intro Archives - Five Blades Brewing

Intro to Sour Mashing

March 1, 2015 by Derek Springer 27 Comments

Part of the Year of the Sour Mash series.

Sour beer, the homebrewer’s final frontier. Many homebrewers spend their entire brewing careers fighting infections, but there are some that crave them; choosing to harness the organisms that would otherwise spell ruin to make something magical.

To many, the idea of making a sour beer seems like an impossible dream: the time, equipment, and expertise required ensures that many homebrewers view sour beer as a pastime for the brewing elite. My friends, do not despair, sour beer is within your grasp! There is a fast, easy method to get active making sour beer: the sour mash. Sour mashing is a technique for any beer that would benefit from a crisp, tart, or funky edge.

I am kicking off the Year of the Sour Mash with this overview of sour mashing. I will be covering many of these topics in greater depth in future posts, but in the mean time I hope to convince you that sour mashing is not something to be afraid of, but a fun process that is easy to be successful at if you follow a few techniques. Without further ado, let us get started!

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Year of the Sour Mash

January 19, 2015 by Derek Springer 3 Comments

Now that the 2015 NHC Seminar List has been published I feel better about announcing this in a more official capacity: I have been selected to speak at the 2015 National Homebrewers Conference to give a talk titled Berliner and Beyond: Sour Mashing and its Applications. To commemorate this auspicious moment (and to focus myself for the conference) I am hereby dedicating 2015 as Year of the Sour Mash. It is my hope to not only inspire and inform my fellow homebrewers about the techniques and applications of sour mashing, but challenge myself to elevate the state of the art through experimentation and education.

Why sour mashing? Sour mashing is a fun, fast, and easy way to begin experimenting with sour beers, a topic more and more folks are getting interested in. I want to equip homebrewers of all skill levels to be able to successfully perform a sour mash and work it into a variety of their beers. A review of the conference seminars of past few years show that there have been no presentations dedicated to sour mashing and I want to be the one to change that.

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Coming Soon: The Yeast Bank

July 24, 2014 by Derek Springer Leave a Comment

It is frequently said: “brewers make wort, but yeast makes beer.” Yeast, in my opinion, is the most important ingredient of a beer; it’s not only the source of glorious alcohol, but the main contributor to off-flavors. Even if you create the most exquisite batch of wort the world has ever seen, if the yeast is treated poorly no one will be coming back for a second pint. The sooner you realize that brewers are just glorified yeast wranglers, the sooner the quality of your beer will improve.

A common anxiety that many new (and even long-time) homebrewers have is “is my yeast looking/acting/smelling like it should!?” I know my heart always skips a beat every time I use a new strain and it looks or behaves differently from previous batches, “this time for sure I’ve screwed it up and I’m on the express train to Infection City!” To combat this anxiety I’ve had this idea percolating in my head for a while: why not document the yeast I use as I put it through its paces as a visual and empirical guide to all the different aspects of our good buddies S. cerevisiae and friends.

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F’ Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades

April 11, 2014 by Derek Springer 2 Comments

As my first official post I’d like to address a question that folks ask my with some frequency: what is the origin of your sites’s name? You see, a lot goes into naming something: the name summarizes the expectations and aspirations of the object that is encapsulates. I wanted to chose a name that motivated me to be bold, to take chances, and to fly in the face if everything that I already thought possible. Here it is, the secret origin of Five Blades Brewing!

What part of this don’t you understand? If two blades is good, and three blades is better, obviously five blades would make us the best f’ing razor that ever existed. Comprende? We didn’t claw our way to the top of the razor game by clinging to the two-blade industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five blades is the biggest chance of all.