Dubbel/Sour Blending Advice

[rocket_man]

Hi guys,

A while back I had my first attempt at making a beer with something other than saccharomyces. I brewed the BYO Orval clone, got two fresh bottles of Orval and pitched the dregs to secondary. Everything went really well and I left it alone for about 5 months. I then went to taste it and it was really sour. Pleasant flavours overall (almost kombucha-like), but just overly sour. So I thought I'd prime it and bottle it anyway, and worst case scenario I could add a little syrup before drinking it for sweetness. Well, the bottles never carbonated. I didn't really know this was a common problem until reading up on it after the fact. Living and learning. In the end, I couldn't be bothered/didn't know what to do with the beer so it has just been sitting in my closet for months, flat and bottled. That's the preamble.

I am currently fermenting a belgian dubbel that I split it into two smaller fermenters yesterday because my other ones are taken. At this moment I thought it might be a good idea to blend some of that flat sour beer with half of this fresh batch of dubbel and make something new. Not really interested in following BJCP guidelines here, just saving that sour and ending up with something drinkable/interesting.

My questions for you guys with experience on the topic are:

- Is this a good idea?
- Will I need to age the new batch for a few months again or could I mix them and bottle right away? Will the brett over-carbonate the bottled beer over time if not aged?
- Since the sour beer was primed pre-bottling and never carbonated, should I account for that sugar when re-priming?

Anyway, any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[RPh_Guy]

Have you tried one of the bottles recently to see if it might have carbonated?

If you decide to blend, I'd recommend to give it time to attenuate before bottling. Otherwise, you do risk over-carbonation.

It's interesting that it got sour. It picked up a contaminant from somewhere, maybe the outside of the Orval bottle.
Does "kombucha-like" mean vinegary?

You could potentially carbonate the batch by just adding a couple "grains" of a wine/champagne yeast to each bottle.
If there's any chance it wasn't primed, you can simply compare current SG to the FG from your notes.

Hope this helps

 

[mashpaddled]

Orval doesn't have any lactic acid bacteria (or shouldn't, at least) so the sourness either came from an infection from your home environment or you left that beer with access to a lot of oxygen and brett created acetic acid. (Did the airlock run dry for a while?) If you describe it as kombucha-like then it is probably acetic acid from oxygen exposure. There's not really anything you can do with either situation but it will help predict whether blending the beer will result in more or less sourness. An infection will likely produce more acid while brett by itself under the right conditions won't.

If the sour beer is bottled I would suggest trying out some blends and see if you like the two beers together. Just open a bottle and blend in a glass with some of the dubbel. No sense blending the two if you dislike the blend.

How you choose to age or bottle the beer depends a lot upon what you want to do with this beer. If you like the blend as it is right now then you should bottle it together now with additional priming sugar and drink them over the next month. Brett will dry out the dubbel and you'll eventually have overcarbonated bottles and possibly explosive bottles. If you are fine with the beer drying out then aging it together would be the best choice because you can bottle it from scratch knowing how much you primed the beer. You could blend and bottle with no priming sugar letting brett consume sugar in the dubbel for carbonation but you still risk overcarbonation and explosions.

 

[rocket_man]

Thanks for the input so far!

I thought the sourness came from the Orval somehow, but good to know it doesn't. I was away for a while when the beer was ageing and my girlfriend was (reluctantly) 'taking care' of it. It could be that the airlock ran dry for a little while. On the bottling day, I got a last minute call and had to run out, so the beer sat on the bottling bucket for a few hours before I could start actually bottling it. So if brett is exposed to a lot of oxygen it'll produce sourness? That could explain that and acetic acid sounds like the right description for it. I don't really remember if the beer was already so sour after secondary or when I tasted it after a few weeks in the bottle. I've moved to Beersmith a while ago and can't find my old notebook. :/

I opened another bottle and it's still as flat as it gets - I think there's no hope there. I think I'll try and blend some of it with the dubbel, and try adding some champagne yeast to the rest of it. Do I just add years grains straight into the bottle in that case?