Worth adding Brett?

I brewed an american barleywine recently, but my mash temps ended up too high and it is too sweet. I have had a couple to drink, and it is okay...but this was massive beer with huge amounts of grain and hops, and I feel like I won't have an opportunity like this for a long time. The hop flavors are good, it is very malty, and it is about 10%ABV currently, with an OG/FG of 1.115/1.038.

Would it be worth pouring 1-1.5g of this back into a bucket and pitching some Brett to lower the FG and add some extra sour notes to the beer? I like sour flavors in general, although I don't know if I have ever seen any sour beer with such a high ABV, and was worried it would make it worse.

Also, if I go this route, should I shake/stir the beer to try and get the CO2 from bottling out? When it comes time to re-bottle will I have issues with too much pressure building and would I have to pasteurize it?

Right now it is drinkable...just not great. Decent for sipping. I wouldn't want to ruin it, but if someone has done something similar, I would love to ehar how it turned out.

I'm on the side of the fence that says dont do it. I love sour and wild beers but if you've made a 10% barleywine that is a nice sipper right now, and it's all packaged up already, I think you should sit on it a while and enjoy it when the time is right, maybe this winter and definitely beyond.

If you add bretta, you will most likely get funky flavors, depending on the strain, and it's unlikely that you would get any noticeable sourness. If you want sour, you need to add Lactobacillus or Pediococcus, which at 10% abv, may not do much of anything anyways.

So, I say sip away and come up with a recipe that is designed to have bretta from the start. Good luck!

you won't be able to make this sour without a very long wait. like brando said, brett won't make it sour, lacto won't do anything cuz of the ABV and IBUs & pedio may, but it will be very slow. I was able to turn a 10% quad into a sour with brett & cherries before, but that was likely due to whatever wild bacteria was on the cherries as it was beyond the tartness just the cherries would bring

the brett could work out well tho, so if you're not thrilled with it, could be a nice experiment with a gallon.

I DISAGREE! I'm a few months away from bottling a mixed sacc-brett barleywine though, so I may be a little biased.

If you like brett funk, go for it. You'll actually be replicating what was the norm - historically - for strong English ales. The term 'brettanomyces' literally means "British Fungus", as the species of yeast was discovered in English old ales. The character it provided was considered an essential quality in many of those ales. You won't get the same degree of funk/sourness that you would had you had the brett in from day 1, but you will get some. In my case I pitched the brett when the beer was at ~11.5% alcohol, and they've reduced it to nearly 13% alcohol (an apparent attenuation of over 90%!).

Bryan

I say no, but for a different reason than those above did. If you already have this bottled, opening them and pouring carbonated bottles into a bottling bucket is going to lead to a huge amount of aeration and everything that comes along with aerating a finished beer.

If you have a keg you can do it, but just pouring into a bottling bucket is a bit risky. Maybe if you made a small amount of similar gravity wort, got that at high krausen, then dumped your bottles into a highly active fermentation. That should scrub any oxygen, and ask give you a nice CO2 layer to pour into/from. You could add the Brett at the beginning too or make it 100% Brett even. As soon as you dump your bottles in there it will be a mixed culture.

My friend recently had a belgian quad turn out this way. What we are going to try is vacuuming out the CO2 from each bottle then adding Brett B. and re-capping. I'm not sure how this will turn out but we can easily store them where bottle bombs won't be an issue.