Great Article on Gose

Allow me to direct your attention to an in-depth treatment of gose in Imbibe Magazine. Writer Joshua Bernstein recounts the history and then spends some time with brewers of modern versions in America, particularly two of my faves, Ron Gansberg and Alex Ganum:

Instead of sour mashing, Upright’s Ganum takes a different tack to gose, which he was first introduced to at a homebrew competition. “My friend was like, ‘You gotta try this,’ ” Ganum recalls of the gose, which was, interestingly, soured with lemon juice. “The salt changes the finish and makes it more appetizing. It makes you want to drink more of it.” Intrigued by the style’s flavor and low alcohol content—gose is traditionally less than 5 percent ABV—Ganum brewed his own version in fall 2009. He used a French saison yeast, then fermented it at cooler temperatures to impart a hefeweizen-like character. Cautious about overdoing it with the lactic acid and salt, he initially used too little of each. He added more salt and lactic acid, then more still. The result was bright and acidic, offering notes of lemon and earth paired with a drying, quenching close. “That’s probably the seasonal beer that’s had the most requests. I always get, ‘When are you going to brew the gose again?’ ” Ganum says of the early spring specialty.

Spring is just one inspiration for Ron Gansberg, 54, head brewer at Portland, Oregon’s Cascade Brewing. Gansberg is renowned for crafting complex, painstakingly blended tart brews, so it follows that when he began dabbling in gose, he went all out. Using the traditional lactic-fermentation technique (the same one employed by Hollister’s Rose), Gansberg crafts a distinct gose for each season. “One of the beauties of the style is that it’s open to interpretation,” Gansberg says of his beers, sometimes released simultaneously as the “four goses of the apocalypse.”

There's lots and lots more in the article. Go read it. Me, I'm off to Cascade for a different rustic wheat ale--saisons.