Try This Beer – Field House Brassneck Wasp Sour

Field House Brewing in Abbotsford, BC is using its copper coolship to good effect in its new Coolship Collab series.  The Wasp Sour is the second collaboration beer in the series and was created along with Brassneck Brewery from Vancouver.  You need to try this beer.

A coolship is a rather cool addition to any brewery’s arsenal and are relatively uncommon.  The coolship is a flat and broad open fermentation vessel that allows for quick and efficient cooling of the wort.  Breweries can use it simply to cool the wort before draining into a traditional fermentation tank.  In the case of the Wasp Sour Field House allowed the beer to cool open to the night air and inviting natural yeast and bacteria to help sour the beer.  Brettanomyces was added later to finish the process.

The most obvious question is: “why is this called a Wasp Sour”?  Well, naturally because the yeast for the fermentation was extracted from a wasp’s gut…

I know, right?

Why the recommendation?

Which brings us to the question: why am I recommending you try this beer?

Okay, setting aside how bonkers that bit about the wasp may sound, there’s a lot of superb chemistry and microbiology that went into creating this beer.  To me, that’s reason enough to give this one a try.  Add to it the unknown factor of letting the beer cool open to the night air to just see what happens and you’ve got a recipe for greatness or disaster.  In this case the result is closer to greatness.

The beer has this delicious flavour of earthy honey in addition to the tartness. This honey is coupled with floral aromas and flavours of lemon.  It’s really just a nice, easy-drinking sour ale but the extra care and forethought that clearly went into it make for a highly recommended beer.

The Wasp Sour was still available on tap at Brassneck Brewery in Vancouver this week although bottles may be scarce.  Check with the great folks at Brassneck to see if they know where to find a bottle or two.  If you can’t find one in Vancouver a trip out to Abbotsford may be in order to grab some directly from Field House.  A trip to their Fraser Valley brewery and tasting lounge would be well worth your time.