My latest article for The Bulletin considers strawberries and rhubarb, prompted by a new beer from Cascade Lakes Brewing, Strawbeery Rhubarb Sour. It’s strawberry rhubarb pie season, after all, and I also delve into rhubarb a bit as well as getting the background on the beer.

Brewmaster Ryan Schmiege shared his inspiration for working with the classic pairing.

“My Grandma made the best strawberry rhubarb jam and pie anyone has ever had. It made me a lover of the fruit combination which I seek out to this day. So, both she and her strawberry rhubarb creations were the inspiration for the beer,” he said via email.

The base of the beer is a pale wheat ale that undergoes kettle souring, a method of brewing sour ale that I wrote about recently; the wort typically undergoes a souring process ahead of the boil and primary fermentation with beer yeast. According to Schmiege, it took several rounds of development to settle on the finished brew.

“Strawberry is a notoriously difficult fruit to get impact from and now we’ve learned that rhubarb is also challenging,” Schmiege said. “We worked with multiple combinations of whole fruit, purees and extracts before settling on puree.”

And of course I review the beer along the way; I think it did a good job of capturing the essence of rhubarb, with strawberry present to a lesser extent, but it’s a nice sour ale to check out.