If you only watch one of the Emily and Melissa Drink Beer videos, make it this one. Gueuze is probably one of the most unique beers there is. I’ve given gueuze to friends who like sour beers, thinking that they’d enjoy gueuze, but they had reactions very similar to this. Read more about gueuze below.

Have you ever left the orange juice in the fridge for way too long and then when you finally drink it, it’s super sour and kind of bubbly? No? Is it just me? What about if you forget to throw out some fruit and it starts to rot? What’s going on here is the sugars in the fruit are being consumed and acidified by the wild yeasts and bacteria that naturally exist everywhere.

Nowadays when brewers make beer, they add a pure yeast strain that’s been cultured by a laboratory in order to ferment the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The Belgian brewers who make gueuze on the other hand, simply expose the unfermented beer to the open air. This allows all different kinds of yeasts and bacterias to come into contact with the beer and create an incredibly complex sour beer. The beer is not only sour, but also a bit funky too with quite a bit of a musty character.

If  you’re still interested in learning more, I’ve gone further in depth on sour beers here.