Experiment with commercial beers?

[daveooph131]

Is it possible and has it been done to test additives on commercial beers instead of brewing a style and then racking to wood, fruit, spices, etc.

I'm wondering if you could just buy the base beer that you want to creat a beer off of and then keg and test. Once you have the desired results your looking for you can then brew your own beer with the additive.

For example if I wanted to try a raspberry blonde. Instead of brewing 5 gallons of a blonde and splitting the batch I could buy a six pack and then age it on raspberries to see if that is something I would even enjoy.

I know there will be some that think why not just brew it yourself and split the batch? But I like to keep a pipeline of what I consider to be good beer. Or beer that I am in the mood for. However sometimes it takes away from me being adventurous in fear of messing a batch up or tying up my pipeline with base beers I didn't really want on tap. Plus you don't have to be as patient to test and experiment some ideas.

Curios on your opinion?

 

[thadass]

It's an idea that's been done before, but I wouldn't suggest doing anything that involves removing the beer from the bottles. I have an experiment I want to do someday of buying some very light american lagers, adding a small dose of a different hops to the bottles and recapping them to try later. Mini dry hopping experiment to compare hope varieties.

 

[daveooph131]

I've heard of the hop idea. Why would you advise against taking out of the bottles?

 

[benuk169]

Oxygen contact I would guess

 

[Cauchy]

For something like raspberries, you would need viable yeast in the bottle to get a comparable result to a homebrew, unless of course you are planning on keg additions.

You could get some examples where the yeast haven't been filtered out but you might also like to worry about oxidation, carbonation levels, etc.

For what it's worth, you can see the Dogfish Head crew employ this technique on their show using their beers. If I recall correctly, they mainly did so with non-fermentable ingredients.

 

[daveooph131]

Ya I was thinking about trying some beers on different woods or maybe a dry hop with hibiscus. But really I don't see why it wouldn't work. If you put them in a keg and then pressurize you should be able to recarb the beer and if you purge the keg and then hit with more c02 you eliminate oxygen.

Am I missing something - to me it seems very simple.