FuzzyBrew

This weekend, Nashville is bringing the funk.

The inaugural “Embrace the Funk Fest,” Nashville’s first ever sour beer festival, will be held Saturday, May 5, at Yazoo Brewing Company.

The festival, which runs from noon to 5 p.m., will focus on samples of wild, funky and sours beers — some extremely rare and hard to find.

The feature will feature several new beers from Yazoo’s Embrace the Funk series, including “Wild Child,” a dark, smokey sour ale with cherries; “Rufus,” the sour collaboration with New Belgium Brewing that debuted during Memphis Beer Week; “Drie Day,” a 100% brett fermented ale in Grand Mariner oak; plus, others that brewer Brandon Jones has in reserve and even more brought in from around the world.

Tickets are $50 per person and are very limited. To register, go to Yazoo’s online store. For more information, visit embracethefunk.com.

A crowd of 2,000 beer lovers converged Saturday on AutoZone Park for the 4th Annual Memphis Brewfest, a celebration of American craft beers and international brews.

The 2013 festival, with more than 165 different beers sampled, was a big success. It rained, and the Grizzlies were playing the Clippers in Game 3 of the playoffs a few blocks away at FedExForum, and the festival still sold out on Saturday morning. Thankfully, there was covered space for all the booths in the concourse area of AutoZone Park, so everyone could stay dry.

There was beer from local and regional breweries, including Ghost River Brewing, Boscos, High Cotton Brewing, Yazoo Brewing Company and Blackstone Brewing Company. Two homebrew clubs were there: the Bluff City Brewers & Connoisseurs and Memphis Brewer’s Association. Craft and international beers were provided by distributors A.S. Barboro and Budweiser of Memphis, and for the first time, Joe’s Wines & Liquors even had a booth, pouring high-ABV selections from its Beer Nutz Beer Club.

The festival capped off the inaugural Memphis Beer Week, with beer tastings, beer dinners, firkin nights and pint nights all across town.

Memphis’ High Cotton Brewing, which has just started brewing at its new facility on Monroe, had samples of its Saison and Scottish Ale at Memphis Brewfest.

The Bluff City Brewers & Connoisseurs served up some great homebrew, including the “High C’s” IPA, Extracurricular Hoptivity IPA, Rauch Me Like a Hurricane and Strange Fruit Watermelon Wheat, just to name a few.

In addition to its year-round beers, Nashville’s Yazoo Brewing Company had two special beers on tap — a barrel-aged version of its Sly Rye Porter, as well as the New Belgium sour collaboration “Rufus.”

Yazoo also gave away this awesome custom big wheel to this lucky guy.

The mission of Memphis Brewfest is to raise awareness of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. All net proceeds from the festival benefit Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy and the Memphis Redbirds Foundation.

On Day 5 of Memphis Beer Week, there was a full-on sausage party!

Chef Ryan Trimm cooked up the sausages and Nashville’s Yazoo Brewing Company provided the beer for “Yazoo Sausage Fest” at Sweet Grass Next Door in Cooper-Young.

Trimm made everything from a fancy American hot dog to Bratwurst to Chorizo Verde with potatoes, peppers and carrot mustard. Yazoo had a full slate of beers, including Dos Perros, Hop Project, Rufus, Sue, Gerst, Pale Ale, Stout and Hefeweizen.

For $7, you got a delicious sausage and a tasty beer.

Memphis Beer Week continues today (see schedule) and culminates with Saturday’s Memphis Brewfest at AutoZone Park.

Memphis Beer Week kicked off Sunday with the debut of “Rufus,” a collaborative beer blend by Yazoo Brewing Company and New Belgium Brewing.

Rufus is a sour red ale fermented with two different strains of Brettanomyces yeasts and puree of blackberry and currants. It’s a mix of “Oscar,” the dark sour base beer New Belgium uses for its LaFolie blends, and a white wheat and pale malt base beer brewed by Yazoo in Nashville.

There were samplings of Rufus Sunday at the Young Avenue Deli and both Flying Saucer locations, with even more opportunities to try it this week.

I got a taste of it at the Deli and was pleasantly surprised. I’m not a huge sour beer fan, but I found Rufus to be fairly sour with nice fruit notes on the nose. It was served a bit too cold.

I defer to my friend and FuzzyBrew contributor Nate, who’s much more savvy with sour beers. I asked him for some tasting notes as we sipped on a couple of pints of this Bloody Mary red beer.

“I don’t feel like the enamel is coming off my teeth or the back of my throat is closing up,” he said. He described it as “moderately sour,” but not very malty.

He continued that it smelled like a New Belgium sour, though “not as intense.” He could taste the Brett yeast, “a little barnyard funk on top. … The fruit is there, but I really don’t know that I’d pick it out.”

As it warmed up, Rufus was more funky, more sour and more fruity. My jaw started to tense up, but I stuck with it and was happy to have tried this ambitious collaboration from Yazoo and New Belgium.

For a ton more details on the beer, Brandon from Embrace the Funk, who worked with Yazoo on Rufus, has a great post on his blog about the beer. He describes Rufus as “dry, wild, tart, dark fruit forward with a solid sour backbone and slight caramel malt finish.”

Try it this week, Memphis. You won’t get to taste it again.

Who else has tried it? Let me know what you think in the comments below.