Andy MacWilliams most recently wrote about beer in Rome. Please welcome him back!
Like any other family out there, the DC Beer family has their likes, styles they lust over. Jordan drinks hazies. Brandy embraces brown ale. Jake favors mixed ferm and rauchbier. Stein prefers continental pilsner. Me? I am an old school beer nerd. All of us will happily try just about anything, with a few notable exceptions. Let’s talk about one of those today. While I wouldn’t rank it in my top 5 styles, I do frequently enjoy a controversial style of beer: the smoothie sour. So there I was on a spring afternoon, I finished mowing my lawn and cracked a lovely can of… RAR Out of Order: MMM-HMM. Looks like a glass of fresh buttermilk, you say? Well, it is their lactose sour base aged with cheesecake, pecans, and pastry cream. Mmm-hmm indeed.
What is a smoothie sour, you ask? At its simplest, it’s fruit puree over a simple grain bill. At its best, it’s a funfetti cake in a glass (sometimes literally). If pils is a Chopin concerto and brown ale is a folk ballad, then a smoothie sour is a Katy Perry anthem remixed by Zedd. They are often unrecognizable as beer in any visual or olfactory way. But they are delicious and nostalgic. And here in the mid-Atlantic we are fortunate to have amazing producers.
Fruit in beer is far from a novel idea though. In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, beer was often flavored with dates, figs or pomegranates. At the same time in Mesoamerica, berries were being combined with corn to create a brew similar to chicha. Cherries and raspberries have been added to lambic in Belgium since the Middle Ages. Napoleon’s troops added fruit syrups to Berliner Weisse during their 1809 occupation of Germany. Still, smoothie sours draw very little inspiration from prehistoric pymet or fashionable framboise.
Back in February, the fam and I ducked into Fourscore Brewery in Gettysburg PA. Fourscore is underrated as far as regional breweries go. They always have a wide range of well executed styles on tap and plenty of interesting things to-go. This typically includes a beer or two from either their Jahmba or Soft Swerve series. The playful names give you a feel for where they are headed. The Jahmba line tends to be more fruit forward whereas Soft Swerve tends to focus more on desserts. While we’re there, my wife orders me a sample of the Jahmba Jingle Jam Cookie. It looks like barf. It’s brownish and chunky. But it smells and tastes fun and festive. Vanilla and baking spice mixed with applesauce and some cherry. I also grab a mixed four-pack of their mixed Monster series for the road. These are fruit forward smoothie beers intended to taste like famous breakfast cereals. Monster Berry is straight cherry sherbet and mini marshmallows. Did I drink the whole thing? No. Did I enjoy it? Yes.
I noticed adjuncts in beer really picked up on the whole around 2010, when we started seeing routine additions of chocolate or peanut butter or coconut in stouts. Breweries like Cigar City and Funky Buddha began cramming vanilla and coconut and chocolate into stouts that had people waiting in line. To this point, big barrel aged stouts were typically tigh, made by the first wave of craft breweries, old school producers you could trust like Goose Island, Stone, and Kuhnhenn. They were good base beers that had been well aged in select barrels. But America is the country that brought you the deep-fried candy bar (though Scotland perfected it) and soon the stouts became more and more extreme with the adjuncts overwhelming whatever refined stout lay underneath.
It’s only natural that the adjuncts moved to other styles. A collaboration between Omnipollo and Tired Hands is generally regarded as the birth of the Milkshake IPA in 2015. Not familiar with the style? It’s an IPA in grain bill and hop schedule, but typically with lactose or vanilla or fruit or some combination of the three added. It was so popular at the time that Sierra Nevada included a Passionfruit Milkshake IPA in their 2017 Beer Camp release. It only made sense that brewers would wise up and drop the aggressive, and expensive, hop additions and just give customers what they want: frooooooot. But well before we made it to 2025 and my Jingle Jam Cookie beer, brewers were starting to play around with sours and adjuncts. Funky Buddha began producing Blueberry Cobbler Ale and Key Lime Pie Ale as early as 2010. Both were made with copious amounts of adjuncts and made a splash in the market. When Shorts Brewing from Michigan held a tap takeover at Churchkey before Savor in 2011, the line was around the block; I know because I was at the front of it. That day DC got their first taste of a gingersnap brown ale; a barrel aged, tobacco inspired IPA called Gambler; Bloody Beer, a bloody mary inspired ale; and Soft Parade, a rye based ale loaded with mixed dark berries. Their carrot cake beer has been a fan favorite for a decade.
It’s at this time breweries in the DC region start to open and include smoothie sours as part of their regular line. Burley Oak opened in 2011 in Berlin, Maryland and their JREAM series has continually pushed the envelope for what can be put in a can. RAR opened in 2013 in Cambridge, Maryland and Out of Order has produced some of the best smoothie sours in the country. The Answer opened in Richmond, Virginia in 2014 and immediately made waves by Randall-izing all the fruit they could find. Nowadays, virtually every brewery you duck into from Virginia Beach to Philadelphia will have a smoothie or fruited sour on the menu.
My favorite smoothie sour ever? Glad you asked. At Max’s Belgian Fest in 2019 I was fortunate enough to try a one-off Out of Order batch from RAR called Ray Jackson’s Bandana. Blended with peaches and guava, my notes from that event say the peach and vanilla married well. The creaminess made it feel luscious even at 4.6%. The acid of the guava helped cut the sweetness. Enlightenment in a glass with no room for nuance. From my notes, I can tell I was blown away.
Smoothie sours have their fair share of critics. Is it sour? Not usually. Will it spike your blood sugar? Certainly. Do cans of smoothie sours occasionally explode and injure people? Yes, so keep them refrigerated. No one would argue that smoothie sours expand the definition of “beer.” At the same time, they can also expand the customer base and attract consumers who prefer a cocktail to fizzy yellow stuff. They will never account for significant market share, but they have a place on tap lists and a home in my fridge. You know what… this is making me thirsty and I have a can of Cushwa Electrofruit Berry Blast waiting.
