Sour mashing.

[jimjohson]

the style's suppose to be 30-45 ibus, but we were planning on just 20. think that'll be too much?

[The_Professor]

the style's suppose to be 30-45 ibus, but we were planning on just 20. think that'll be too much?

I guess it depends on where you look.

This Wikipedia article says 27 IBU average, and this missing style guideline says 20-30.

I checked and mine was 22 IBU. It had a nice sweet and sour thing going on.

[philm00x]

Sounds like we're going in the right direction then. I'm just hoping for a smooth, not overwhelming but not understated pucker, with malt flavor still lingering at the back.

[jimjohson]

proff i could only style after a california common hence the ibu discrepancy. i know my cincy common is only 20 ibus

[philm00x]

Trying to determine how quickly hot liquid cools in my cooler, I performed a test using boiled water. Only did 1.5 gallons worth, so there's a lot of headspace left in there. The water cooled to about 195*F when I poured it out of the pot and into the cooler. Covered it and let it go w/ a probe thermometer hanging inside. After a couple hours, the temp reached 165. I then proceeded to cover the water level inside with aluminum foil to where it was touching the water. Another couple hours went by and I only lost another 8 degrees. Been another couple hours since and I lost another 7 degrees. So when it comes time to sour mash, I'm gonna lay plastic wrap on top of the mash so that it pushes as much air as possible off of the mash, and then lay some aluminum foil on top of it.

I'm still torn between sour mashing all the grist, or just a percentage of it (thinking 50% right now). Sour mashing half of the grist will allow for more sweet than sour when I mash the other half and add it to the sour wort, but then I feel like I can probably achieve the same effect by sour mashing the whole she-bang but for less time.

[mashani]

Both methods are valid.

The more of the grist you sour mash the more likely you will get a more complex flavor profile. But it's harder to control the sour, you have to be keeping a close eye on it.

Blending is a good way to make up for "too much sour".

For perspective, although real Belgian sours are brewed full volume and duration with sour bugs (not just sour mashed), many styles are often blended with a sweeter batch to achieve the balance of sourness that the brewmaster intends.

Mostly it depends on if you are willing to dump it if it gets too sour or weird bugs get in the mix and instead of complex you get rotten and how much you value the complexity over the "make beer for sure". Blending will let you "save" a batch in this case perhaps.

[philm00x]

Thought about that. The safe thing to do for now is blending it, so that's how I'll go about it.

On a related note, my digital thermometer decided to go wonky. It read boiling water at 227*F, and ice cold water at 90*F. So today's project was to make sure my brewing thermometer was accurate, and also to calibrate a 3" brewmometer I intended to put on my brew pot but now is rigged where the spigot was on my soon-to-be-converted mash tun cooler. I'm going to sour mash half the grist in a double bagged plastic bag lining the inside of the cooler so that I don't infect the cooler with bugs and potentially infect future batches that I don't want infected. I'll pull the bag out and use it to sparge over the sweet mashed half of the grist, then finish sparging as normal with water until I'm at my boiling volume.

[philm00x]

Leak test passed and calibrated. Should work for the time being, but I ought to add it to the tun after I finally finish converting it.