This week marks the first release in an exciting new series of beers from Boulevard Brewing Co. Foeder Projekt #1, a draft only wood aged sour beer, will show up in bars and restaurants in the Kansas City area. At just under 7% ABV, Foeder Projekt #1 is best described as a wood aged sour. The base beer spent six months in a foeder at our Smokestack Series 750 ml bottling facility.

A foeder (pronounced FOOD-er) is essentially a giant wooden barrel. Ours came from a high-end winery in California and holds 1,860 gallons of beer. Wineries retire foeders for a variety of reasons, but once they’ve aged wine for several years, they serve as awesome hosts for a variety of souring microbes and/or wild yeast.

The beer transported to the foeder was, to be quite frank, a fairly uninteresting beer at the time of transfer. We had brewed a golden colored sour ale with the intention of aging it in the foeder to be blended into a future Love Child beer, our award winning series of sour beers. As with all of our projects, we tasted the beer as it journeyed down the path to sour deliciousness. It was at one of these stops that we realized this beer was pretty damn awesome just as it was. We called a brewers meeting to taste other barrel aged projects and everyone fell in love with the beer from the foeder so we decided to pull off some of the beer and keg it by hand.

If you’re familiar with our Love Child series, or sour beer in general, then you have a good idea of what to expect. Foeder Projekt #1 is a very tart, very dry beer. Sensory notes from Elizabeth Belden, a member of our quality assurance team, go in depth to compare the acidity of Foeder Projekt #1 with other well-known sour beers:

• Foeder Projekt #1 total acidity (% lactic acid) = 1.36%
• Love Child No. 3 total acidity = .7%
• Unfiltered Wheat Beer total acidity = .2%

• Foeder Projekt #1 pH = 3.47
• Love Child No. 3 pH = 3.8
• Unfiltered Wheat Beer pH = 4.4

Please keep these numbers in mind as you have your first taste of our latest creation. Those of you who are already down with the sour power, help your non-sour drinking friends make the leap by educating them on what they’re drinking and remember: It’s never ever cool to surprise someone with a sour beer.

-by Boulevard brewer, Jeremy Danner