Bruery Terreux - Sour in the Rye (with Passionfruit, Orange, and Guava) (2017)

For our latest limited offer from The Rare Beer Club, we’ve sampled through a ton of The Bruery’s vintage offerings to come up with twelve of our favorites. From complex sours, to finely tuned Belgian-style takes, to massive Solera-style releases… we think this may be our most memorable collection of beers in a special offer to date.

To start, we absolutely had to go with this 2017 release of Sour in the Rye with Passionfruit, Orange, and Guava, which proves light and refreshing and aged perfectly. We love the base beer, Sour in the Rye, The Bruery’s barrel-aged sour ale made with 40% rye malt, and here a tropical POG riff is just a perfect accompaniment to that base beer. This pours a lightly hazed, pulpy pinkish-orange color, topped by off-white foam that leaves a touch of lacing. There’s immediate aromatic impact from the guava, especially: juicy, tangy, boldly tropical as soon as this is poured, followed by tart passionfruit, lemons, and oranges. The fruits show clearly, but that core Sour in the Rye base is also key, providing tart lemon and subtle funk.

In this version, that intense lemony-guava tang lands as a key piece. Nicely complex, rounded acidity—mouthwatering but not bracing. The guava and passionfruit help round out the tart expression, while a moderate underlying carbonation provides vibrancy alongside the central tartness. A juicy, tropical sour ale that proves continually vibrant and generous. Its orange is subtle, secondary throughout. Passionfruit’s prominent. Guava shows itself at full volume.

We’d pop these bottles soon for the brightest fruit expression, but most of these vintage bottles can go for a bit longer in the cellar as needed. The lemony acidity here has us craving the salinity of fresh oysters.

What The Bruery has done for beer in Orange County, California, while impressive, is just a part of their contribution to the greater brewing landscape. Once just a confusingly named, obscure little brewery from a curiously named little Southern California town, The Bruery is now known to the majority of beer geeks across the country and beyond. They’ve continued to develop their extensive barrel-aging program, launched the Bruery Terreux line, opened The Tasting Room at Bruery Terreux in Anaheim, and ultimately become one of the most respected breweries in the nation. They’ve even recently added a third Bruery location: The Bruery Store at Union Market in Washington, DC, establishing a wee East Coast outpost.

As a result of their unbridled creativity and skilled brewing practices, The Bruery’s beers are still some of the most highly coveted out there, period. It was back in 2009 that they released the beer that took the brewing community by storm: Black Tuesday, a massive imperial stout (clocking in around 20% ABV) aged in bourbon barrels for well beyond a year. Hugely oaky, rich, velvety smooth, and borderline nourishing, it caused both a stir and an annual tradition. The demand for this stout led people to drive and/or fly from hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away.

A handful of breweries have managed to take the “limited-release” concept as far as The Bruery has done with their beers, with annual vintages that sell out in a single day. Some folks have even gone one step further, creating the release equivalent of a serial novel, as The Bruery did with its recently completed 12 Days of Christmas series of annual beers.