The Phoenix Brewing Co, home away from home

When, in a small town such as mine, there are people outside in the city square at three in the morning, smiling maniacally and following their smartphones around like divining rods, you become curious. Are they on drugs? Is it a cult? Have the proper authorities been notified? But more importantly: what am I missing out on?

I hate know-it-alls as much as the next person, but mostly because I am always the smartest person in the room. I was sort of disgusted that this cultural phenomena snuck up on me. Similarly, one day I was blissfully naive and innocent of the gose style of beer, and the next, it was a nationwide sensation.

In the last few months, the style has popped up in breweries all over the country in that same inexplicable way that everyone knows, suddenly, to roll their jeans up above the ankle. One day I realized the gose style was everywhere and I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. Gauze? Goose? Nope: GO-zuh. It is a German style wheat beer, originating in the Leipzig area. They are traditionally tart and refreshing, so I think we may be related.

Rock on.

What makes the beer really unique is the addition of crushed coriander seeds and salt. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the Midwest with bland-as-taupe green bean casseroles and cream of everything, but I think pretty much anything is vastly improved by a handful of salt. Not that the beer is at all salty, but it does serve to augment the sourness and add a sharpness on a different part of your tongue.

Sometimes flavored syrups are added, like they do with Berliner Weisse beers. I mostly see them with a fruity, flowery addition of some sort — hibiscus flower, blood orange, melon. My local brewery, The Phoenix, recently tapped their Garuda, a blackberry gose. I haven’t seen so many grown men with bright pink drinks in their hands since the Valentine’s Father-Daughter dance of 1989.

This particular gose was quite sour, indeed, and it was the opinion of some of the beer snobs surrounding me at the table that it needed more salt. So they got a salt shaker. I should reiterate the use of the phrase beer snobs, not brewers. So, salt was shaken liberally into a pint of the Garuda, where it fizzed and popped like New Year’s on the rich side of town. This is decidedly not what I look for in a beer. I believe wholeheartedly in the healing powers of beer, don’t get me wrong, but I still don’t want it to look like Alka-Seltzer.

I politely declined the opportunity to try the concoction (“Oh, hell no!”) after witnessing one strained pucker after another. Shifting dunes of salt covered the bottom of the glass, abandoned half-full on the table until someone forgot why it was there and took a big, salty, regrettable swig.

Is the popularity of the gose style a trend that will stick, like tattoos? Or will it go the way of mullets, TMNT, and Nintendo? And to think, for a minute there, I didn’t know what was going on.