My sour beers are TOO sour - help!

[Crispyvelo]

Over the last year, I started brewing sour beers. The first beer was a brown ale fermented with Roeselare yeast/bug blend and 3 bottle dregs, then aged for 8 months in a glass carboy. The second beer is a blond ale fermented with Bootleg Biology's Funk Weapon 1 and re-pitched WLP530 from Westy Blond trub. A couple months in I added dregs from a Russian River Supplication.

Both beers are bordering on TOO sour...like lemonade puckering sour. I haven't taken a PH reading, but I'll try and do that soon when I borrow a friends reader.

Question - what options do I have? Blending? If I blend with a clean beer, how long should I wait before bottling (the Brett takes times to do its work). How do others keep their beers from getting too tart? Methods?

Thanks!
Chris

 

[secondbase]

If the beer is too sour, I would brew a clean beer and blend. You will need to make sure that the overall ibu of the beer after blending is over 15ibu to ihibit further souring though. I've found that once the pedio starts working, the overall sourness will soften. This has happened for me around 10-14 months of aging.

 

[bruteforce]

Send it to me for proper disposal.

 

[Crispyvelo]

Thanks!!

 

[tagz]

Good advice from secondbase. You gotta be careful with bottle dregs, they can be super aggressive.

I would suggest doing some small batch experiments in the future. Collect some one gallon jugs. Split a five gallon batch up. Ferment with a saison strain or roeselare and add one type of dregs per gallon.

If you are looking for a very subtle tartness and some funk, I've found the zwet.be dregs to be very nice.

For now though, brew a dry saison for blending.

 

[Crispyvelo]

Good advice from secondbase. You gotta be careful with bottle dregs, they can be super aggressive.

I would suggest doing some small batch experiments in the future. Collect some one gallon jugs. Split a five gallon batch up. Ferment with a saison strain or roeselare and add one type of dregs per gallon.

If you are looking for a very subtle tartness and some funk, I've found the zwet.be dregs to be very nice.

For now though, brew a dry saison for blending.

Great advice - thanks!