Rapid-fire sour brewing - ingenious or stupid?

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jpoder

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I just ordered a huge amount of bulk malt, and was thinking of how to maximize my brewing to a) get through it before it starts to go bad b) learn a lot c) keep costs low. I've been itching to get into brewing sour beers for a long time now, and am now ready to take the plunge. I was thinking of doing a few brews in fairly rapid succession (around 1 a week) to try out a few different ideas. here is what i am thinking:

week 1: Berliner Weisse - no boil (modified B.W. recipe from BYO) using 2/3 pilsner malt 1/3 wheat and mash hopping. pitching White Labs sour mix (is this even appropriate for Berliner Weisse?)

week 2: leave mash in tun, add a handful (or two) of fresh grain and let it sour (or should I just start anew and throw out grain from batch 1?). a few days later add new grain (on top of old) and brew second batch of B.W. using same recipe, but sour mash. rack week 1 B.W. to secondary and pitch week 2 B.W. on top of yeast/bug cake.

week 3: rack week 2 B.W. to secondary, brew flanders red and rack onto yeast/bug cake.

wait...bottle...wait...enjoy!

what do you think? am I crazy to try this? will I get the results I desire (testing sour mash vs. sour bugs added to wort + getting a flanders red underway)? will the yeast and bugs survive my crazy process/repitching? should I attempt to "clean" the yeast between batches?

Thanks!

Jim
 
1 - you can use a sour mix on a berliner but it wont really be a berliner it will be more like a gueze in the end, a week primary is a bit optimisitic from my viewpoint as well

2 - not sure exactly what you mean, do you plan on leaving spent grain in your tun for a week? if so I wouldnt do it, instead do a sour mash the following week with fresh grain, keep the temp up and prepare for some vomit smells coming from your tun/boil

as far as racking off of the yeast every week I think you would be moving far too fast for most all of the bugs to do much of anything in any of the beers, they work slow and need time to build up their populations

that said I think you could do these in 3weeks, you just need a blend for each beer, and more time in the primary
 
My sour mashes are just mashing for extended periods. I do 18 hours in my KY Common for a hint of sourness. 48 hours will be very sour. No need to throw extra grains on there. The mash will smell terrible when you open it. One guy just did a Imperial BW with a 52hr sour mash, and I think some others things to make it sour as all hell.
 
hmmm...thanks for the advice. couple additional questions:

so, I should stick to yeast + lacto (and/or soured mash) for a Berliner Weisse?

does souring the mash just encourage growing lacto?

am I asking for trouble doing a sour mash and no boil? how long a boil would you recommend with a sour mash? Does this kill everything?

How long should I expect a B.W. to take to develop? From what I've been reading, normal times are just a few months before bottling b/c of the low gravity. Is that wrong? any good sources on more info for Berliner Weisse brewing?

perhaps I should just focus on doing 2 B.W. batches in a row. Realizing that it will take some time in a secondary, won't there be enough yeast and Lactobacillus to dump new wort on top of to get the second batch started after a week or so?
 
I really don't know about the BW style, but I can tell you what I do with my KY Common. I do everything like a normal beer, just mash a lot longer. Still a 60min boil. Can't really help you with anything else, sorry. Hopefully someone else can.
 
so, I should stick to yeast + lacto (and/or soured mash) for a Berliner Weisse?

does souring the mash just encourage growing lacto?

1 - not necessarily but it depends on what you want, WY came out with a BW blend last year that contained brett, it was extremely subtle in the finished product though, but i think if you asked someone they would only expect a clean lactic sourness

2 - no, lots of stuff will grow as well, hence the vomit smells coming from the mash, Ive heard but havent tried yet, that you can minimize the smells by limiting the amt of oxygen getting into the mash

am I asking for trouble doing a sour mash and no boil? how long a boil would you recommend with a sour mash? Does this kill everything??

1 - not necessarily, if you end up pitching a sachet of yeast it will most likely dominate, but the bugs may continue to work very slowly, Ive boiled a sourmash 15min-60min, just make sure you do it outside far away from any door to your house, it smells like hot rotting garbage in my experience with it, and yes boiling will kill anything that we are worried about

How long should I expect a B.W. to take to develop? From what I've been reading, normal times are just a few months before bottling b/c of the low gravity. Is that wrong? any good sources on more info for Berliner Weisse brewing?

1 - a bw fermentation should proceed very rapidly, very much like a normal ale, now i like to age mine because when young they display a meaty wheatiness that i dont like very much, luckily this fades with age and the sourness becomes a bit brighter as a result

Id say the biggest resource Ive had for BW is brewing blogs, google some up, they provided me with most of the info I needed when I started

perhaps I should just focus on doing 2 B.W. batches in a row. Realizing that it will take some time in a secondary, won't there be enough yeast and Lactobacillus to dump new wort on top of to get the second batch started after a week or so?

I would let it go a bit longer, if you get a good amt of sourness in the 1st batch the second will be even more sour, as the bacteria start to outgrow the sacch, trick is getting that blend right in the first batch, you need a very large healthy population of lacto to get the sourness in the beer, they also dont flocc pretty much at all, so getting them to drop in a week is wishful thinking, it does happen but takes time


for your overall idea i think i think you should definately do a flanders as well, but remember thats gonna take 12mos+ to get good, I generally leave it on teh cake for ~6mos before racking and putting fresh wort on it, which seems to work very well, first pitchings onto roeselare etc are generally a bit bland but Ive found that adding ~1# of maltodextin really helps the first batch alot
 
Thanks for the advice!!! I'm really anxious to get brewing!

Here's what I'm thinking after some time searching the internet, reading replies, and contemplating... BTW, best resources I've found include this recipe from BYO magazine and the Jamil show from Brewing Network on Berliner Weisse There are lots of other interesting snippets on various forums, but hard to find the bits of goodness among all of the trub.

I'd still like to do a side-by-side comparison of sour mash vs. Laco innoculation, so I'm thinking:

make a big starter of clean fermenting yeast (Jamil on his Berliner Weisse show recommended european ale yeast...sounds good as any to me)

I'm going to go with around 4 Lbs of pilsner malt 3 lbs of wheat malt (and contemplating the advice for 1 Lb of maltodextin malt (or something similar to help add body) 1 oz spaltz hops.

brew 1: brew batch 1 using above recipe single infusion @ ~150 mash hopping, 15 min boil. pitch pure lacto culture, and let it ferment hot for ~2 days. then pitch 1/2 of yeast starter(dropping to ~68%). ferment out and bottle.

brew 2: same mash/hop schedule, after starch conversion let the mash cool down to ~100 and keep it there for ~2 days (I like it SOUR, so we'll see how long I actually let it go). boil (~15 minutes), cool to ~ 70 pitch second half of yeast starter, ferment out and bottle.

I think I'll do a Oud Bruin as well, but seems to have little or nothing to do with the BW brews (can't really reuse yeast or bugs from what I've been hearing). So I'll leave that for later...

I'd appreciate any thoughts/comments/advice, and will post updates as I brew and taste this one.
 
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