Glossary
Turbid mash
A complex traditional lambic mashing regime that deliberately leaves starch and dextrin unconverted, providing long-term food for Brettanomyces.
The full record
Turbid mash has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Turbid mashing — Run a deliberately inefficient traditional lambic mash that leaves starch and dextrin unconverted, providing long-term food for Brettanomyces.
Ordinary brewing tries to convert as much starch as possible. Lambic does the opposite: the residual carbohydrate is what sustains a fermentation lasting years, because Brettanomyces can slowly consume material Saccharomyces cannot.
Related
- Lambic — The style it exists for.
- Brettanomyces — The organism it feeds.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.