Berliner Weisse - 2-day Sour Mash then Boil

[jwible204]

A few weeks ago, after I started riding my bike again this year, I got the itch to make another Berliner. Last year's batch wound up tasting great, but took a long time to develop the acidity and character I wanted.

To summarize last year's batch, I mashed/sparged as normal to achieve .25 gallons more then my desired fermenter volume. Boiled for 15 minutes then cooled and pitched lacto for 7 days, then pitched sacch to ferment it out. I didn't keep the wort hot while the lacto was working so it never really developed past being subtly tart and a touch funky until it was a few months old.

This year, I wanted to turn the beer around quicker and do it in a manner that left me with clean wort/beer from the brew kettle on. I stumbled on a great post about doing a 2-day sour mash, boiling for 15 minutes then cooling and pitching sacch. My hesitation for not wanting to do this is I didn't want to stink up my apartment for 2 days, my wife would kill me. Further research confirmed that keeping a layer of c02 over the grain bed would cut down and/or eliminate the cheesiness/funk of the sour mash. Using the blog post info and after talking with Jimmy @ PHBO I set out to do the sour mash.

Here was my plan.
- Mash in at the normal 1.25 qts/lb at 148F
- After 1 hour, cool to about 115, then pitch (1) lb of uncrushed 2-row (I sped up the cooling process by adding ice cubes)
- Purge the mash tun with c02 (from my kegerator), seal it with duct tape, cover with a blanket and place the entire thing on a heating pad (i use this heating pad for saisons, at full power it hols a bucket to about 95F)
- Check every 6-10 hours and add re-heat water as needed. These water volumes were calculated as the intent was to 'finish' the mash with my full boil volume. I wound up targeting about 105 degrees F for each infusion as my mash tun would drop about 5-8 degrees between checking. After each addition I would gently stir, purge with c02 and re-seal the mash tun
- After 24 hours I started checking pH, it was at 3.3 during my first check. By the following late morning it was at pH 3.2 and it had developed some peliccle. I added my last water infusion to bring me to my total boil volume, then about 2 hours later I ran off into my kettle (no sparge).
- Once I hit boiling, I added .2oz of Chinook (4 IBUs) and Whirfloc. After 15 minutes I cooled to about 75 and pitched rehydrated Belle Saison. (I have no room in my ferm chamber and won't for a while, that's why I went with Saison yeast and pitched warmer then ideal).
- My OG was 1.032 and fermentation took off within 2 hours.

I had my first taste last night, about 54 hours after pitching and just 96 hours total after my initial mash-in. I'm so incredibly happy with how this beer is turning out. The aroma has notes of breadiness and lemon, the flavor is very clean with good tartness. I'm going to guess that the breadiness will subside, there was still a ton of yeast in suspension. I'll crash it out in my keezer this weekend then keg early next week. I'm very much looking forward to having this on tap for post bike ride beer.

 

[bknifefight]

Did you seal the mash tun with duct tape to try and keep the smell at bay? I've never had a bad smell from purging with CO2. It's more like cooked corn.
Also, that's interesting you had a pellicle in the mash. I've never seen that.
The Saison yeast sounds like a good addition. I always go Nottingham but I am sure yours will be delicious.

 

[jwible204]

I sealed it because my mash tun is a rectangular cooler that isn't air-tight and I wanted to keep the C02 in there. The smell wasn't bad though, not at all. My only exposure to someone else's sour-mash was where they didn't purge with C02 and it smelled like vomit and cheese, so I was also being cautious. The pellicle only showed up somewhere between hour 24 and 32, here's a picture of it.

 

[Natdavis777]

Awesome! One of my next beers is a Berliner that I plan to sour mash. I was going to run off my total volume into my BK and pitch my grain then in some panty hose and wrap the kettle with a heating blanket. I like your method though because if my blanket doesnt cut it, I wont have any other way of upping the temp.

 

[jwible204]

That's another way of doing it, I chose the mash tun because it's already insulated by default so it maintains temperature better.

Berliner is an interesting style to me because there's so many different ways to achieve the same thing. I do think sour-mashing is the quickest, but the downside is that it's not 100% predictable. I recently got a pH meter from a friend so it's helpful being able to check that on this beer and pull it when you feel you've hit the pH you want it to be at.