No Corporate Beer Reviews: Synopsis Dark Cherry Sour

Beer: Synopsis Dark Sour Cherry
Brewery: Area Two Experimental Brewing (Stafford, CT)
Style: Sour – Fruited
6.4% ABV / N/A IBU

Area Two Experimental Brewing is a new-ish offshoot of Connecticut’s beloved Two Roads Brewing Company, with an emphasis on Sours, American Wild Ales, and funkier Belgian styles like Flanders Red Ales and Lambics. The vision for Area Two is wholly independent of the Two Roads Tanker Truck gose series; Area Two beers mesh Belgian brewing techniques with bold, fruit-forward flavors for sourz that are easy-drinking but deliver a premium alternative to the hard seltzer craze.

Decibel sampled the Dark Sour Cherry version of Synopsis, but the 6.4% ABV sour is also available in pint cant two-packs of the black currant, prickly pear, blueberry-açaí, and “red fruit” (cranberry, raspberry, strawberry) varietals. All versions of Synopsis are essentially prepared the same way: first fermented with bacteria, plus wild and cultured yeast strains, then aged on wood. The beers are the “fruited” with juice and pulp during aging – with Synopsis Dark Sour Cherry, it’s a quantity of the Morello (no relation to Tom) cherry.

I’m going to guess that Synopsis has some artificial dyes based on its color, a non-occluded red that resembles cranberry juice; the skin and nectar from Morello cherries is typically pretty dark. That aside, Synopsis Dark Sour Cherry is fantastic and fun to drink, with ample amounts of cherry flavor. It’s also somewhat hard to describe, with the minimal carbonation and taste profile of a fruited lambic but the mid-range booziness of a wild ale. Particularly impressive is that the bacteria and yeast and the fruit of Synopsis Dark Sour Cherry mesh into something that is neither overly sour or cloying in presentation.

For more info, check out Area Two Experimental Brewing here.