Oak/Brandy/Cherry aging a moose drool clone"

Okay, you've got me confused. You have a gallon of Moose Drool clone in a 1-gal. carboy? And you have some brandy that has been sitting on cherries, but it's too sweet? Were the cherries in a syrup? Are they Maraschino cherries by chance?

You want to put you gallon of Moose Drool into a secondary carboy and pour a gallon of cherries with syrup and oak chips on top of that? Will you sanitize the oak chips before adding them? From your description of this solution, there may not be enough alcohol in the cherries to do that job.

The excess sweetness from the cherries/brandy tells me that there is a lot of sugar involved here, so just how much there is will help determine what can happen. For one thing, fermentation will restart with all of that sugar, so you could end up with way too much alcohol depending on how much sugar you're talking about. Is there really a gallon of cherries? Can you be a bit more clear on what you're doing?

 

You've been sucked in...Woooooosh! : )

 

The combination of ingredients sounds to me like it could be good. The key to making it good lies in getting the proportions right. Only you have access to all of the ingredients, and your opinion on the outcome is the most important one. If my opinion mattered, the Moose Drool flavors would still be the main players, the cherries and brandy would be apparent, but still secondary, background components. The oak would provide a subtle vanilla kiss, but oak tannins would not be welcome.

 

Okay, the 4-gallon portion is not going to have anything happen to it, so it can be bottled/kegged once you are sure that fermentation is complete. There is really no need for a secondary for this beer, unless, again, I'm misreading what you are saying.

The other gallon is what is going to get the cherries/brandy/oak, right? I agree with @pweis909 that this sounds like it could be a good mix of flavors. But if the cherry mixture seems sweet to you, you need to consider what this sugar will do once you put it in a secondary fermentor. How big the jar of cherries is in relation to a gallon of beer, i.e. what the alcohol from the brandy and the additional fermentation from the sugar in the cherries will do is the unknown factor for what you're going to get. And the oak chip tannins that pweis also mentioned above need to be considered. If you want to use the chips, how about boiling them in water first to remove some of the tannins before they go into the beer? That will also sterilize them.

There are variables here that make it too difficult to predict what your beer will taste like, so it's a judgmental thing to decide how much of the cherry/brandy mixture and how much oak to use and for how long. You'll just have to make a decision and go forward with it and hope for the best. But that's kind of the fun of experimentation. Keep notes so that you can repeat the amounts if you want to brew it again (if you like it) or to adjust amounts for the next time (if you don't like it). Good luck.

 

I would taste test a small portion first. I made a tincture recently of bourbon, oak chips, and vanilla beans that I was planning on blending when bottling my imperial stout. Tested about 1/4 oz of it in an old rasputin, and found it to be wayy too harsh. I'm not using it in my batch now, and am really glad I taste tested before dedicating the entire batch to the tincture. You don't have as much to lose though if you're only aging a gallon of it on the brandied/oaked cherries, but I'd still make sure you're using the right proportions.

If you use the right amount I can see it being a good addition to a brown ale though.