What Makes Our Beer Special: Turbid Mashing

When making beer one of the first steps is the conversion of malt to its constituent sugars and nutrients when is then converted to beer. This initial conversion to sugar and nutrients is done by adding water to malt then heating it to various temperatures to trigger and enhance enzymatic conversion. This is common to all beers though there are many different mashing processes that can be used to create unique beers. We’ll give you a quick outline of the turbid mashing process we use.

Turbid mashing involves maximizing the amount of grain in the mash tun and adding, removing, and then replacing the liquid in the vessel.

The in-process wort removed from the mash tun is boiled in a separate vessel (called liquid decoction) to neutralize any enzymatic reactions and essentially fix the removed liquid in an incompletely converted state. New brewing water (called liquor) is added to the mash tun and the process is repeated. A number of complicated temperature rests and liquid moves occur until finally all the wort created is moved into the boil kettle and boiled for three and a half hours.

So why the crazy maneuvers? Well, in the region that eventually became Belgium (a great video on Belgium’s creation) beer taxes were based on the size of your mash tun. The ingenious brewers devised a way to maximize their output by adding the water in steps in a smaller mash tun rather than putting everything all together in a larger mash tun. This was the case until 1885 when a new law established taxation on the overall grain used rather than the mash tun size. The inadvertent result of this process was the creation of a wort that was extremely complex, with many types of sugar and starch chains and filled with protein and nutrients. This wort turned out to be the ideal substrate for long term aging in barrels, allowing fermentation to carry on for years, rather than weeks. All of the Monolith beers use turbid mashing and that process allows us to finely tune fermentation and our subsequent beer quality.