When I started brewing in 1985, small breweries made something light, something dark, and (if you were lucky) sometimes something with wheat. The variations depended on which tradition you were representing—something light British was a pale ale, something light German was a pale lager, and dark beers were stout or dunkel, respectively. Wheat beer was a German thing, and sometimes, if you got very lucky, the British dark was a porter. The 1985 Great American Beer Festival® (GABF) winners list was three beers long: lager, amber lager, and dunkelweizen. The first year the GABF had style categories was 1987, and there were 12. One of the new ones was Continental Pilsner (leading me at the time to believe there must be other types of Pilsners to be found—why else specify this Pilsner as Continental?). Clearly I needed to know more. I talked to other brewers (the few who were around back then), I began to acquire books (even fewer of those), and I pestered the homebrew shop owner.
I started brewing professionally in 1988 for Redhook Ale Brewery, and in 1989 I went to work for Pike Brewing. Merchant du Vin owned Pike Brewing; it was an importer of classic European craft beers, and this is when I was really exposed to beer styles. Owners Charles and Rose Ann Finkel took me with them on visits to their imports’ breweries: Samuel Smith’s, Ayinger Privatbrauerei, Lindemans, Caledonian, Traquair House, and others. We met with brewery owners, talked to brewers, and we drank a wide variety of great beers. I was bitten by the brewing bug; once again, I wanted to know more. I started collecting books on beer and brewing. It became a kind of an obsession—I am a bit of a collector, and I may have gotten a little carried away. I ended up with a pretty extensive library of a few hundred books, many of them pretty old. And over my years as a professional brewer, I have done a lot of research in my quest to develop new beers.
So the first time I heard of Gose, I was honestly a little annoyed with myself. How had I missed this style of beer? I went back to my books, starting with the obvious ones: Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion, Michael Jackson’s New World Guide to Beer, The Oxford Companion to Beer, The Encyclopedia of Beer, German Wheat Beer, and Prost! The Story of German Beer. Nothing. Maybe I needed to go old school; The Curiosities of Ale & Beer, Origins and History of Beer and Brewing? Nada, no entries for Gose. Maybe I was not the only one who had missed Gose. Then, finally, while digging through One Hundred Years of Brewing, I found two brief mentions: “Goslar and Halberstadt Gose,” and later, “The Gose was named after its home city, Goslar.” Then I found two entries in The Oxford Companion to Beer; my friend (and excellent brewer) Brian Hunt mentioned Gose in his discussion on sodium chloride: “However some craft breweries have recently recreated the previously extinct Leipzig Gose beer style, which contains notable salt.” And then a few pages later Wolfgang Stempfl, while discussing sourness, states, “Sour ales such as Berliner weisse and Leipziger Gose are inoculated with Lactobacillus bacteria.” Now I knew that Gose-style beers were sour and contained notable amounts of salt, and that they came from either Goslar or Leipzig. Clearly other brewers knew about Gose. I needed to catch up.
Until very recently, little was written about Gose in any language except German. The issue then became finding these old German books and getting good translations. To complicate matters, 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. Maybe this would be true of any beer style that spans approximately a millennium, but Gose had moved not just through time but through various locations as well. Over the years, Gose has been sour and not sour; salted and (maybe) not salted; made with 100 percent wheat or 50 percent wheat, or possibly 75 percent; spontaneously fermented or inoculated; spiced with coriander, spruce, and at some points other spices; and named after a huntsman’s wife or a river. You have to glean each piece of information with a grain of salt, both figuratively and literally. Each written account needs to be examined through the lens of the appropriate time, using an understanding of the technology and scientific knowledge of the day. And maybe most importantly, you need to realize that all beer styles are fluid and bound to change a little (or a lot) over time. What follows is my endeavor to make sense of what I have learned about Gose, and in turn tell you, gentle reader. 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. I hope you enjoy the journey!