Quick Sour Experiment Thoughts

The other day a buddy and I brewed a Hefeweizen with 75% wheat and 25% 2 row in the mash.

Mashed (a little low at 150 after doughing in) and sparged with 175 degree water. I got real low mash efficiency that day (about 60%) then put my mash tun in the garage where I promptly forgot about it (blame the homebrews).

About 2 days later I went out to the garage, which ranges in temp from 50-75 degrees, and remembered the mash tun was still full of "spent" grain and I opened it up and smelled a very strong but not unpleasant cider/sour odor. With nothing to lose and a couple hours to spare I boiled 3 gallons of water and dumped it in the mash tun (a chest cooler). This raised the temp of the mash to about 130. Then I drained it off very slowly into my kettle getting a gravity of 1.040 for the runnings (i told you my efficiency was shit on brewday).

I brought the runnings to a boil for 60 minutes and added some leftover tettnang (.3 oz) at 60 minutes, perle (.3 oz) at 30 and about an ounce of zythos at 2.

I split it up into 3 containers.

1- a growler with abbey ale yeast i had harvested from a belgian stout
2- a growler with s-04 I had harvested from a porter
3- a gallon jug with a combination of those two harvested yeasts because why the hell not. I'll probably throw some strawberries in it too.

After 1 day they were all active, though the s-04 growler went batshit insane, and today they are all about equal in activity, bubbling consistently.

My question is, how will this taste? I know some people do a sour mash to cultivate lactobacillus (sp?), but typically thats done at temps over 100 over the course of three days. Do you think there will be any sourness to this? Did I boil too long to retain it? I was curious because after this experiment I was thinking a lot about doing a quick berliner weisse and testing the sour mash/sour wort procedure.

What are your thoughts?

 

Thanks for the feedback. I figured thats what happened but the low temps had me worried, though very possible the temp inside my cooler maintained above 100 for quite a bit longer since it wasn't opened at all.

I was worried about the boil more than anything because out of all the info online there isn't really a guide on how long to boil a sour mash. I guess it doesn't matter.

After seeing how this turns out I think I'll try it with a full batch (with more controlled conditions) and see what happens. I've become enamored with the idea.

 

Will do. I plan on doing a standard 2 week fermentation with no secondary and then just bottling it. and seeing what happens.