5 Beer Varieties You’ve Never Heard Of (And Where to Drink Them)

Allow me to indulge my geekery if you will. As craft breweries continue to push the limits of beer in an effort to impress customers, they look to little known styles from elsewhere in the world to revitalize and call their own. In most cases, they tend to bastardize the original under the creative license of brewing.

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Most of those styles have an interesting backstory. Even more importantly, most offer up a fun travel destination for the rapidly growing community of beer tourists of which I am a card carrying member.

Gose

If you’re craft beer savvy, you may have heard of Gose – a salted sour wheat beer spiced with coriander. It’s the new gateway beer as craft drinkers and brewers start experimenting with sours. Like most styles, it has been so manipulated to appease North American palates that the story and taste of the beer has been lost. I kid you not, I had one brewed with oysters to acquire the salt from the brine of the oceanic aphrodisiac.

While the original Gose was brewed in Goslar, Germany and obtained its saltiness from the natural salinity of the mountain water used in the beer’s production, the style’s home moved to Leipzig, Germany when the mines closed. Salt was then added during the brewing process to lend the beer its unique flavor. The style then disappeared during WWII and didn’t return again until after the Cold War. Today, the most authentic German Gose is brewed at Gosebrauerei Bayerischer Bahnhof in Leipzig.

Bernt Rostad