Cranberry Blood Orange Sour Pairs a Bog Fruit With Winter Citrus

Side Launch pairs Ontario cranberry with blood orange in a 5 percent seasonal sour, one fruit picked in the fall and one that peaks in deep winter. Out now at LCBO stores across Ontario.

• Style: Fruited Sour
• Release Date: 2026-09-16
• ABV: 5.0%
• Side Launch Brewing Co. (London, ON)

Cranberry is one of the few fruits that still keeps to the calendar it gets sold on. It is raked out of flooded bogs in the fall and it tastes like it.

Side Launch Brewing Co. has released Cranberry Blood Orange Sour, a 5 percent seasonal now available at LCBO stores across Ontario in 473mL cans. The brewery specifies Ontario cranberry rather than cranberry generally, and pairs it with blood orange. Side Launch describes the beer as bringing together refreshing fruit flavour, balanced acidity, and a crisp citrus finish, and is positioning it as a fall seasonal rather than a permanent addition. The can carries a limited release marking.

The two fruits are not doing the same job. Cranberry is aggressively tart and carries almost no sweetness of its own, which is why it usually arrives in a glass already cut with sugar or juice. Blood orange brings a softer, slightly berry-edged citrus that can absorb some of that sharpness without flattening it. In a sour base, where the acidity is already accounted for, the pairing gives the beer somewhere to go after the initial tartness instead of simply staying there.

Side Launch keeps a standing sours collection, so this is a category the brewery returns to rather than a one-off experiment. It joins a core lineup that leans mostly the other way, toward Northbound Lager and the Fifth Coast Hazy IPA that reached the LCBO earlier this year.

Cranberry Blood Orange Sour is available now at LCBO stores across Ontario.