Sunday, February 21, 2016

Old Beer Blending Party

Sometimes, things get put on the back burner of the list of brewing projects to fulfill, or just plain get lost in the shuffle of brewing. Maybe you dont brew enough to have that problem, but I certainly do. I’ve been trying to clean up and organize the numerous carboys gracing my dining room (at some point, I’ll actually start calling the room what it actually is: our bicycle and carboy room), and I realized that tucked in amongst the all the various current projects were several older carboys that had fallen by the wayside. So I pulled them out, tasted them, and decided to try my hand at blending. You know, to get things moving again, and away from their current de-railed project trajectories. Several of these were quite acidic (both versions of 165 had dry airlocks) and sharp; I decided to incorporate batch 203 to bulk up the overall volume, and give me enough to try two different blends. 

The first blend went into the 10 gallon oak barrel that also lives in the bike/carboy room.

10 Gallon Barrel Blend:
151b. ECY05 Brett Blend #9: approx. 1 ½ gallons @ 1.000 (July 2013)
165. The Great Brett Experiment II 005/008: approx. 4 gallons @ 1.006 (December 2013)
196b. Rueuze Lambic: approx. 1 ½ gallons @ 1.000 (February 2015)
203. One Last Lambic Hurrah: approx. 3 gallons @ 1.000 (March 2015)

The second blend went onto the wild raspberries that were previously used in 168b. Wild Raspberry Lambic; I bottled the beer and then added this beer to it. Im hoping to pick up some tannic skin character to round the beer as a whole; the left over beer mixed in with the fruit was more than enough to already give the beer a pinkish hue.

Second-Use Wild Raspberry Blend:
151b. ECY05 Brett Blend #9: 1 gallon @ 1.000 (July 2013)
196b. Rueuze Lambic: 1 gallon @ 1.000 (February 2015)
203. One Last Lambic Hurrah: 1 gallon @ 1.000 (March 2015)

I’ll probably rack the barrel beer onto fruit before bottling it, and possibly try and finish it with champagne yeast since I want to make sure there are no post-bottling surprises. 

10 Gallon Barrel Blend
Barrel: 2/21/2016
Secondary:
Bottled:

Second-Use Wild Raspberry Blend
Blended: 2/21/2016
Bottled: 3/20/2016 @ 1.000

Tasting Notes:

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