I have been brewing for about 8 months now, and gone through about 9 batches of beer. I started out with extract brewing and moved my way up to all-grain (so far only 1 brew I wasnt blown away by!). I am now fermenting a batch of “sour beer” or Berliner Weiss from a recipe I found in the March/April issue of Zymurgy magazine.
Anyway, this is my first time attempting a sour beer and I just have one main question at this point. Do I need to transfer this beer into a secondary fermenter and let it sit for a few months? I do not quite understand the reason behind having a beer sit in a fermenter after it is done fermenting (which the process of fermentation has yet to take more than 2 weeks in my limited experience).
What is the benefit of putting a beer into a secondary fermenter and letting it sit for several months? Why is this process so important to sour beers? And should I be incorporating this habit into my other brews?
Im sorry for such a novice question, but I just cant seem to find the answer in any of my books.
Usually if you use a yeast or a sour bug strain along with a “regular” mash, it will take months for the bugs to sour the beer. If you did a sour mash procedure and are just using a regular strain of yeast, there would be no need to age in secondary being that you developed the flavor profile using a sour mash procedure.
I am using a sour mash procedure and regular strain of yeast. So then in my case there is no benefit of letting this beer sit in a secondary fermenter? Because the souring method happened before the boil, it will not sour any more than it is already.