Do as the Vikings did. Or at least close to it! Today Im brewing sahti, the Viking brew of choice. No hops, baker's yeast, no boil and a 6 hour mash! This is going to be fun.
UPDATE: Aight, I decided to just update this post as I go. Before I did anything, I made sure to fire up my new Nordic style pipe, hand carved by mister Tom Leedy, and to make sure I had my weapon of choice ready for battle...
Aw yea, ready for action.
LETS BREW SOME SAHTI!
STEP 1 - THE RECIPE
So, in its purest form, sahti is traditionally brewed by the household. Therefore, there isn't just one recipe. In general, there is:
-Malted barley (60-70%)
-Malted Rye (10-20%)
-Crystal malt (0-20%)
-Juniper branches
I really wish I could have gotten my mits on some juniper branches, but alas, I could find none. Usually the mash is strained through a bed of branches, and I really wanted to do that. O well. Here is the recipe I came up with for the Leavelle house sahti.
-2 lb Pilsen
-2 lb Pale
-1 lb Rye
-8 oz Crystal 120
-8 oz Crystal 80
-.5 oz juniper berries
STEP 2 - CRUSH DA BERRIEZ
Since I could not get juniper branches, I had to settle for berries. I decided that the best way to utilize them would be to crush them up and add them to the mash. So I stuck em on a plate
Crushed them up and dumped them into my grains and mixed them up really well.
STEP 3 - BOIL WATER
Next I got a lot of boiling water started. The idea is to make a very thick mash at first, then continue to add water twice an hour over the course of 6 hours.
STEP 4 - MASH IN
Put the grains in the mash tun, and add enough boiling water to get it up to 150.
Its a VERY thick mash. I wish I had a big enough pot, I would have rather mashed in that, because I know Im going to have to boil the whole mash at the end. Still have not figured out how Im going to do this. Maybe a beer or two will get my gears turning...
Im gonna grab a pint while I wait. Thats all for now!
UPDATE: My cooler holds heat too well. I took the lid off to try and lose some degrees on the mash. Havnt been able to add any water yet, and its been an hour!!!
UPDATE: Minor fail. After almost 2 hours of mashing at 150-155, I realized I added WAY too much boiling water at the beginning. Soooo, Im moving on to boiling the mash/sparging. More updates while the wort is cooling.
UPDATE: DONE. Here's the rest of what I did.
STEP 5 - BOIL THE MASH
There are a few major differences between how beer is brewed and how sahti is brewed. Heres a quick rundown.
-Generally there are no hops
-Usually the wort is not boiled after sparging
-The mash is sparged with boiling water instead of 170 degree water
-Usually the mash itself is actually boiled
*I have to use words like "usually" and "generally" all the time because... there are a million ways to brew this stuff. I looked at many recipes and basically used what I saw as the most common practices.*
So, this final difference is just what I did in this step. I dumped the entirety of the mash into my kettle (actually, some of it got on the floor...)
and let it boil while stirring for about 10 minutes.
As I was boiling the mash, I filled two pots with water and started to boil those as well for my sparging water.
As the mash got to the end of its boil, I boiled a small saucer pan to sanitize it for transfering the mash back into my mash tun from the kettle.
Once the mash was done boiling, I put it back in my mash tun for sparging.
STEP 6 - SPARGING
By now both pots of water were raging. So I rinsed out my boil kettle, dumped about 2 gallons of sparge water in, opened the valve and... O NO. Stuck sparge. Just as I was about to dump everything out to find out what the FFFFF I did, a miracle happened... WORT STARTED FLOWING! What a beautiful site. It was slow, but better than nothing!
At this point I snaked a small portion of the wort, put it in the little pot I was using as a scoop, and threw in my yeast. BREAD YEAST.
I also tasted the wort and noticed there was barely any juniper taste at all. So I crushed up another .5 oz of berries and put them in with the yeast to add later in the fermenter.
Yummy.
STEP 7 - REGULAR BREWING
Chill the wort, sanitize the fermenter, pitch the yeast, aerate. Blah blah blah...
BEER
Today was a fun brew day. Very hectic compared to my recent brews! The process was so much more different than usual, my flow was always interupted. Reminded me of when I first started brewing... just as you go to sit down, a little alarm goes off with a jolt of adrenaline, and you think "O shit! I forgot ____!!!"
I learned a few things about brewing sahti that I will incorporate in my future sahti brews.
-Mash in a pot. Transferring the mash twice was a headache.
-MOAR JUNIPER. I could barely taste any at all from the wort. We will see if my additional "dry junipering" will help. I have a feeling Ill have to dry juniper that beotch again.
-Start the mash lower in temperature. I need to think of it like a step mash, I think, with multiple rests.
Thats all, methinks. This will be my last brew for a few weeks... heading out on the road for work starting Saturday, and seeing as my pipeline is completely full as of today, it may even be a month before I bust out the mash tun again. Bummer.
BAH. PEACE OUT YALL
2:55 PM
Bryan
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