Blending beers with Acid beer

General Homebrew Discussion
1

Hi
Inspired by Jeff Cranes presentation at NHC 2015 I will be doing a talk at my homebrewing club on monday along similar lines. Jeff started his talk with demonstrating the effect of blending an acid beer with a saison, which I thought worked really well. I brewed a saison to do this but it turned out very fruity and estery and so isn’t a good candidate for this (I have tried it). In any case I thought it might be more interesting to try blending the acid beer with other styles. The ideas I have so far are:

Irish Stout (given the belief \ history that some sour blending occurred with guinness)
Belgian Dubbel - might approach a flanders red to some degree
Saison - as per Jeff’s demo (commercial example, not mine)

Can anyone suggest another style \ example that might be fun to experiment with? I’m in the UK so obscure US beers might be hard to source…

My acid beer turned out pretty good, I used L. brevis and brett (sacch)  b trois. For the first few months there was a definite strong and quite unpleasant barnyard aroma but it has calmed down now with clean acidity, a bit of funk and is nice and clear.

cheers
steve

2

Sounds trippy.
Sorry.

How about a nice English Brown?

3

Bock/doppelbock would be interesting, as would a Helles. Any malty, but not sweet, style would probably be a good start.

4

Alt could be interesting.

5

thanks all, will try and source some of these
cheers
steve

6

Not much experience in blending, and none with acid beers so take that into account :D.

If your “acid beer” is truly very acidic - mouth-puckeringly so - I would think that picking a beer with low IBUs would facilitate the blend since bitterness and sourness are said to clash. I also think that blending a sweet beer with a really acid ale should help to offset the acidic bite and, conversely, the sweetness. I think a dopplebock (as mentioned) is a fine choice to try. I also think that a belgian quad/dark strong is a fine choice. Other potentials could be lowly bittered but drier beers (cream ale, blonde, saison, light lagers, etc).

Then again I may be totally off my rocker  :o

7

I would suggest one of Ron Pattinson’s recipes for 19th century London porter.

8

Wits were sour traditionally as they did not contain hops.  Make a modern wit and try blending it with acid beer in the glass.

Thanks for the link to the presentation.  I’ll have to listen the seminar too.