Adding beer to wort for flavor.

I am brewing 1 gallon batches and for kicks picked up a 3lb can of dark LME on sale for $4 to experiment with. I brought it to a boil, added hops and then fermented, bottled, yada yada yada. Unsurprisingly, the beer did not taste that great (lol)...more like a very very sweet thick stout.

Can I add this (fermented) beer to another batch I'm brewing for flavor?

Anything to watch out for?

For $4 bucks I wouldn't bother. Just study the results and apply lessons to future brews. Not sure if you can actually do it and if you did if it'd be a good idea.

I'm thinking crappy beer plus good beer = not so good beer. Just brew up another batch and suffer through this one. Once you get a couple three in ya it ought to start tasting pretty good.

This is basically how all british brewers did things a couple hundred years ago. Various strength beers were brewed individually and then combined to meet the local tastes.

Of course, they actually knew what they were doing with those combinations, not just tossing things together. If you had something along the lines of hoppy ale, you might try blending those together to balance out the sweetness. I wouldn't make anything to blend that you wouldn't want to drink individually though. Otherwise, you could just end up with twice the amount of beer without wanting to drink any of it.

Just FYI, if your stout ended up very very sweet, you likely didn't ferment long enough. Did you take gravity readings?

You are likely also risking bottle bombs if you haven't put this one in the fridge yet. Make sure you get them all cold ASAP.

TopherM said:

Just FYI, if your stout ended up very very sweet, you likely didn't ferment long enough. Did you take gravity readings?

You are likely also risking bottle bombs if you haven't put this one in the fridge yet. Make sure you get them all cold ASAP.

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The OP didn't really say what size this batch was, only that they had been brewing one gallon batches... throw a 3lb can of LME in a one gallon batch and I'm getting a 1.102 OG, probably end up at about 1.030. OP didn't say how much hops or how long they were boiled for, but I could easily see this being pretty think and sweet unless there were a lot of hops to balance it, even then...

Although they didn't say how long fermented either so you could be right as well!

OG was 21 (plato), FG was 9. I am just wondering if this can be salvaged by adding to the wort in place of some grain and water. It is very sweet because I didn't extract bitterness from the hops, but otherwise not a terrible beer, but then again not great. I might consider it a fail and pour out the few bottles.

I'd either drink them or dump them (or age them for a year, why not?). Trying to combine it with something new would likely condemn the combination to mediocrity at best.