The lagers and wheat beers all get decoction mashes—an old-fashioned method in which part of the mash is separated and boiled, then returned to the main mash. The moderately modified malt they get from IREKS is well suited for it; besides adding richness and deepening the malt flavors, other benefits of the decoction mash include improved foam and stability. Most of the beers get single decoctions, but the bocks get double decoctions—that is, two successive portions of the mash are boiled. They carbonate the beers naturally via spunding—using CO2 from the fermentation process, rather than forcing in extraneous gas. This helps to create a softer texture and denser foam.
Graham, although a Kansas City native, is one of those German-trained brewers for whom Celsius and degrees Plato come more naturally than Fahrenheit and specific gravity. He describes their typical regime: steps at 62°C (143–144°F), 65°C (149°F), 72°C (161–162°F), each for 20 minutes; then two-thirds of the mash is pumped away, and the remaining one-third boiled for 15 minutes. Then the mash is reunited to reach about 76–77°C (168–170°F) for mash-out. He says that this process leads to relatively less-attenuated beer with a rounder, fuller malt character.
He and his brewing team are open to additional tweaks. In fact, they are adding a wrinkle to their mash regime after recently brewing an Uerige-inspired altbier. Following the Uerige recipe as closely as possible, Graham mashed in at 47°C (117°F) then did a short protein rest at 52°C (126°F). They didn’t really know whether the step was important; based on their analysis of their malt, there should be no need for a protein rest. They did it anyway, and they ended up with some of the best foam stability and attenuation they had ever gotten in a beer—and in this brew-house, that is saying a lot. “This head was so distinctive,” Holle says. “It was this really dense foam. It wouldn’t go away.”
As a result, Graham is now experimenting with that regime in some of their other beers, including their Winterbock. “It came out great,” he says. They also adjusted the other mash steps for the Pils. “It comes out drier and with a better head, so it looks like we will switch Pils permanently. It’s hard to argue that drier with a better head is not improving a pils.”
However, they like the round malt character of the Helles as-is. They won’t be fussing with the Dunkel, either.