Is it time to bottle my too-tart spiced cherry ale?

[oregonianredbird]

Not sure if this is the best forum, but basically I'm curious to get thoughts about a beer I have in secondary. It's sort of a spiced cherry winter ale, definitely on the darker side. At the end of the boil, I added 32 oz of Knudsen's Just Tart Cherry Juice and pitched WLP022 (Essex Ale Yeast). OG was 1.059, and after 8 days in primary and a gravity of 1.020 I transferred to secondary. After another 5 weeks in secondary, the gravity is still at 1.020 (was hoping for 1.015), and while the flavors are pretty good, there's an acrid aftertaste that I'm sure has to do with the cherry juice addition. Honestly, I didn't realize the juice I was adding was tart, which caused me to slap my forehead after the fact. And the stuck gravity makes me think I screwed up also by transferring too soon.

But now here's my dilemma - Do I just leave the beer in secondary for another month? 2 months? Longer to see if the taste evens out? Or should I just go ahead and bottle it and let it age that way? I wonder how much of a difference there is between bulk aging and bottle aging.

I'm not that impatient, but if I can get this fermenter emptied I can get to making my next batch. I'm considering bottling a 6-pack today, and testing it in a few weeks before deciding what to do with the rest of it. Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[oregonianredbird]

Well, in case anyone drops by and wonders what happened.... I ended up bottling a six-pack because I want to have something for a homebrew tasting I'm doing with friends in a couple weeks. The rest is still in my glass fermenter, where it will sit for at least another month. I'm hoping the tartness is something that fades with time, but I'm not confident.