For the upcoming August edition of The Session I once again have the honor of hosting duties—something I haven’t done since way back in February of 2008 when I selected the topic of Barleywines to write about.

And this is a bit of a late announcement, I know; for this August Session I was thinking I wanted to come back around to a good old-fashioned beer tasting and review but it took me forever to come up with a good idea to run with. Stan had half-jokingly suggested it would be too early for Fresh Hop Beers and I’m pretty sure he knows me (or at least my blogging) well enough that I would have absolutely selected that for a topic—were it two months later when they will be available!

Instead we’ll be in the heat of the summer and while we’ve had Sessions covering Summer Beers, Fruit Beers, and Wheat Beers already (all which could suitably cover summertime beer enjoyment), it occurred to me that the topic of Sour Beers fits well within the season and (surprisingly!) hasn’t come up yet.

I’ve been gradually exploring Sour Beer and finding myself seeking out and trying various beers which fit into the “sour” realm (yes, I’m purposefully avoiding the word “style” here as it is entirely too loaded): beers inoculated with wild yeasts, soured with fruit (often in conjunction with those wild yeasts and barrel-aging), lactic acid beers like Berliner Weisse-influenced beers and the rare Gose, and so on. It’s a challenging area, both in acquiring a taste for soured beer and in brewing them—fortunately many brewers are being adventurous and branching out these days, giving us many more options.

So that’s our topic for August: Sour Beer. I’ll leave the implementation up to you, but here are some suggestions: seek out and review a sour beer of some kind; write about your experiences with brewing a sour beer; talk about your first sour beer experience; who’s brewing the better sours—Belgians or Americans (or somebody else)?; perhaps a contrary approach—what you don’t like about sour beers. Or if you have the perfect sour beer idea you want to write about, I can’t wait to read it!

On Friday, August 5th, publish your sour beer-influenced post and either leave a comment here or send me the link directly. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if you’re not a regular beer blogger—or even if you don’t have a blog: taking a page from Stan, if you don’t have a blog I would be happy to post your contribution here, provided you send it to me in advance of the 5th.

And sometime during the weekend (or early the following week at the latest) I’ll compile and publish the round-up of all the Session posts. See you on the 5th!