othellomcbane
Well-Known Member
There seems to be a ton of ongoing discussion about sour mashes and Berliner Weisse, so I figured I'd share a technique I came up with that I think produced very good results.
One caveat: this would be harder to do with larger batches. The batch I did was a bit under 3 gallons, and you could definitely do a 4 or 5 gallon batch this way, but more than that might be hard.
My take-away from all the reading I've done on sour mashes is that their success depends largely on how well you can maintain the temp. Somewhere around 110 degrees (F) being ideal; much under 100 and you run the risk of nasty odors. One day it occurred to me to take the temperature of my kitchen tap water at its hottest setting and wouldn't you know, it was exactly 115 degrees F. I started brainstorming, and came up with this plan: do a small (1 gallon, in this case) BIAB and transfer the cooled (to 115 degrees) wort into one of those 1 gallon glass jugs. I then threw in a handful of grain, and topped it off with carbonated water to purge out oxygen (another contributor to nasty smells in a sour mash.) I then plugged up the jug with a drilled rubber stopper and covered that in saran wrap, so there was basically no headspace or oxygen exposure at all.
With the actual sour mash sealed up nice, I removed the Bazooka screen from my 7 gallon Gatorade cooler mash tun and set the jug inside. Just about any cooler mash tun can fit at least one jug, but you could easily do two or more depending on how large your mash tun is. Also depends how sour you want the result to be *personally, I wish I had soured more of the wort. Anyway, with the jug inside your mash tun, you can just fill it up around the jug with tap water on its hottest setting (take the temp first to see what that is, of course. You might have to make some adjustments.)
With the mash tun filled up and sealed up, the temperature held for a while after 12 hours, even in my cold apartment in December, it never dropped much below 110 degrees. After 12 hours, I drained the water and refilled it to keep the temp extra consistent. Repeated for about 40 hours. Especially since I only mashed ~40% of the total wort, I wish I had held it for longer; I'm sure it could have gone three days or more. When I opened it up and boiled it with the second half of the wort, there were no unpleasant smells whatsoever.
I also did a 100% Brett B fermentation after the boil, hoping for some added complexity and funk. Sadly I don't have much to say about that, since I can't pick out any Brett aroma or funk in the beer. I think it was worth doing though for the "why not" factor, but there's definitely no cheating complex sourness. Still, I'm extremely happy with how this came out, and I think this technique should be easily repeatable with consistent results.
Not that this hasn't been long enough already, but if you want to read any more about the resulting beer, here's a write-up on my blog: http://www.bear-flavored.com/2012/04/bear-flavored-100-brett-berliner-weisse.html
One caveat: this would be harder to do with larger batches. The batch I did was a bit under 3 gallons, and you could definitely do a 4 or 5 gallon batch this way, but more than that might be hard.
My take-away from all the reading I've done on sour mashes is that their success depends largely on how well you can maintain the temp. Somewhere around 110 degrees (F) being ideal; much under 100 and you run the risk of nasty odors. One day it occurred to me to take the temperature of my kitchen tap water at its hottest setting and wouldn't you know, it was exactly 115 degrees F. I started brainstorming, and came up with this plan: do a small (1 gallon, in this case) BIAB and transfer the cooled (to 115 degrees) wort into one of those 1 gallon glass jugs. I then threw in a handful of grain, and topped it off with carbonated water to purge out oxygen (another contributor to nasty smells in a sour mash.) I then plugged up the jug with a drilled rubber stopper and covered that in saran wrap, so there was basically no headspace or oxygen exposure at all.
With the actual sour mash sealed up nice, I removed the Bazooka screen from my 7 gallon Gatorade cooler mash tun and set the jug inside. Just about any cooler mash tun can fit at least one jug, but you could easily do two or more depending on how large your mash tun is. Also depends how sour you want the result to be *personally, I wish I had soured more of the wort. Anyway, with the jug inside your mash tun, you can just fill it up around the jug with tap water on its hottest setting (take the temp first to see what that is, of course. You might have to make some adjustments.)
With the mash tun filled up and sealed up, the temperature held for a while after 12 hours, even in my cold apartment in December, it never dropped much below 110 degrees. After 12 hours, I drained the water and refilled it to keep the temp extra consistent. Repeated for about 40 hours. Especially since I only mashed ~40% of the total wort, I wish I had held it for longer; I'm sure it could have gone three days or more. When I opened it up and boiled it with the second half of the wort, there were no unpleasant smells whatsoever.
I also did a 100% Brett B fermentation after the boil, hoping for some added complexity and funk. Sadly I don't have much to say about that, since I can't pick out any Brett aroma or funk in the beer. I think it was worth doing though for the "why not" factor, but there's definitely no cheating complex sourness. Still, I'm extremely happy with how this came out, and I think this technique should be easily repeatable with consistent results.
Not that this hasn't been long enough already, but if you want to read any more about the resulting beer, here's a write-up on my blog: http://www.bear-flavored.com/2012/04/bear-flavored-100-brett-berliner-weisse.html
