As Gose becomes a breakout star in the beer world, a new release from Brewers Publications, Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer for the Modern Era by Fal Allen, explores the history of this lightly sour wheat beer style, its traditional ingredients and special brewing techniques.
Popular in Germany centuries ago, Gose is experiencing a renaissance today, capturing beer fans from both the session and the sour beer categories. Allen takes readers on a journey of the innovation and experimentation that is occurring within the style, offering modernized brewing methods for this style that originated during the Middle Ages.
“Gose’s history is long, complicated, and sometimes confusing. There are twists and turns, dark patches, and dead ends. Over the more than 600 years that brewers and beer aficionados have written about Gose, much of what has been chronicled created almost as many questions as it did answers,” said Allen. “What follows is my endeavor to make sense of what I have learned about Gose … We will explore what Gose was like during its heyday, through its darkest hours of near-extinction, and plot out the most likely path it took from Goslar through Halberstadt, Leipzig, across the pond to America and around the world.”
A brewer for three decades, Allen started brewing professionally in 1988 for Redhook Brewery in Seattle. Two years later, he moved to Pike Place Brewery where he was the head brewer for eight years. In 1999, he was awarded the Brewers Association’s Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation and Achievement in Craft Brewing and subsequently took over as the general manager at Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Northern California the following year. Starting in 2005, Allen did a five-year stint as brewmaster for Archipelago Brewing (a division of Asia Pacific Breweries) in Singapore, before returning to Anderson Valley as brewmaster in 2010.
Allen’s writing credits include co-authoring Barley Wine, a four-part series on microbiology and lab work in brewing techniques and more than 40 articles in American Brewer, The New Brewer, Zymurgy, MBAA Technical Quarterly, Celebrator, Malt Advocate and other publications. Allen resides in Navarro, Calif.
