Maintaining sour mash temp

What are some tricks to maintaining my sour mash temp?

The only thing I can think of is using an electric blanket and to wrap it around the mash tun. . . but I am concerned that extended duration will be dangerous.

Ambient temperature range for my area is about 15F from Day-Night. I can't mash indoors.

If I use club soda to help drive out O2, how much should I use? Just enough to cover the top of the mash?


:rockin:

I soured my wort in my kettle. Wrapped my FermWrap around it, wrapped blankets and a big winter coat around it and let it go for 2 days. It maintained 110-120 just fine. I did it in January when the ambient temp was much lower in my garage.

What are some Pro's and Con's with full sour mash vs. souring the wort with grain in kettle?

The major pro to me was being able to use my FermWrap to keep the temp up. The FermWrap would have had a much smaller affect on my cooler MLT.
The major con for tossing a pound (yes, I used a pound) of 2-row into the kettle was that I had to fish out a pound of 2-row from the kettle. About half of it sunk into the wort over the 2 days. I ended up boiling about a cup of grain as I was not able to get it all out and after 30 minutes of trying I just decided not to care. The Berliner Weisses that I made from that sour-wort were/are awesome. VERY tart. So, a pro to souring in your tun would be that you don't have the issue of grain in your boil.

Used a 5 gal contractor water cooler for my sour mash to maintain temps, and followed a method from Zymurgy magazine. For the sour starter I used a reptile heat stone in a small cooler. I describe the process here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/berlinner-weisse-question-293924/index6.html#post3979714

Your process for a sour mash is a bit different than how I've been seeing. . . I admire it. I think I may do that as a second batch to compare results.

I can't take credit for it, it came from the Zymurgy article, but the sour mash worked well for me on the 1 batch I tried it (and for my friend who's the VP of Education in our brew club - he's doing a demo of this method at the next club brew session. He's done it several times and it works consistently).

The advantage to this method is you can make the starter a week in advance if you want, so if it fails (smells like vomit instead of green apple), you can try again with another starter and you are not wasting much time or grain. I'd recommend using sterile wort (canned), so you know the only bugs in the starter are coming from the grain. Keep the starter warm (100) the whole time - I think that's important too. You only have to keep the full wort volume warm overnight after you add the starter to it - a cooler will do this pretty easily so you don't need to buy a heater wrap or anything.

Having said all that, I have switched over to using bugs (lacto, pedio, brett) to make sour beers, because I think the flavor is much better and more complex. Sour mashes can make some good beers, but not as good as using Roselare or sour beer bottle dregs and waiting a few months IMO. I'd probably sour mash again if I were to make a Berliner Weiss - the lacto finish you get from a sour mash would be perfect for the style, and you could knock one out in a couple weeks.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f72/alferman-imperial-berliner-weisse-255777/


I was trying to follow the process in the above link.

I made a homemade Lactic starter which I think gave this beer the right flavor. Crush a cup of grains and add them to a Cup of Water at 130 degrees and put that combination into a jar for a starter.

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don't use club soda- that has salt in it- use seltzer water.

Pardon my nescience. . . What will be the adverse effects, even after a full boil occurred?

I do a "sour worting" technique on a regular basis. I mash as normal, then cool to 120ish degrees and transfer the wort to my 5 gallon cooler along with 4 ounces of uncrushed grain, top-off with some seltzer water, then seal up the lid. 20-24 hours later, the temperature of the wort has fallen to 90-100 degrees and is moderately to aggressively sour. Then I boil as normal (or in the case of a "no-boil" Berliner Weisse, I briefly bring the wort to 200 degrees to kill off the bugs).

I don't think it's too essential to maintain 120 degrees... just try to keep it as warm as you can. A sour mash will work at even lower temperatures, it will just take a little bit longer.

That makes sense. I think I will try the sour worting next time. First attempt, full sour mash. Current attempt, lacto starter.

I plan to do a sour mash and maintaining the temperature by putting a two gallon bucket full of mash into a larger plastic bucket with a food dehydrator placed on top of the larger bucket so that the warm air from the dehydrator blows down onto my mash bucket. I drilled some holes in the bottom of the larger bucket to accomodate proper airflow. I tested this with my 2 gallon bucket filled with 100 degree water, set the dehydrator to 125 degrees and let it go for 24 hours.
After the 24 hours my water was still 100 degrees, so I will give this method a try.

I do sour worting as well. However, I drain my wort into a corny keg and purge it with CO2. I then stick my keg into my mash tun and fill it with water and stick an aquarium heater in the water. The mash tun lid won't close because the keg is too tall but I rest the lid on top and throw some towels over it. It maintains the temperature great.

The dehydrator thing worked (kept it at just over 100 deg). I'm now trying a 120v car battery warmer (80 watt with a 36" wrap). This thing heats up to 180 deg which of course is too hot, but I'm thinking would be a nice heat source for my 14qt pot of mash placed inside my 60qt kettle with the lid slightly off to let out some heat. Car battery warmer was 28.00 at Canadian Tire.

HopHoarder said:

The dehydrator thing worked (kept it at just over 100 deg). I'm now trying a 120v car battery warmer (80 watt with a 36" wrap). This thing heats up to 180 deg which of course is too hot, but I'm thinking would be a nice heat source for my 14qt pot of mash placed inside my 60qt kettle with the lid slightly off to let out some heat. Car battery warmer was 28.00 at Canadian Tire.

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You can always use it with a temp controller if you want to maintain a specific temp.

You can always use it with a temp controller if you want to maintain a specific temp.

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That's exactly what a homebrewer friend of mine said too. It's been nearly 24 hours hours now and my mash is getting really funky looking and sitting at just over 100 degrees, so it's all good. The car battery heater seems to be doing the trick.

Just going to use this thread instead of starting a new one... Does a sour mash lower the SG before you pitch Sacc?

tagz said:

Just going to use this thread instead of starting a new one... Does a sour mash lower the SG before you pitch Sacc?

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Yes lacto will consume a portion of the fermentable sugars.

This may be a dead post but I will share the experience I just had.

I built a mh1210f to control the temperature the temperature of my cooler using a hot water heating element. I found that at first it made the grain rise to the top and leave the liquid below. This caused the lid the rise and I lost some wort on the first day. After that, I wrapped a towel around the side to catch anything that escaped. I set the temperature controller to 99F with a 3 degree shutoff. The temperature would rise quickly to 102F and stop the heating element. As the heat leveled out in the cooler it would stabilize at around 107-109F. The third day, something weird happened and the temperature shot up to 115F and the grains sank to the bottom. Upon stirring my mixture I noticed that the temperature was rising to 130F. Since I passed 120F and decided the bacteria was dying already, I drained my cooler and proceeded with my boil. All in all, I think it was a success and I cant wait to use it again after I figure out why the temp rose on the 3rd day. Ill post a picture on my set up on the next post.

Apparently I'm missing my empty picture... this is the sour mash in action

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