Looking for blending advice

[goodwood]

Hello,

We brewed a ton of funky beers last year. We are now bottling a few and some still need a bit of time. We also have a few batches up to 2 to 2 1/2 years. We are working on bottling a beer soon.

We got two barrels that had gin in them. We filled them and one barrel tasted great. The other one, we left in two long. The beer in the barrel is a sour brown that actually has another 5 gallons in a carboy. It was a 10 gallon batch. We like it, but it took on too much gin. We liked the initial taste, but don't think many people would like it.

We did a sample blend of 3 parts barrel, 2 parts carboy. It tasted great and reminded us of when we first tasted it. I zeroed out a taster and weighed out the beer to get this. Our scale goes to 55 pounds but I think we could just eyeball it in our bottling bucket.

I have some questions.

Oxidation:
What is the best way to blanket with cO2 using buckets and carboys. We have a spare cO2 tank.

Carbing:
I'm sure this doesn't matter probably but it seems weird. We blend, grab a sample, boil corn sugar and re introduce back to bottling bucket? We will also be adding yeast again. Adding yeast to our sours has worked in the past.

Blending:
We have another 2-3 batches that taste good blended with this batch. This is the only dark sour we have. If we were to blend our dark brown sour with a light brett beer and amber sour, would we need to let it rest for a week or so?

There is just so many variables. I don't see much information on blending on the homebrew scale so I thought I would ask. Ideally, we would blend in our conical but that is full of wine right now for another month or so. We have hundreds of bottles saved up and will do this soon. I just have a few worries.

Thanks!

 

[Coff]

Blending is something I am in the process of working on myself, and I am writing a blog post on my experiences from last week blending a gueuze. You're right there really is not much information on blending on a home brew level, I think mostly because either people do not blend or have limited experience in doing so. I am the latter but am planning on documenting what I learn blending over the next few months.

I think your process sounds great, it's similar to what I have been playing with as well. I like using weights to measure the blend instead of a measuring cup/beaker, I started the other night using mL to measure and it was too imprecise so I switched to using my gram scale.

You have the co2 so you can easily purge the bucket of o2, just prior to racking blast the bucket with 5 seconds of co2 and thee should be a nice blanket sitting in there. Then siphon into the bucket and the co2 will just sit on top keeping it away from the o2 above.

I would definitely re-yeast like you said, I use wine yeast usually EC1118 (close enough), I do it on all 1yr old+ sour beer even when not blending.

Take notes on your process and be sure to post back here and let us know how it went, I think it's definitely something that the home brew world needs more info on. Mike T has some info on his blog, so does Jeffereycrane.blogspot that might get the creative juices flowing.

 

[goodwood]

I am so glad I blended. This beer got crazy complex. This sounds weird but here are my sum up. Highly sour, gin, oak, funk, and...chocolate. I get chocolate on the nose. That came from the un barreled beer that had cocoa nibs on it for 10 months. Totally forgot we put them in there. Oh well, this is one of my favorite sours we have made so far. I will be throwing labels on these now.

I didn't take much notes. I basically used a bottling bucket and eyeballed with the markers on the side. CO2 blanket. Yeast rehydration and blend that with priming sugar.