The clcean Dark Dawn stout that I brewed was ready to move to the secondary last weekend. I used this time to do a test mixing to see where I thought the final ration may come in. I started out by doing a one-to-one ration. I did this by mixing 1.5 oz (shot glass) of soured stout with 1.5 oz of the clean stout. I mixed them back and forth in two glasses to ensure everything was mixed well and then took a sip. To my surprise the it was still very sour. I only pulled a few ounces to I had enough flat beer to give it another try.
This time I did a 2-1 blend. Two parts clean and one part sour. Amazingly this was too clean. I had the lady of the house try this blend to make sure I did not blow out my taste buds on the first one. She tried the 2-1 blend without having the previous blend and agreed. Only slightly sour.
So where does this leave us now?
When its time to do the final blend I know that its going to fall somewhere in between 1-1 or 2-1 blend. I like to keep round numbers so I am going to try 1.5-1 and then go from there to either 1.25-1 or 1.75-1. Hopefull one of those three solutions will work for our tastes.
No matter the solution, I am going to need to make another clean batch to help finish the rest of the sour beer. The most I need based off of this preliminary blend is 2 gallons out of the 4.5 to 5 gallons that I have soured. I only need to save one gallon to put into the new barrel once its ready. I should have about 1.5-2 gallons left over for blending with a new clean beer or I can decide to save it and just have it to up the sourness in any other beer I create moving forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment