Reading up on Lambic brewing, I've discovered a lot of brewers use a turbid mash (and long boils). Is this really necessary? ...or can a starchy wort be achieved by a simple, single, short sacc temp of say...162*F with no rests? A starchy mash seems like it should be easy...just do everything wrong btw...I have plenty of free rice hulls
Mash on the high end for lots of dextrins, go normal lenght for conversion, add cake flour to the boil, it's pure unconverted starch. Did that with the first sour beer I did. Longer boil is good if you are using aged hops, extracts more hop tannins and boils off the chessy aroma.
Yes, wheat flour at the end of boil will give plenty of starch. Mosher and others have advocated this. Some also have made award winning lambic style beers using extract as the base, as there are the dextrins in the extracts for the bugs n critters to eat.
turbid mash is a pretty easy one, but also fairly unnecessary. jb pretty much has it right, i would run the usual mash to convert all the starch in the grain, then add starch into the boil.
I just grab a half gallon of wort right after dough in and boil it to kill the enzymes. Then add it to the kettle later once its boiling post the main mash run off.
Quick Question: how much flour in the boil for a 5 gal batch? (I'm thinking a 1/2 cup) I also pulled 1.5 litres of dough-in liquid and boiled.
I don't do anything wild.. Just mashed high like 158-159*. 90min boil. It was plenty starchy. Has some oats and some wheat in the mash as well for extra brett food. I did do a bit of a step mash, mashing in with really low amount of water. Bit of a guessing game, but meh. Used ECY01 and it's taken off. Even put a little wort in the yeast vial from my hydro sample and it's chuggin away in the bottle! Murky and ugly looking beer, thats for sure.
Yes, an ugly looking beer...could hardly make myself intentionally throw starch in there. Topped up with water as my OG was 1.080...I was kind of winging it since I really didn't know what I was doing and my batch size was inbetween 5 and 10 gal...and I was brewing indoors because of the shitty weather. Lambics are weird...kinda like making Thanksgiving gravy
I'm starting to get addicted to brewing sours... Shit's pretty fun, if more the the fact that you can control as much as you want, but it's the yeast and bacterias call on what happens. If anything, it makes it a risk, and that is fun on it's own. I'm gonna get a funky sour saison going soon enough, as well as a sour brown, or a flanders red to boot. Need to order me some more better bottles to funk up.
