Souring a not so great batch

I think it kind of depends what's wrong with the beer. The flaws are still going to be present in the soured beer. In the case of the Wee Heavy, it might work since you can blend in wort with more hops (or not, since it's a sour beer). I don't have any experience with making sours, so take that with a grain of salt.

As for the bugs, they can be killed, the worry is more with plastic and other porous brewing materials. The bugs are pretty hard to get out of plastics, so I think the idea is to have a separate set of tubing, racking canes, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about glass though.

 

While not true 100% of the time I think the statement of "Garbage in, Garbage out" may be able to be applied here. If you want to brew a sour, I would recommend building the recipe as a sour from the ground up.

@barfdiggs has a bit of an experiment going with what I believe started out as a barleywine but he decided to take a few turns with it. Maybe he can chime in with the progress on that.

 

I won a bronze on a dunkelweizen that I used an old 3068 car ion that fermented it tart. I chucked some ECY04 (IIRC) at it and got the medal in sours as a Flanders Red.

 

The barleywine-mild hybrid soured with ECY Bugfarm VI and dosed with D2 Candi syrup and aged on home grown peaches, turned out awesome, and just won a gold in a hybrid fruit and vegetable/herb/spice beer category in a local comp. It was a case of thinking about the ingredients I had on hand as well as the beers I had to work with and my end goal, and of course, some luck

 

I would say if it depends. If there is a major flaw like oxidation, souring wont make it any better, and the process of pouring out the beer might only make it worse.. If it is something like bland, or underattenuated beer, then souring might be beneficial, but dumping out each individual beer might oxidize it. Be wary of using soft/scratch plastics, it is possible that no ammount of sanitizing will be able to get rid of all the bugs. I wouldnt use a plastic fermenter with a sour and non sour beers.

 

The problem in the case of wee heavy is killing the bugs with the abv

 

Good point. In that case, the OP would have to be sure to pick the right bugs for the ABV.

 

Personally, I would deal with the beer as is since it's already bottled and try to learn from my mistakes. I've also had homebrews age very well when I wasn't particularly happy with when fresh.

Also, if you don't have any experience with "wild" yeasts and bacteria, I wouldn't count on using a beer you consider flawed as a good starting point. It might turn out well, or might turn out worse. With the time you wait on such an experiment, I would much rather start with something that I feel good about.

 

I'm about to do the same with a saison that the OG came out way too high and the abv ended at like 9.3%. I'm going to make a few gallons of weak wort and add in 8oz of maltodextrin and see what happens. The beer sucks now so nothing wagered nothing lost.

Good luck in whatever you decide. Only difference is my beer is kegged so I'll just siphon back to a better bottle. Still risk oxidation at any extent