, long while, drinkers would turn away from it more and more as the years progressed with World War II and the Cold War doing it no favors. Eventually it died out in 1966. But 20 years later it was revived in Germany and seems to be hanging on to dear life in its homeland with a handful of German breweries making it.

Gose became something of a trend for American craft brewers around 2013 or so. I don't have numbers but it seems that it is less popular today. Even if true, there are still examples of the beer that are easily available such as Otra Vez (which has been reformulated, I see) from Sierra Nevada, Kirsch Gose by Victory, and a variety of gose iterations from Anderson Valley with their Blood Orange probably being the most well-known of them. I suppose it's arguable whether a gose remains a gose if you add citrus fruit, cactus, or agave to it in lieu of coriander. The addition of salt to a kettle soured beer is pretty much all it takes to be a gose in the States today, it seems. But the fact remains that Sierra Nevada has a beer on shelves year-round that says "Gose" on the packaging which is a lot of visibility for a beer style that was all but dead not long ago.

I have nothing against the fruited gose per se and have enjoyed those beers listed above, but in the rush to make everything that isn't an imperial stout taste fruity (the stouts get laced with lactose, coffee, vanilla, and so on), American brewers have made the ordinary non-fruited variety something of a rare bird. This is a shame because I am rather partial to coriander.

Thankfully the folks at Delta Beer Lab offer a more traditional take on the style in addition to one that's in the cult of tropicality.

The beer is a lovely light gold color with a slight haze to it. My pour produced a big, white head that made quite a racket as the bubbles burst. It was like listening to Rice Krispies. But louder.

It smelled first and foremost of that lemony sour from the lactic acid which gives the beer its sour taste. I also caught a little coriander and just a wee bit of sweetness – like honey.

While I have had beers that were more sour, Delta did not skimp on it here. It was very sour but fell short of a xenomorph blood level of acidity, thankfully. As you can imagine, it was good 'n fizzy with the salinity having an almost spectral presence. It didn't taste salty but I could tell it was there enhancing the other flavors. It adds a certain overall fullness. The coriander wasn't prominent but was there playing its role in generating tastiness. Some wheat and a slight grainy sweetness rounded things out. With all that sourness, some lingered on the finish and made it rather dry but I was also left with a wheaty taste and I could just discern some salinity too.

As Darth Vader once remarked to his son, impressive.

I really enjoyed this beer. It was good and sour, it had just the right amount of salt to enhance flavor, and a goodly amount of coriander. That is, I would have been happy with just a smidgeon more of the spice but it complemented the wheat very well and was still quite tasty.

Junk food pairing: I recommend pairing your Gose with some Carada rice ball cuttlefish flavored snacks. The beer's citrus sour complements the cuttlefish flavoring while also acting as foil to the snack's sweetness.