Hundreds of years ago, on the banks of the river Gose, a new type of beer was brewing. Brewers used salinated river water and special souring techniques to create a savory, extra-tart, refreshing beer that quickly became a prized (and costly) regional delicacy.
The history of the Gose style is a crazy one — it changed homes, then dwindled to near-extinction after an untimely brewers’ death and the loss of his brewing records… only to be revived years later by a German Gose-fiend just Mad enough to resurrect it:
As recently as the 1980s there was not a single brewery in the world making Gose. Berliner Weiss, flavored with sweet syrups, was the closest thing publicans could get. The real Mccoy, delicious and tangy gose, could have ended up as a historical footnote and nothing more… until Lothar Goldhahn purchased an old Gosenshenke (Gose House). The brewing records for crafting gose had been accidentally destroyed, but there were still wizened old pubgoers who remembered the taste, the look, the smell. So Lothar set out to find them.
He gathered enough scraps of records, along with personal accounts, to revive gose brewing in it’s homeland. The style caught back on, and there’s now a steady trickle of traditional gose dotted across pubs in Leipzig, Germany.
But let’s jump to the back seat of a stifling cab in BKLYN in July 2011, with the Sixpoint crew heading to pick up our German Brewmaster. It’s hot, it’s sticky, and we’re stuck in traffic… only one type of formulation can quench this type of thirst. Think refreshing waves of tart, spritzy brew carried from Leipzig to BKLYN and jammed in a 12 oz slim can.
Hand-harvested sea salt crystals from Netarts Bay
We brewed our first gose, draft-only, the following year. The salinity, the inviting aroma and the tart finish create an incredibly refreshing brew. Now, the Mad Scientists have taken it to the next level – we trekked across the country to see our friends at Jacobsen Salt, and those dudes provided a key ingredient – their world-class hand-harvested sea salt from Netarts Bay, Oregon completes the cross-continental jam session. With their help, we’ve reimagined thebracing concoction of the elite as the salty tango of the everyman. Killin’ it in tangy 6ers and flowing on draft across the Sixpoint distribution network.
When Sixpoint Founder Shane Welch cracked open the inaugural can, he was ecstatic. After a big whiff and a big gulp he said, “yeah, it’s supposed to be just a little schtinky, a little briny, tart in the back end… and absolutely crushable. It’s the rooftop jammer of this summer.”
It’s sour, it’s salty, it’s slammin’. It’s Mad Science.
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