Lambicus Insanitus

nfo:

• Brewer: Ryan
• Mash: Turbid Mash (Wild Brews by Sparrow page 141)
  
• Date: 01/10/2009
  
• Size: 6 gallon post-boil

Grain Bill:

Main Mash

• 8.5 lbs 2 row malt
• 5.5 lbs unmalted wheat (hard white, ground to a mix of coarse grist, graham flour texture, and flour)
  

Yeast:

• Wyeast 3278 Lambic Blend
  

The Mash:
This is the mash schedule from "Wild Brews" by Sparrow (pg 141). I basically treated it like a series of batch sparges where you denature the resulting liquid to stop conversion. Actually doing this really helped me to understand what the constituent components of the final wort are like. With a decent mash tun with a false bottom this isn't as hard as its often made out to be, although be prepared for it to take a while and to have a relatively long boil at the end.

• Target of 28qts (2qts/lb) total liquid addition
  
• add 5.6qts water (20%) at a little below boiling (roughly 190, with some tweaking) to target 113F, rest 15 minutes
  
• add 5.6qts water (20%) at a little below boiling to target 126, rest 15M
• draw off 4qts (~30% of liquid) to kettle, heat to 190 and hold
• add 8.4 qts (30%) water at 212 to target 149F, rest for 45m
• draw off 8.1qts (50% of liquid) to kettle, heat to 190 and hold
• add 8.4qts (30%) of water at 212F to target 162, rest for 30m
• draw off 11qts and start heating, the grain bed should be pretty much dry after this. Heat kettle to 190F
• Add all the liquid from the kettle back to the mash to target 172F, rest 20m
• my 10 gallon mash tun was almost completely FULL at this point
• Sparge with 190F water until around 1.008, this got me to right about 8 gallons pre-boil
• Pre boil gravity 1.050
  

The Boil (longer than you want):

• Strange mix of ancient hops I've saved up.
  
• .6 oz of 2003 tett
• .6 oz of 2003 williamette
• 3 oz of 2005 goldings. This is the only one with any real bitter left. The rest were long past the "cheese" state. Hopefully these don't throw the bitter to far over, the original recipe called for 4.8 oz of debittered, I'm at 4.2. Well we'll roll with it and see what happens. Post boil it was fairly bitter, but not overly so and since we're going for a ~6 mo+ fermentation I expect a lot of that will scrub out.
  
• Boiled down to 6 gallons over the course of almost 3 hours. While that was going on I basically finished my second batch (peachy keen nut brown, post to follow). I tried to keep it to a "soft boil", lightly rolling but not overly vigorous to minimize excess maillard.
• This is the first time I've used the converted keggle I got from a freind of a guy at work. It has a false bottom so I just pitched in the hops loose and crossed my fingers. Worked awesome, drained almost completely dry and basically no hops made it through. The old keggle will be retired and I may try to convert one of my 7 gallon pots to work the same.
  
• Cooled to roughly 80F
  
• Put in a 7 gallon carboy and pitched in the lambic blend.
  

The Finish:

• OG: 1.060
  

Commentary:

Was the turbid mash worth it? Well only time will tell, I can say that it definitely produced a different wort than any I've ever made before. It was very "bready" and had a definite dextrinous after taste/mouth feel to it. Could you emulate this by just adding dextrin? Maybe, but I don't think it would get the same mix of starches and sugars. The interim run-ofs were interesting to see and taste, there was a definite progression from the first run being almost completely white to the last being a pale golden straw color (which is what the final sparge was like). This definitely helped me grok at a more fundamental level what happens here since I could tast, smell, feel the product, which imho made it worth the experience. I would caution anyone else who wants to try this that this needs a decent sized mash tun (10g for a 5-6g batch) and a 10+gallon kettle because of the large volumes used. Would I do this again? Probably yes, its definitely way easier than a 3 step decoction :)