Coming Soon to Long Beach: Beachwood Blendery

Drumroll please. The award-winning Beachwood BBQ and Brewing recently announced they will be opening up a souring program, Beachwood Blendery.

Situated next to their downtown Long Beach location (sorry, Seal Beach), the facility will also house a tasting room so you can get your sour on straight from the teat. The acidic adventure will aim to brew and blend authentic Belgian-style spontaneously fermented beers.

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And when they say spontaneous, they mean spontaneous. Typically, American-made lambics and guezes are made by adding various yeast strains to ferment the beer. Belgium, however lets mother nature do her thing. Leaving your beer up to the beers gods to ferment and sour is like playing Russian roulette with the beer, but hey, it's the beauty of the experiment.

As risky as the project sounds, Beachwood owner Gabe Gordon, along with brewmaster Julian Shrago and barrelmaster Ryan Fields look at this project as a chance to try and duplicate what makes Belgian sours so damn good.

Gordon will be going to great lengths to make the 4,500-square-foot facility as close to the Zenne River Valley, where technically all lambics and guezes are made, as possible. In the space, he'll attempt to mimic both the temperature and humidity levels of the area.

Unfortunately, the process of building, brewing, blending, and aging these beers will take quite a bit of time. The facility will be finished by mid 2015, but you can't expect to try the American-made and authentically Belgian beer until at least 2017.

Tant pis, but hey. Good things come to those who wait.

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