If you've followed along with my brewing adventures, you'll remember a couple of barrel aged beer recipes (Russian Imperial Stout and English Dark Mild). I also did a Barley Wine and a Rye Saison with Riesling grape concentrate in the same barrel (recipes lost forever to a computer crash). The saison had some brett in it, so the barrel's days of seeing clean beers were over. After I finished aging the Riesling Rye Saison, I kegged 5 gallons out of the 11 gallon barrel and then added in 5 gallons of the base beer used in my Nordic Wheat beer that was soured with my house sour culture. The barrel has now become a mini Solera project. Every 6 months or so I'll brew up 11 gallons of a basic 50/50 German Pale Malt/What Malt beer, 5.5 gallons will get soured and the other 5.5 gallons I can play with.

And that, my friends, is what brings you to this blog today...me playing with my wort. I was due to give a talk at my homebrew club (W.I.Z.A.R.D.S. in Worcester, MA) about sour beers back in April and wanted to have an example of both a fast and slow soured beer. I had a turbid mashed lamibic I brewed back in 2015 still kicking around that fit the bill for slow soured beer, so all I needed was a fast sour beer. And that's where this mid-February brew day came in.

I'm a big fan of Berliner Weisses, but had never tried making a no-boil one. I wanted to keep that raw, rustic, bready flavor from the pale and wheat malts, but I also didn't want this to continue to sour and watch the pH drop until it got too acidic to enjoy. So instead of a more traditional no-boil brews where you pitch lacto and yeast either together or slightly staggered on wort that was pasteurized, I decided to do an overnight kettle sour with pro-biotics, then raise the temp of the soured mash to 185F to kill all the bacteria and then pitch yeast into the cooled wort.