Hi all, i'm looking for any tips folks here might have for blending a homebrew sour with a new beer. I have about 2 gallons of a golden sour that has been sitting for like 6+ months with clementines and oak. It's nice and citrusy and seems like it'd be decent on it's own but might be approaching the edge of being too sour and acidic to just drink as is...so I was thinking about bottling a few small bottles of it and blending the rest. I was thinking about getting a bit crazy with it. I was just going to brew a saison base and blend with that but where's the fun in that!? The idea that's currently in my head is brewing 3 gallons of a red ale with honey and raspberry (possibly with some cabernet soaked oak cubes) and blending a gallon of the orangy sour with it at bottling time. Does this sound ridiculous? Any tips for this type of blending? Should I be worried about bottle bombs doing something like this? thanks!
What are going to be the cumulative bugs in the blend? Also depends on how dry you can get that red ale before blending and how long you let the blend in secondary ferment to dryness. What I would do if I were you is blend the two and secondary them for about a month, at the beginning of the blend, thief off a hydrometer sample amount and take a combined OG, then with that hydrometer sample, do a force ferment via hot temps and frequent shaking etc.. see how low of a gravity that sample can get. If there is a big disparity between what your batch is at (say it's still at 1.010 after a month) versus the force ferment (say it's at 1.002), then you know you have roughly 2 plato left for the batch to drop and your looking at bottle bombs.
Bottle the sour and blend it in the glass with other bottled beers. It doesn't take a lot of regular beer to make a sour beer not that sour.
Also if you're worried about bottle bombs I think oldsock has a calculator for blending and calculating carbonation on his blog.
