Our Story
Pastore, founded in 2019 by Ben & Chris, was born out of a shared love for mixed fermentation beers old world and new. Our aim is to showcase all facets of sour & wild brewing. All of our sour & wild beers use mixed cultures. We make ‘fresh sours’ co-fermented with lactobacillus, giving a lovely lactic acidity. And we also make ‘wild ales’ aged for months or even years with our mother culture of wild yeasts and microbes.
So how do we define ‘fresh sours’? To us these are modern and heavily fruited sours, sometimes inspired by traditional sour beers such as Berliner Weisse and Gose, sometimes by modern styles such as Pastry Sours and Sour IPAs. All of these are fermented with our fresh sour mixed culture of kveik & lactobacillus giving our characteristic lactic and ‘yoghurty’ acidity.
How about our wild ales? We have a small library of oak barrels and steel tanks housing a rotating collection of saisons, table beers & Flanders reds that are fermented for an extended period with our mother culture of wild yeasts & microbes. Our mother culture lives & ferments continuously in a solera tank in the brewery. These beers are often blended and in some cases re-fermented with local fruit grown in East Anglia. We love working with local wine, cider & sake makers to re-use their spent grape, apple or rice in funky beer projects.
More recently in 2024 we started producing more lagerbier. In a story as old as time we all found ourselves drinking lagers after busy shifts at the brewery and decided to devote a tank to making traditional and speciality lagers year-round. The first recipe we made was Molto Dry, our beloved rice lager. This is a refreshing dry lager, but as well as traditional lager yeast we use ‘sake kasu’ in the fermentation. This not only imparts a lovely crisp rice finish but also feels like the perfect bridge between our mixed fermentation roots & our love of lager.
Ben, Chris and our small team of dedicated beer obsessives hope you enjoy our beers – if you’re in the neighbourhood or come across us at a festival or event near you, drop by and talk to us about sour beer!
