Western Sun Hides a Gose's Salt and Coriander in a Smoothie Sour

Prickly pear, watermelon and lime carry the fruit here. The coriander and sea salt sitting underneath them come straight out of the gose playbook, which gives this smoothie sour older bones than it lets on.

• Style: Smoothie Sour
• Release Date: 2026-09-11
• ABV: 7.0%
• Hitchhiker Brewing Co. (Pittsburgh, PA)

Prickly pear is not a common brewing fruit in Pennsylvania. The fruit of the Opuntia cactus is magenta, mild and faintly vegetal, and it belongs to the desert Southwest and northern Mexico far more than it belongs to Pittsburgh.

Hitchhiker Brewing Co. has built a beer around it. Western Sun is a 7 percent smoothie sour, brewed with wheat and conditioned on prickly pear, watermelon, lime, coriander and sea salt.

Two items on that list are worth separating from the rest. Coriander and sea salt are the defining additions of gose, the tart wheat beer from Leipzig, and they are doing the same work here that they do there. Coriander lifts and widens the citrus. Salt sharpens the edges and keeps a heavily fruited beer reading as refreshing rather than sweet. Underneath the smoothie-sour format, which is about as modern as the category gets, there is a fairly traditional set of bones.

The fruit half is well matched to itself. Prickly pear, watermelon and lime share a register: high-water, mild, floral more than sharply acidic. None of the three is likely to shove the others aside, which is a sensible thing to want when you are stacking that much fruit into one tank. The wheat base gives it something to sit on.

It is also a fairly obvious candidate for the table. Anything you would already be reaching for lime and salt to finish would work alongside this: tacos al pastor, elote off a grill, a plate of ceviche.

Western Sun is available for pre-order now, with pick-up beginning Friday, September 11 at Hitchhiker's Mt. Lebanon and Sharpsburg locations.