Blending an already-bottled Oud Bruin with a new batch?

[AdamWiz]

So I have an Oud Bruin that got a little too sour. I origionally fermenteded it with ale yeast and then added White Labs sour mix to the secondary. After 6 months and very little evident sourness, I started adding dregs of a bunch of different sour beers to the fermenter and a couple months later the sourness had already gotten out of control. It has now been in bottles for about 6 months and I haven't really been drinking it because it has kind of a harsh, sharp sourness, and has a bit of a metallic twang to it. Both judges in the competition I recently entered it in knocked it for "metallic" or "blood like" flavors. So now I'm thinking of brewing a small batch of fresh young beer to blend with it, and I have a few questions:
1.) Any issues with using already carbonated and bottled beer to blend with? Should I open the bottles and let them warm up to room temp. and lose their carbonation before pouring them into the fermenter to blend, or will this cause oxidation problems?
2.) Should I put some bugs in the new blending beer as it ferments, or just ferment it with straight sacc and let all the sourness come from the old stuff? I was considering just using a regular Belgian ale yeast for the new batch. When a brewery like Rodenbach does this, is the young beer in the blend soured at all?
3.) After blending the old and young beers in a fermenter, how long should I let them sit and stabilize before bottling? I don't want the young beer to make the bugs take back off and end up with bottle bombs.

Any input on these questions or any other potential issues you can think of with this project are appreciated.

 

[smokinghole]

What I would do is seriously consider why it has a metallic or blood taste to it and decide on whether blending will get rid of that. Is the flavor because of too much sourness or do you have a lot of iron in your water? Regardless I'd brew up the new beer to blend into. Then take some of the new beer and your bottled sour and pour them together in different glasses in different ratios to get a feel for how they blend together. If you like what you got then you can blend together, or if it still tastes like blood, just bottle the new beer up alone.

The next problem then becomes that with out pasteurizing you will cause the yeast in the bottles and bacteria to begin consuming sugars from your young beer. I'm not sure what kind of bottles you packaged in but I've heard of people pasteurizing in their dishwasher as well as the stovetop. The stove top has obvious increased danger but the dishwasher seems to be an unknown. Eitherway the only way you can blend this quick with out a long secondary fermentation is to kill the brett and bacteria.

 

[AdamWiz]

What I would do is seriously consider why it has a metallic or blood taste to it and decide on whether blending will get rid of that. Is the flavor because of too much sourness or do you have a lot of iron in your water?

I don't think there is an issue with too much iron in my water, I have used the same water in everything I have ever brewed and never had any metallic or blood flavor issues. In fact, I don't even really detect the blood taste that the judges were talking about, I just taste a slight metallic twang which I attribute to the sourness being a bit harsh. Maybe my palate isn't as refined as theirs, or maybe since the metallic and blood off-flavors usually are found together they just said it was both. Either way, I'm pretty sure that this can still be an excellent beer if I blend it right. As is, it scored a 27 in competition despite the off flavor issues. At this point it really is more along the lines of a Flanders Red, so I think with about a 75/25 blend of young beer and this it will give it more of the sweet/sour balance of a good Oud Bruin. I just have never heard of anyone blending anything after it has already been bottle conditioned, so I'm hoping that won't cause any problems.

Eitherway the only way you can blend this quick with out a long secondary fermentation is to kill the brett and bacteria.

I have heard some brewers talk about killing off the bugs with campden and cold crashing before blending, so I'm looking around and reading up on that. Hopefully that will work because I really don't think I'm up for pasteurizing.

 

[smokinghole]

Blending an already carbonated beer into a non carbonated beer won't cause any issues. The only issue could be some oxidation from pouring the beer, but if you have any CO2 around you could put it on a low flow into where your pouring and avoid any real atmospheric oxygen contact if that's even much of a worry.

I suppose campden could work but there are some here that argue that brett won't die off from campden. If it were me I'd try the pasteurizing route in my dishwasher before dumping a bunch of sulfites in my beer. I'd try it with one bottle first just to see if it changed the flavor and if so, how, and if bad, then you don't do the rest that way.