I learned that beers can be sour and tasty last year, when we were traveling to Copenhagen with one of my dearest friends. As always being an amateur in everything I do in life, I had no idea that such a thing existed.

Sour beers are also known as wild or funky beers and rightfully so. They are born out of wild experimentations by the masterminds of craft brewing, that carefully select a roster of ingredients needed to produce surprising and delicious taste palettes. To my limited knowledge, sour beers are brewed using wild yeast strains that give it a tart, sour flavor and on the top of that, they add something as unexpected as coffee, which may seem like overkill, but in reality, it can create quite good balance of acidity, bitterness, and sweetness.

The best three sour beers I tried so far:

  • Canadian Breakfast Sour , by Hungarian craft beer brewery Horizon. The beer is brewed with yoghurt, chocolate, coffee, raspberry, blackberry and blueberry. Wild. And it tastes accordingly, but in a good way — it is sour, it is a bit milky, but also sweet. It’s good, really. Most of the time, you can order it in the majority of Budapest’s craft places, but I usually get a can in Beerselection and Crafty Bar.

  • Berlin Jam by German brewery BRLO. It is unapologetically sour, but has a bit of strawberry added to the mix. I tried this one on my recent trip to Berlin, where I discovered this very nice bar called Kaschk by BRLO. They have really good snacks, too — try their BBQ nuts if you want to visit.

  • Coffee Sour by Denmark’s Taphouse. It is exactly what it is — a sour beer fermented with coffee beans. This was my first love and to this day, still is — I am still searching for a beer that can match it. It tastes like a cold coffee AND it tastes like a sour beer — I do not know how else to describe it — it is a mix of confusion, surprise and caffeinated excitement. Numero uno for me. Love it. You will too.

Here you go. Let me know if you love or hate sour beers, or if you visit any cool places that serve them.

In other news, life is just being a life. I did some travel (Nice in France just exceeded all expectations), rode some extreme-ish attractions in Vienna, cried a little during my *forced * commute to the office on the first day after the vacation. Sometimes I have this feeling of wanting to do some major intellectual work, that would challenge me and require me to spend hours and hours on researching and writing. And then, I feel like doing nothing, just existing, playing Japanese video games (like Yakuza, Judgement or Ni No Kuni) and binge-watching Netflix shows (The Diplomat and Giri/Haji are really good). Other times, I feel like going for a run.