Recipe Mash Up

[Badseed]

Is it possible to blend ingredients from two very different styles of beer into one mixture and achieve a solid beer combination or will one style dominate. It seems that there are a few companys that mix beers to create a single beer rather than combine ingredients and create one. For example, I have heard that Firestone Walker blends two beer styles to produce the Pale 31, apparently Newcastle blends two different beers to make their brown ale. What is the advantage of not combining all of the ingredients at once?

 

[jaycount]

I've never heard of this practice but assuming the mixture is done post-fermentation maybe they like the effect yeast a has on grain a and the effect yeast b has on grain b, but not the effect yeast a has on grain b (or vice versa).

You would get different flavor profiles post-fermentation then throwing it all together before.

 

[Bob]

Because it's really, really hard to make a single recipe exactly like a blend. Remember, we're talking about commercial breweries here.

If you make beer for money, sometimes things go screwy and you have to blend or lose a crap-ton of money. Say you bottle a blend, and that label flies off the shelves. It behooves you to change nothing about the production of that beer. You'd waste a lot of time, production costs, ingredients costs and tank space tweaking a single recipe, and chances are the drinker wouldn't really like it.

Alternately, they could be shooting for a particular flavor profile that they can get more easily by blending. Think "lambic". Or Yuengling Black & Tan.

Cheers,

Bob

 

[Badseed]

Good points. So in reality the chances that I could create a single brew that mimics the taste of a brown ale and apricot ale are slim and none? From the sounds of it, Slim is leaving town.

 

[Bob]

No, not at all. I'd brew a brown ale with relatively low hops and dose it with apricot extract at bottling.

Bob