Sunny Boy Sour by Hope Brewery

For this week’s beer, we head back to the sours.  It’s not necessarily my go-to genre of beer, but I certainly don’t mind me a sour every now and again.   But when it’s as good as the Sunny Boy Sour from Hope Brewery, I’m certainly inclined to have them significantly more often.

First off, sour beers are definitely not every beer drinkers cup of tea.  So if you don’t like them, fair enough, this one is fantastic, but still probably unlikely to change your mind on the genre as a whole.  But if you are even slightly inclined to a sour beer (or anything sour in general life), I strongly suspect this will be right up your alley.

Hope Brewery has been doing some really good beers for a while now.  They’re DIPA is fantastic and one of my personal favourites.  But it seems like at some point over the last year or so, some one high up at Hope one day showed up and said ‘Hey guys, how about we just get super awesome at sour beers?’.  And whoever that person was deserves a promotion.  Because they are absolutely crushing the sours lately.  I’ve previously written about the absurdly good Mango Imperial Sour which potentially up until right now was my favourite ever sour.  I’ve recently been lucky enough to have Hope’s Imperial Blueberry Tart Sour.  That is an amazing beer in its own right. In fact it has a high likelihood of getting its own post in the very near future.

But the Sunny Boy Sour is in a class of its own.  The can describes it as a ‘Super Sour’.  And that ‘super’ description is true on so many levels.  For one it clocks in at a staggering 9%!  That is huge!  Especially for a sour.  Sours are usually hovering around the 4% mark so we’re talking twice that.

But even more than the alcohol content is the sourness.  This is a SOUR beer.  Like REALLY sour. It’s face-implodingly sour.  But somehow between to two extremes of the 9% booze content and Warhead-level sourness, neither reaches the level of being noticeably, unpleasantly over the top.  I mean this will never be a beer you have 3 or 4 of in a night.  It’s the sour equivalent of a really big hoppy IPA. It kicks you in the teeth, but in a good way. Again, not an everyday beer, but as a one-off it is staggeringly good.

Again, the Sunny Boy Sour is not an everyday beer.  But it’s very much one that anyone even slightly inclined towards a sour beer should seek out immediately.  And if you can’t find it, given the recent evidence I’ve seen, just find pretty much any sour from Hope Brewery cuz odds are it’s going to be pretty damn good.