Sour Ale v.2

Earlier today, I tried the sour ale started in February 2009. It has been doing its thing in my beer cellar, growing some funky mold and other interesting creations over the past 22 months or so. This has left me skeptical on the outcome but, aside from an occasional tanginess, it is pretty much what I hoped/expected. I decided to counter the tinges of tanginess by doing what I've heard some brewers do with sour ales, and that's to combine the original batch with a fresh/new one. So today I bought the ingredients and am trying to recall what I did 22 months ago. Thankfully, I blogged about it pretty extensively and am also using the recipe I based that experience from (with the help of the friendly folks at E.J. Wren). Next time, I'll just try the Oud Bruin recipe in The Brewmaster's Bible. For now, here's version 2.0:

• Add 22 liters of room temp water to 14.5# of pale malt and 2.2# of 45L crystal malt. Step mash beginning at 50c as in step 9 of this method. Stir occasionally to distribute the heated grains at the bottom of the pot.
• At same time as step mash is started, ~2 gal room temp water, 2.5# bulgar wheat and handful of plain malt heated t0 65c and rested for 30 min. Then bring to a boil.
• Added the bulgar wheat mash (post boil) to the malt mash to help raise it to 65c.
• Continued the step mash through to 75c.
• Brought ~4 gal water to 170f.
• Mashed out at 75c.
• Let mash steep at 75c in lauter tun for ~15.
• Sparged with 170f water to produce ~7 gal of wort.
• Brought wort to a boil.
• Added 1 oz of Kent Golding hop pellets (4.5% AA) and boiled one hour.
• Cooled with wort chiller to ~68f
• Pitched Wyeast Belgian Abbey 1214.

Will rack into secondary in a week. After that, a method of combining the two batches has yet to be determined. Stay tuned.