What does it take to brew over fifty gallons of Flemish Sour Red ale? Over 100 pounds of grain, mass hops, 20 gallons of soured starter (not to mention 5 gallons of actively fermenting yeast to get the main batch going), 4 people and about 12 hours. Worth it? Hell Yeah! Click through for the photos…

Who–or what–is Mob Barley, anyway? Little is known about them, besides their clear proclivity for effin’ up the shiznit. It is said that they are comprised of homebrewers from myriad clubs (in more than one city!); that their combined years of experience brewing is infinity–1; that their combined annual homebrewing output would fill a shallower Great Lake; that they have some deep, mystic and inscrutable knowledge of hops and even, perhaps, of related plants. Their agenda is unclear, and they don’t wear ski masks, but one thing is certain, or at minimum, certain-esque: none of them appear to own a refractometer. And at least one of them seems to have a blog.

So, back to the concept. The first thing you’ll want to be sure to have is something you can actually ferment that much beer in. Mob Host to the rescue on that- the day before we brewed, this fine blue barrel arrived at his doorstep (delivered by the postal service, not by a guy wearing it on his head, but you get the point: that’s not yr. average 5-gal garrafón carboy.)

We put it to use first to collect the entire grain bill after milling, the better to thoroughly mix it before portioning it out into our three mash/lauter tuns. In total, we had: 55 lbs of Vienna Malt, 49 of Pilsner Malt and an odd-6 lbs of Munich as base malts. Dimensionality was the result of 9.8 lbs of Cara-Vienna and 4.2 lbs of Belgian Special-B. Below is a shot of the grain before mixing. What’s that yellow stuff on the top? I should mention that a significant portion of the grist was actually not barley at all, but flaked maize–28 lbs–sometimes called corn, just as you might see in an American light pilsner. However, its use in this beer is perfectly appropriate. Of Rodenbach (the very definite hallmark example of the style, we drank several while brewing), the late and lamented Michael Jackson wrote:

“… These malts comprise eighty percent of the grist, and the rest is corn grits.”

So, it’s not like we were cheating.

After heating up water and getting the grains all sorted, we mashed-in. We had three lauter tuns and as well, a large-ass cooler we also used, just for mashing: we had to transfer that batch over for lautering. Here’s a shot sometime during the sparge. You’ll see we were definitely not setting up a nice continuous sparge for this; we simply did the ol’ drain, refill, and drain again, which worked out just fine.

We collected gallons and gallons of wort, and put it all to the boil for an hour, all portioned out across 5 kettles. Hops were added at the onset, we added 9 oz of Kent Goldings across the kettles at the beginning of the boil. Cooling all of this down to yeast-pitching temperature after the boil was water-intensive, to say the least. But we weren’t especially worried about infection, since by the very nature of the style, we intended to infect the beer purposefully. After transferring the cooled wort carboy-by-carboy to the fermenter, we pitched the yeast: a full 3-gallon container of fresh yeast from the Rohrbach brewery that only earlier that day had been working hard on some other, certainly inferior beer (but thanks for the yeast, guys, really!) Pictured below, you’ll see the soured starter culture–20 gallons worth–we intend to add on down the line…

Yeast pitched, we oxygenated the hell out of it, clamped down the lid and now we must, as all homebrewers do, wait. And wait. And… wait. Also, “wait.” For you see, once the primary fermentation is done, we’ve only just begun on this one. Our original gravity reading was on the high side for the style, about 1.058, but that’s good in the sense that it means we can add all of that soured starter without worrying about it when, in about a month or so, we transfer the beer over to a big ol’ oak barrel and add the soured beer culture. At this point, a long period of much slower fermentation will begin- we’re looking at this beer finishing this stage probably in April or May of ‘08. And even then, Mob Barley will not yet be satisfied. Oh, no. If you’re going to do something like this, why not go all out?

(MobAlex goes all out!)

We’ll finish the beer using Méthode Champenoise, meaning this: once the beer is ready to bottle, we’ll add a new shot of yeast and sugar and bottle & cap them in heavy, champagne bottles, all held at 75-degrees (angle, not temperature) to encourage the yeast to fill the neck of the bottle. During this period, the bottles will be rotated frequently. When it is time to finish them, we’ll dip each neck in below-freezing liquid to form a yeast plug, which will pop out when we pop the cap, itself to be replaced with a cork and a cage. This bottle beer will have to repose for another several months before being ready to drink, so we expect this beer to be done no sooner than early 2009.

Mob Barley. A threat to democracy? A threat to your sister? A threat to your beer cellar and fridge? Who can be sure?! BOV will keep you posted on this beer, and further adventures of the Mob.