Vice & Virtue – The First Crush Cherry Sour

Vice & Virtue – The First Crush Cherry Sour Review

After our visit to Kelowna this summer, we’re pleased to notch the first Beer Me BC review for Vice & Virtue Brewing, one of the city’s standout breweries.

As we learned when sitting down with owner Matt Jewell and brewer James Windsor, V&V has helped to popularize kettle sours in wine-centric Kelowna. As the beneficiary of a growth spurt in the burgeoning North End craft brewing district, the Okanagan city is becoming one of the province’s breakout craft beer centres. More on this in the Fall 2020 issue of What’s Brewing.

Our first review is the First Crush Cherry Sour, documented by the brewery as:

Lean, tart, and with bright, bright acidity. This beer is kettle-soured, fermented with their new Framgarden Kveik strain, and then racked onto sour cherries that beautifully and naturally carbonate the beer.

This one pours a unique colour; kind of a clear, bright metallic tangerine with a reddish-pink undertone. Despite two decades of beer seeking, we haven’t seen this hue before. After this sour settles, it’s essentially headless, looking like a still beer.

On the nose, there’s a sort of candied cherry. Most kettle sours aren’t aroma beverages, but there’s enough there to say it has a fruity scent.

We found that the flavour was reminiscent of cherry preserves. It’s not the same as biting into a fresh cherry, but again, you’re getting a beverage that’s repping the Okanagan. If you’re a local fruit wine fan, you’re loving this tart ale, which as many of us know is a great gateway beer for lovers of vino.

Speaking of that, on the palate, the beer is what you’d expect: a little bit of bite but also vinous, which ties in perfectly with Vice & Virtue’s stated goal of appealing to wine drinkers since the founders are both beer and wine enthusiasts themselves.

If you’d like to learn more about Vice & Virtue, check out this episode by a friend of the magazine Aaron Johnson of Cascadian Beer Podcast.

Kelowna’s Emerging Beer Districts, Part I