Night Moves Sits at 4 IBU, With Whole Vanilla Bean on Top

Four IBU is the entire hop contribution to Sons of Kent's new kettle sour, which is roughly none. What fills the space instead is blackberry and whole vanilla bean, in quantities the brewery will only call enormous.

Style: Blackberry Vanilla Kettle Sour
Release Date: 2026-09-10
ABV: 4.8%
Sons of Kent Brewing Co (Chatham, ON)

Four IBU. That is the entire hop contribution to Night Moves, the blackberry and vanilla kettle sour Sons of Kent released this week, and it is about as close to none as a commercial beer gets. Most mainstream lagers, not a category anyone accuses of being bitter, sit at roughly three times that.

The number is the point rather than an oversight. A kettle sour is soured with lactobacillus in the kettle, before the boil, so acidity arrives early and sets the terms for everything that follows. Hop bitterness and lactic acid do not flatter one another. Brewers working in the style tend to keep the hops functional and quiet, and Sons of Kent has kept them quieter than most.

What fills the space instead is fruit. The Chatham brewery says the beer is crafted with enormous amounts of blackberry and whole vanilla bean, and describes a tart mouthfeel with a smooth vanilla finish. Whole bean is the detail worth pausing on. Beans are slower to give up their flavour than extract and cost considerably more to use at volume, which is precisely why extract is the common shortcut.

The can is not shy about any of this. Hot pink, a yellow lightning bolt running top to bottom, the name stacked in white block letters, and the style spelled out in small type down near the base. The line the brewery is running alongside it: "The Night is Yours. Make a Move."

Night Moves is 4.8 percent in 473 mL cans, priced at $4.95, and is available now through the brewery's Adelaide Street taproom in Chatham and its online shop.

Editor’s Take

There was a stretch, not so long ago, when a good part of the industry seemed to be competing to print the largest available IBU figure on a label, as though bitterness were a high score and someone were keeping a leaderboard. Night Moves arrives at 4. Four. You could set a glass of this next to a cup of strong tea and the tea would be the aggressive one in the conversation. I find that enormously cheering. Somewhere in Chatham a brewer measured out precisely enough hops to do the job and not one pellet more, then got on with the actual business at hand, which is blackberry and whole vanilla bean in amounts the brewery declines to quantify beyond the word enormous.\n\nThen they put the whole thing in a hot pink can with a yellow lightning bolt running down the middle, which strikes me as exactly right. A 4 IBU fruited sour is not a beer that wants to be approached cautiously, and nothing about that can suggests caution. Try it with something salty and fatty enough to argue back - a good sharp cheddar, or fried chicken - and let the acid do the work that the hops were so pointedly not asked to do.

Source & Editorial

JollyPint independently prepares release articles using information published by breweries through newsletters, websites, and other official public communications. Brewery-supplied descriptions and tasting notes are reported as provided, while editorial context is added by JollyPint.