Boulevard Brewing Love Child #4

July 23rd, 2014 by Scott in Other Beer Reviews

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks around here. My sister got married in New Orleans over the weekend (remember she got engaged at Port Orleans last year?) and getting everything ready has been rather time consuming. I’m back from NOLA now and I just picked up Boulevard Brewing’s Love Child #4 from the nearby store.

Do you like sour beers?

Love Child #4 is for you.

Do leftover wedding cake and sour beer really go together? Probably not, but that wedding cake wasn’t going to eat itself.

50% of Love Child #4 was aged in whiskey barrels and 15% were aged in wine barrels. According to Boulevard these were primarily oak barrels and portions of the beer aged from 16 months to 6 years. The rest aged in stainless tanks for 11 months with a healthy dose of Lactobacillus to sour the beer.

Love Child #4 is a brownish-orange colored liquid with a white head that dissipates fairly quickly. The aroma is full of sour fruit with just a hint of funk. Flavors of sour cherries and lemons fill the palate, with just a bit of oak and a leathery funk in there. This is a seriously sour beer. A little bit of the wine flavor seeps in, but I don’t taste whiskey at all. That’s not necessarily a complaint but an observation as the beer doesn’t really need the whiskey flavor.

If you’re a sour beer fan, Love Child #4 should be right up your alley. If you’re not as big on sour beers or looking for a sour beer to get started with, you might want to try something else. If you’re just looking for wedding pictures, I posted my first set from the weekend here.