Yeastie Boys Craft Bacteria-Free Sour Beer

New Zealand’s adventurous Yeastie Boys have become the first brewers to make a sour beer for the UK with a new strain of yeast that doesn’t require bacteria to produce lactic acid.

Here’s the deal…

Yeastie Boys is an independent brewing company that started in Wellington, New Zealand. Launched in 2008 Stu McKinlay and Sam Possenniskie, their name is playful play on the Bestie Boys. And like the legendary band they enjoy pushing the envelope as well.

Yeastie Boys doesn’t have its own brewing facility. They contract those duties out. Yeastie Boys beers are commercially produced in Auckland, New Zealand, Australia and in the UK for the European market.

And now you can add introducing the first a bacteria-free sour beer to the UK, to Yeastie Boy’s growing list of brewing hi-wire acts…

As the Drinks Business correctly explains “normally a sour beer gets its sharp taste by bacteria added to the process. That bacteria creates lactic acid which gives these beers their sour edge as well their alcohol content which is produced by saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast.

But when Stu McKinlay heard about a new yeast strain, produced in the US that does both jobs, reducing the pH to create the tart taste of sour beer and producing (low) alcohol through fermentation, he was interested according to the industry publication…

“I picked up on whispers of this amazing yeast, last year, and our head brewer JK was immediately fascinated with the idea of using a brewer’s yeast that removed the traditional need for bacteria to produce a sour ale.”

“It took a lot of asking around, a little dumpster diving, and over a year of elapsed time between our first chat,” McKinlay explained before he and Head Brewer James Kemp were able to come up with something they were excited about…

And Yeastie Boys Head Brewer James Kemp thinks that UK brewers will embrace the new yeast going forward…

 “This new yeast enables brewers to use standard processes, and gain the complexities of traditional sour fermentation, while lowering usual risks associated with creating sour beer. We expect to see a lot of UK breweries using this yeast in the years ahead.”

Heaven Up a 3.8% Berliner Weisse-inspired bacteria-free sour brew and the first of its kind to be commercially released in the United Kingdom