fermenting on the mash, for beer.

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allucinari

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Hello all, forgive me if i posted this in the wrong section. I almost posted in the fermentation section, but seeing as this applied to all grain directly i put it here.

Distillers ferment on the mash all the time, traditional practice of beer must have included this method somewhere.

Has anybody done this with results, or know of a brewery that practices this?

This could be done in any single open vessel.

I got to thinking about this when one things got hectic around here and i left out one of my bread starter crocks at room temp for way too long...
The starter was mostly spent grain mixed with whole cracked emmer, rye, and oats.

The "beer" i poured off this tasted remarkably like a young abbaye de saint bon chien.

basically, dump mash/wort in a bucket/trashcan/crock/stocktank/bathtub and let it go from there... of course you could intervene in there somewhere and add in some controls:mug:

What would the pros and cons be of leaving all the mash in the fermenter be? Off flavors yes, but more specifically? Any compounds aside from the alcohol that will kill me?

cheers!
 
Well, the obvious difference is that you need to boil the wort prior to fermenting and I don't think you want to boil all the grain, right? So, that means you separate the wort from the grain, then boil, then add the wort back to the grain?
 
Well, the obvious difference is that you need to boil the wort prior to fermenting and I don't think you want to boil all the grain, right? So, that means you separate the wort from the grain, then boil, then add the wort back to the grain?

Not necessarily. He could go down the raw ale route.
 
You wouldn't have to boil, but you would have to use something other than hops for bittering.
 
Malted barley usually has lots of lactobacillus on it, which may survive the mash but never the boil. So there's that. I would think that fermenting the mash itself would be a recipe for sour beer (not necessarily a bad thing, but...).
 
Thanks everyone, yes we would be talking about a raw beer here. This was my second attempt at this post, the first one i wrote, i detailed how i would go about this and why, but i lost it when i tried to post as it had signed me out...
 
Malted barley usually has lots of lactobacillus on it, which may survive the mash but never the boil. So there's that. I would think that fermenting the mash itself would be a recipe for sour beer (not necessarily a bad thing, but...).

Thankyou, thats what i am looking for. Most of the older sour recipes i have found have you throw in some raw grain somewhere in the process... basically.
 
one could boil or steep whatever they were using as herbs or preservative first and use that "tea" for the mash water. Though i would assume certain things may have enzymatic effects, not sure. You could also let the wort settle and pour off some to steep your herbs, hops etc in, pour it back in at 170 or so.

in terms of no boil, this is helpful info. https://www.experimentalbrew.com/content/no-boil-experiment
 
Why couldn't you bring the mash to a boil , wouldn't that essentially be a decoction at that point . Decoct it until the whole mash reaches >160 degrees and that should sterilize it . Chill , Dump to fermenter and add yeast
 
Why couldn't you bring the mash to a boil , wouldn't that essentially be a decoction at that point . Decoct it until the whole mash reaches >160 degrees and that should sterilize it . Chill , Dump to fermenter and add yeast

This. Do a mashout at 160*F for 3 minutes and it should be sufficiently pasteurized. As long as the pH of the mash is good, tannins should not be an issue.

Only down side I see to this is the size of the mash tun/fermenter will be HUGE if you want more than 1 to 3 gallons of finished product. Sort of like those pictures you see of 3rd world brewers making chica like substances in old 55 gallon plastic drums.
 
Why couldn't you bring the mash to a boil , wouldn't that essentially be a decoction at that point . Decoct it until the whole mash reaches >160 degrees and that should sterilize it . Chill , Dump to fermenter and add yeast

bringing the whole mash to a boil, and decocting it until the whole mash is 160 are two different things as far as i know.

should work either way, but the short boil will give you DMS, and the long boil to get rid of it might get you more tannins etc out of the husk and grain. I am not totally sure. i could be missing something... most of my fermentation experience is with raw stuff.

raw keeps the cost of heating low.

another good raw beer article i found here http://mutedog.beer/blog/brewing-raw-ale
 
I would aim for 165F instead if you are not looking for a lacto soured beer. The minimum pasteurization temp for milk is 161F for 15 seconds [source]. You'd want to make sure it was consistently heated through. It would also kill off any E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria on it, not that malted grain is at a high risk for those.

This website mentions a paper from 2005 that Brett was severly deactivated in wine at 32.5C (90.5F). So heating to 165 should get you clear there too.

Personally I'd give it a try with a small batch and see how it comes out. Then let us know cause I'm pretty curious now :mug:
 
This. Do a mashout at 160*F for 3 minutes and it should be sufficiently pasteurized. As long as the pH of the mash is good, tannins should not be an issue.

Only down side I see to this is the size of the mash tun/fermenter will be HUGE if you want more than 1 to 3 gallons of finished product. Sort of like those pictures you see of 3rd world brewers making chica like substances in old 55 gallon plastic drums.

sounds good, you got it with the "3rd world" chicha like substances, that is part of the appeal to me. I have been brewing all grain in a bag (same "game bag" i use for sheep processing) so far and have not been able to justify buying all the expensive kit. After that being such a success i wanted to explore what results i can get from crude and simple methods.

if you have pictures of unindustrialized brewing i would love to see them.

i have large fermenting crocks, but i might try something bigger than those, not sure i trust the 55 gal barrels that i store my grain in, they work for that, but when i used them to tan hides in, the plastic coating on the inside delaminated. Not sure if i trust plastic at all honestly. I had a source for old cut open bourbon barrels...
 
I would aim for 165F instead if you are not looking for a lacto soured beer. The minimum pasteurization temp for milk is 161F for 15 seconds [source]. You'd want to make sure it was consistently heated through. It would also kill off any E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria on it, not that malted grain is at a high risk for those.

This website mentions a paper from 2005 that Brett was severly deactivated in wine at 32.5C (90.5F). So heating to 165 should get you clear there too.

Personally I'd give it a try with a small batch and see how it comes out. Then let us know cause I'm pretty curious now :mug:

thankyou!
I should note, my wonderful mother in law just dropped off a bulk sack of crisp maris otter, which i will use as the single malt for this experiment.

I'll try it both ways. ill do a low temp batch split with hops and spruce/pine(maybe sumac), and a higher temp batch split the same way. give me a little time to do a little more research, but the point of this is to keep it simple and basic. I do plan to use my wild sourdough starter as inoculant in my next batch which will be a BIAB however, then i will get to this.

I may lose a few here, but beer to me is mostly about communion with my fellow humans, and communion with the earth. Fementation is probably the closest thing to "magic" we posses.
So often do we freak out about minutia trying to get something perfect, and get hyped up about the latest magical piece of kit that promises to make things better.
That is why i really love the idea of "heat mash together with herbs, dump it all in a pot and wait" approach, i want the perspective of seeing what the simplest has to offer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)

cheers!
 
Hello folks, I have a couple things to update.
It seems i have been talked into more control, so first i will do a balsam beer in my normal methods, and use a commercial yeast, then the same one with my native/wild starter i use for bread and kvass, then i will try the same thing raw and dumped whole into a crock, still undecided what i will do for yeast on that. i played with various amounts of balsam at different steeping and boiling times, copying general hop usage, steeping at mash temp, etc...

some good considerations on the fermenting on the mash here:
"We've been asked 'why not ferment in the trough. Why go to all the trouble of trying to collect a wort without bits in it?'

Firstly, alcoholic fermentation requires anaerobic conditions. A large vat (1000s of litres) within a building has a blanket of carbon dioxide over the fermenting beer, as in lambic brewing. A small trough (100s of litres) situated outside would have this blanket blown away. Secondly, during fermentation, the little bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast, stick to the smaller particles and lift them into the froth of the barm. You can see the towering barm in the picture below. It can turn into a really messy monster when it has a lot of little bits in it. After fermentation you would still have the problem of straining or filtering what brew has not been lost to the froth-over. That is a lot harder with little bubbles in it. A bed of husks will not form properly and filtering just doesn't work."
http://merryn.dineley.com/2016/07/big-pots-fermentation-and-storage.html

if any of you guys have not checked out that blog... you must, fastastic stuff!
i'll send them what i find.

And a great source of info on raw ale here:
"Of the farmhouse ale brewed today, how much is raw ale? That's nearly impossible to quantify with anything like precision, but I can outline the areas where raw ale appears to be the norm:

Norway: large parts of Sogn og Fjordane, Sunnmøre, and Oppdal, and to some degree also Stjørdalen. [Own research]
Gotland: most of the beer appears to be boiled, but boil times vary from 1-2 minutes to hours. [Salomonsson 1979]
Finland: most sahti is unboiled. [Ovell 1996]
Estonia: I don't know of any boiled koduõlu. [Järmälä 1997]
Latvia: the beers in Latgale seem to be unboiled; not sure about western Latvia yet. Older literature describes mostly raw ale. (Sources: Cinitis and [Hupel 1777].)
Lithuania: I don't know of any boiled traditional farmhouse ale. (Sources too many to list, but see Gutautas.) "
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/331.html


cheers!
 
...well the first set of controls is in primary fermentation. 3 gallons of raw done with my wild house starter, and 3 done with WLP833. mashed for 90 min or so between 150-160 with balsam boughs, put more in at the end and let cool in the kettle overnight. i put more unsterilized boughs straight into the carboys too, which both yeast liked, at 7 hours most of the first bubbling activity was all around the boughs in the carboy, as i gather the yeast was using the extra surface areas. OG was 1.050


I have my ten gallon fermentation crock ready to do this same thing on the mash next if these turn out reasonable, it should hold a whole 5 gallon batch it seems.
 
slight update, wlp833 is a stinkpot, still smells like a geothermal wonder. the house yeast had a bit of sulfur at the beginning, but now smells nice and clean with a hint of lactic.

the balsam smell is pretty heavy, i hope i did not overdo it.
 
well, it turns out there is a high profile commercially done sour mash beer on the market RIGHT NOW... i was down in bristol NH at Cathleen's and saw this on tap.
It is very nice, the hops clash a bit for me, but i liked it, and still definitely a lagunitas.

https://lagunitas.com/beers/aunt-sally#

i do not know exactly how they get on brewing this, but the concept is at least likewise.

cheers!
 
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