South Florida's first dedicated sour beer-focused festival, Anything Gose, will return for another year at Bangin' Banjo Brewing Company on Friday, January 18. The Pompano Beach-based brewery will celebrate the third installment of its tart-tasting event highlighting dozens of gose-style and sour-style beers.
More than 20 individually-treated kegs, a number of full-batch treatments, and specialty gose-inspired brews will be available to festival goers from 6:30 to 11 p.m. The event is capped at 500 people to ensure a more intimate, exclusive experience. Tickets are on sale at Eventbrite for $40 per person, which includes admission and unlimited sampling of more than 50 beers.
The first Anything Gose festival launched in 2015, a smaller version of today's event that serves to highlight one of brewer-owner Adam Feingold's favorite styles. During the event, guests can taste unlimited samples of gose, a German beer characterized by the use of coriander and salt traditionally made sour by inoculating the wort with lactic acid bacteria before primary fermentation.
The beers you'll find at Anything Gose aren't traditional gose, per se, meaning there's no bacteria to make it sour, says Feingold. But it's still the same German-inspired recipe brewed with coriander and sea salt. For the past several years, Feingold has been perfecting his own take on gose, a style he's continually experimented with since the brewery opened its doors four years ago.
It began with Gose Getter, a gose featuring a heavy dose of fresh Florida orange zest. Feingold says it was among the area's first to fall into the "Florida-style" category of beers — sour-style brews that are heavily treated with tropical fruit for an often colorful, flavorful kick.
A year-long preparation process, Feingold and co-owner/brewer Matt Giani have been hard at work preparing for the biggest Anything Gose festival yet. This year, specialty tappings will include a number of never-before-seen beers featuring a total of eight different barrel-aged goses and a smoothie-style gose brewed with lactose for a sour twist on the trendy milkshake-style IPAs that have become popular in the past year. Specialty treatments will include an imperial gose, dozens of fruited goses, and cuvee-style barrel-aged sours.
Guests will also be able to sample beer from ten guest breweries — many Florida-based and known for their sour-style beers — who will make an appearance to pour limited release brews during the event. Among them will be a true German-style gose, a collaboration done in partnership with Pompano Beach-based Odd Breed Wild Ales.
During the event, Bangin' Banjo will also be doing a limited, 22-ounce bottle release for two of its most popular gose beers from years past: barrel-aged versions of Tiny Guitar, a passion-guava-mango gose aged in Chardonnay barrels; and Cover Band, a passion fruit-dragon fruit gose aged in Zinfandel wine barrels. Admission tickets can be bundled with one or two bottles of each beer.
"These treatments are very labor intensive," said Feingold. "They take twice as much work when comparing them to specialty beers we've done for anniversary events. But the end result is something spectacular."
Bangin' Banjo Brewing Company. 3200 Northwest 23rd Ave., suite 500, Pompano Beach; 954-978-3113; banginbanjobrewing.com.