The husks of the grains naturally have a bacteria on them that product lactic acid. The propagate and sour the mash for as long as it's kept in the 90 - 120 degree band.
The next step was to push a film of plastic wrap over the surface of the mash. This is done because the good bacteria doesn't require oxygen to go it's thing, however some bad bacterias do. By blocking out the oxygen, you stifle the growth of the bad ones. Any place that it's exposed to air will form a funky looking and smelling fuzzy substance that will need to be skimmed before using the sour mash.
To keep my sour mash in the right temperature range, I wrapped it in blankets with a heating pad that I could turn on and off and a remote probe thermometer inside to keep tabs on it. Temperature was pretty stable overall and may have been ok without the heating pad if kept in a warm place.
I only remembered to snap one picture. This is the cocoon that the sour mash spent 36 hours in. Conventional thinking seems to indicate that between 24 and 48 hours is sufficient. When you're done, the sour mash should smell "cleanly" sour.
The rest of the brew was pretty standard. I used a strainer to separate the grains from the sour wort. I then added some water and some DME then did a normal boil, hopping wth some leftover cascade on a schedule similar to a pale ale. I can't find my exact recipe at the moment, but when I do, I'll post it here. In all, it was a 1 gallon batch and the grains for the mash accounted for about half of the fermentables.
When I put it in the primary fermenter, I also added 12 ounces of raspberries to give it some other flavor besides sour.
It fermented out in about a week. I didn't bother with a secondary fermentation and just bottled it when primary was done. It's now conditioning, although the small taste I had when bottling indicated that it was going to be pretty good.
This is after 3 months of aging. It wasn't nearly this clear after a couple of weeks in the bottle.
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