It’s the signature beer because: “I don’t claim we have a signature beer, but Gose kind of defines what we’re doing here,” says Greg Rapp, owner and head brewer.
“Our whole approach is to explore beer, so we brew in small batches, all hand-crafted, and we look for beer styles that are fairly obscure. We get people to try beer styles they don’t ordinarily find anywhere else.”
How it tastes: Gose (pronounced go-zah) is a salty sour wheat beer. “It’s more tart than sour,” Rapp says. “It has a little bit of coriander. And we add Himalayan sea salt. It’s about 4.5 percent a.b.v.” It pushes the envelope, but in a direction many craft beer enthusiasts already are headed. “I really think the next big thing in beers is lower alcohol with a lot of flavor and sour beers.”
Why the salt?: “The reason gose is salty is it was originally brewed in Goslar, Germany...and their water is naturally salty,” Rapp says. “So they would brew a wheat beer, since they had access to wheat malt, and the local water was naturally salty and they would spontaneously ferment it with wild lactobacillus yeast from the air, which is where the sour is from.”
Why he brewed it: “I was just doing some research on German beers four or five years ago and I stumbled across it. I thought, this sounds good. It was actually brewed in the area my mom is from around Leipzig, Germany.”
Tasting room ambience: Housed in a warehouse in a light-industrial park, with gray walls and a dark ceiling, the small bar is dominated by a soaring blackboard listing the 20 beers on tap at any given moment.
Best time to go: Saturday afternoons draw large crowds of craft beer enthusiasts geeking out over the obscure styles. —Tom Scherberger