Kentucky common beer

[sledge]

I came across this today: Kentucky Common Beer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This looks interesting if only for it's rarity.

The question is how do I prepare a sour malt?

 

[joeybeer]

There's a recipe on here somewhere. I made it a couple of years ago, and it was great. It ended up tasting exactly like New Belgium's 1554. First and only time I've mashed for 24 hours in a cooler !!

 

[ajdelange]

Only did it once in the lab. I just added enough water to cover the malt and then put the container in an incubator at 47 °C. It should be covered closely to exclude air and spoilage organisms. After a couple of days the stuff was pretty sour and I dumped it on a cookie sheet and dried it in the oven. It really tasted good. In the drying process I obviously converted some starch to sugar i.e. I really made crystal-sour malt. If it's going straight into the mash tun it is "sour mash" and obviously doesn't need to be dried.

I now "prepare it" by calling my LHBS and saying "Hey Derek, get me a sack of sauermalz."

 

[doghousechef]

I do sour mashes fairly often, for wits and Kentucky Commons(I live in Louisville). Eventually I'm going to do one for a stout. My method is to take about 20-30% of my pale barley and do a regular sacharification infusion(150 or so) in a small playmate cooler. I wait until the temp drops to 120 and add a little uncrushed grain to the mini mash and cover the surface with plastic wrap. About every twelve hours I'll add an infusion of boiling water to bring the temp back up to 120. Keep the oxygen out with a covering of plastic wrap. I keep this up for 2 or 3 days, depending on how well I've planned ahead and how much sour I want. I'll usually heat it up (maybe using it as a decoction) for mashout. The only problem I've ever had is one of my wits turned out too sour and was more like a berliner weise.

This is a good resource, and what I went by when I first tried to do sour mashing:
Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Techniques - Sour Mashing: Techniques

Edit: For the wits or other light beers I'll use the sour mash to bring down the ph