Vinnie Cilurzo

Sometimes we go to the brewers and other times they come to us. This week we were lucky enough to have Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing Co. come to talk to us about how to make sour beer. Here in the States, any sort of sour flavor in your beer used to be considered a defect and a sign of a failed brew. But increasingly, sour beers have recently become more popular and now command quite a cult following. Vinnie is making some of the best American sours on the market, and he's been doing it for longer than pretty much everyone else. Vinnie was brought on to start a brewery under the Korbel brand called Russian River in the 1990s. In 2003, Korbel decided to exit the brewing business Vinnie accepted the Russian River brand in lieu of severance. He and his wife Natalie opened a small brewpub in Santa Rosa, CA specializing in hoppy beers and sour-barrel aged beers. At the time, sour beers were pretty much unheard of but Vinnie pursued his passion and Natalie helmed the business. This allowed Vinnie to focus on brewing and if you try his beers, you will quickly appreciate that focus.

So what are sour beers? Typically beer is fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ales) or Saccharomyces pastorianus (lagers). These yeasts are "domesticated" meaning they have been selectively bred over thousands of years by brewers to provide the desired characteristics and flavors for specific styles of beer. For example the yeast used to make Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will make a much crisper, cleaner flavor and provide a much clearer beer than the yest used to make Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier which will result in a fruity, floral flavor and be much cloudier in appearance. Yeah, ingredients play a role, but as the saying goes "The brewer makes the wort. The yeast makes the beer." So for most brewers the goal is to limit all activity in their fermenter to only one specific yeast strain which they provide.

With sour beers, all bets are off. Brewers making sour beers use "wild yeast's" and bacteria to ferment the wort, leading to a wide range of flavors which some people love and some people find repulsive. Brettanomyces (yeast), lactobacillus (bacteria), and pediococcus (bacteria) are the three types of microorganisms responsible for most sour beer production. They all have different ideal conditions and produce different flavors and aromas when fermenting wort. These byproducts of fermentation are what produce the characteristic flavors in sour beer.

So why doesn't every brewery experiment with these bugs? Because they are extremely difficult to kill. While Saccharomyces has been bred for thousands of years with the primary concern of beer flavor, aroma, clarity, etc. these other bugs have been out in the real world experiencing the tough-knocks of evolution. They can eat almost anything, survive in harsh conditions, and stick around for long periods of time.

So in Vinnie's brewery, he has two (or three) of everything. One for regular beer production, and one for "funky" beer production. Two transfer pumps, two sets of hoses, two sets of kegs, even two bottling lines! Everything is labeled and color coded to limit confusion. Even so, cross contamination is always a risk with so many microorganisms under one roof. If a brewer works with funky beer one day, he/she is not allowed near the clean beer that day and has a separate set of work clothes and work boots for when they switch over to the clean beer production! Vinnie and Natalie dream of the day when they can physically divide the operations. But they have decided to focus on slow growth and are financing all of they current projects purely with cash flow rather than debt, so a new brewery is not an option for now.

In addition to bringing three of his sour beers for us to try, Vinnie also brought 2 cases of Pliny the Elder which is someone of a cult beer. It is a double IPA consistently rated 100% and people tend to brag about it. It was quite good. Vinnie is all about freshness with his hoppy beers since hop compounds in beer degrade over time to no ones benefit. This beer was bottled 6 days before we drank it. Pretty impressive Vinnie!