Captain Lawrence Rosso e Marrone

Some people have a sweet tooth. I have a sour tooth. In most beer styles, taking a sip and finding it sour would result in pouring the remainder of the beer down the sink. But when it’s intentional, as with Captain Lawrence’s Rosso e Marrone (“Red and Brown”), that sourness, and the funkiness of the byproducts of the yeast — in this beer, it’s a strain named Brettanomyces — just creates a beer like no other.

Captain Lawrence Brewing Company, and its owner/brewer, Scott Vaccaro, have been churning out just great beer after great beer from their location in Pleasantville for more than four years. His beers are found all over New York City, mainly in good beer bars but increasingly in good restaurants, particularly those that enjoy pairing their cuisine with beer. The Rosso e Marrone is yet another in a long line of hand-bottled, brewery-only offerings to complement the year-round beers that form the core of the business. And sour beers are quite popular at breweries these days, too, so as long as you feel like making one, might as well make a good one!

For the most part brewing a sour beer requires a lot of patience and a lot of optimism. Patience, in that the flavors really don’t develop quickly with the yeasts used; they like to take their time breaking down the sugars into the funky, musty, “horseblanket” aromas from the Brettanomyces yeast strain, and the more pronounced sharpness from other yeast strains. And of course these yeasts could infect your house yeast, the yeast used to create every other beer, and render those unusable, so a lot of care goes into brewing a batch like this. Optimism because typically you just won’t know if the beer that tastes great right now, as it ferments, will still be a good beer a few months from now. Vice-versa, too. Plus, that imparted sourness has to be matched with a good base beer to create harmony. So how does the Rosso stack up?

The Rosso e Marrone pours a thoroughly cloudy, garnet-brown. There’s plenty of yeast in suspension, chunks, even. The head, a sodalike, massively fizzy, towering ivory head, effervesces madly — like it’s infected, honestly, which if you think about it, it is — and disappears in a matter of seconds. The aroma gives the first sign something’s… different. The nose has more in common with red wine (go figure), but there are underlying currents of acetic, musty sourness throughout. The Brettanomyces yeast really enjoyed going to town on this beer for the past year-plus, and if you’re a fan of sour beers, this delivers. Alongside the mouth-puckering sourness in the flavor, the funkiness mixes with the grapes to produce an intense, complex flavor profile. I pick up dark cherries in there as well, a little currant (kind of the same but more astringent) and the oakiness picked up from the barrel aging comes through periodically as well. The slight nuttiness of the base beer, the Brown, shows up too, but it’s mostly washed out. Overall, it’s the funky barnyard that makes me want more of this beer, a drying sensation on the finish to lead me to each next sip.

This beer was released in late March in 375 milliliter bottles, to great fanfare at the brewery, and the allotment of around 900 bottles sold out within a couple of hours. This means that hundreds of people showed up, many hours and hours in advance, just for the right to buy four bottles at $15 each — a fair price, honestly, given the expense of the ingredients and storing the beer for so long. Why yes, yes I did show up too, though my friend had procured a couple of line numbers earlier and we “only” waited an hour. I wouldn’t mind the atmosphere as much if the people purchasing the beer wanted it for themselves and their friends, but… well, for far too many of these people, several of the beers were essentially auctioned to the highest bidder in advance, whether the price was cash or some other rare beer.

Fortunately I’ve got three more bottles left, and I plan to share them as they change over time. It’s this good so soon after release, so I can only feel optimistic it will improve over time.