forgot how fun blending beers can be. just mixed 1/3 german pils with 2/3 o"fest…i am digging it!
do you blend?
Not as much as I should! There’s a section about it in the next book (out in the spring) so I hope to inspire myself!
awesome. i think it inspires creativity and how you might develop/enhance your next brew.
I have blended a few beers in my time. Mostly sour beers for competitions but have also blended regular ones for home enjoyment.
The sour blends are the most fun blending especially when working with multiple beers. Having a few graduated cylinders and pipettes for blending along with paper and pen seem to work the best for me. Taking good notes, having an end “product/goal”, and sharing the blending process with a trusted brew buddy with a good palate make for a more successful blending session.
I had a ho-hum Cascade SMaSH and a whatever all Citra IPA. both were fine, but I didn’t really want to drink them. Needed a keg and jumped one into the other. Result was pretty awesome.
i hear ya. the conundrum here is- can i figure out how to take the two recipes and create what the blended finish product represents…or do you just brew the beers separately and commence blending???
I think you could maybe get close, but I don’t think it will be exact. Just adjust your batch size to yield a keg of each plus a keg of blend.
Two off my favorite blended beers come the Gilded Otter brewing company in New Paltz, NY. “The Stumpkin” is their seasonal Pumpkin and Stout. Another was their Blueberry summer seasonal and their Porter with fresh blueberries. Both created by the Bartenders there.
I just remembered how much I used to like black and tans.
So Steve, dumb question - I assume you just used the jumping of one keg into the other to do all your blending ? I’m just trying to picture how to get a homogenous mixture without introducing air/oxidation other than how you did it.
I blend mostly by the glass. I have blended by jumping from one keg into another. Just watch the condensation on the side to estimate the fill level.
I made an awesome Amber once from blending. When I put the recipes together in Beersmith, thinking about brewing it, there were like 8 malts and 4 hops. I figured it was not reproducible.
Blending in the pint seems most practical at our level…but I still ponder the possibility of doing it in the recipe.
Yeah, I knew the tasted pretty good together and I knew they would fit combined in one keg so I just used a jumper line and let it hangout for a day.
I’ve blended in a secondary carboy once. Brewed a stout and a very red ale. Racked half of each to the fermenter with the other half going to bottles. I let it hangout for a few days before bottling the blend.
Ken:
I just realized how many awesome libations you have on tap. Let’s have a pub crawl at Ken’s house. 
I got into a brewing frenzy this summer and knock a bunch out.
I don’t do much post-bottling blending of my own beers but I have done a fair amount of pre-bottling blending and plan to do a lot more of it.
My wife and I play the worst half and half game at bars (it’s exactly what it sounds like) and the worst combination is usually something like Dos Equis and Liefman’s Framboise. Nothing like skunk, raspberry and lactic acid mixed together to create a good time.
I’ve long thought it would be fun to brew several IPAs with each IPA having a limited number of hop varieties and slightly different grain bills and hop schedules and put them all on tap together to blend at will. I don’t have that kind of space or the desire to drink that many kegs of IPA. Maybe some day.
Blending is an important skill for correcting minor problems or imbalances in beers. It has produced more than one Ninkasi winner in the past and you can too…if you have the palate and skill.
I was at a beer fest where Left Hand Brewery was serving its Sawtooth Ale and its Milk Stout both nitro servings, which the server offers as a blend he called a “Moo-tooth ale”. It was quite good.
At the NHC Club Night in Orlando we were blending my Poblano Wit with a Smoked Porter. We called it Arizona Black and Tan.
So true. Over the years I’ve had batches that didn’t end up as intended, and I was always able to salvage them by blending with other brews I had on hand (some of my favorite standard ‘house’ recipes were actually the result of some of these blends). Taking good notes on brew day and careful measuring at blending time allowed pretty accurate reproduction of the blends and repeatability by subsequently using some ‘reverse engineering’.
The blending idea has certainly been used in commercial settings as well, both in actual production as well as experimentation/formulation. It’s standard procedure in some UK breweries, and it has also been suggested (whether it’s true or not) that many of Pabst’s contract brewed ‘legacy’ brands actually may be a variety of blends using a core set of standard brews.
In the early '80s, I attended a beer talk/tasting in New York conducted by Matt Reich, the guy behind the excellent New Amsterdam Lager. During a chat with Matt afterwards, I asked how he and his consultant (the esteemed Joe Owades) came up with the flavor profile and formula for New Amsterdam (which was a very good beer, and unsurprisingly in many ways quite similar to Sam Adams Boston Lager, which hit the market around the same time). His answer was that one of the primary things they did to arrive at a prototype for the final product was to concoct and taste various blends of a large selection of commercial products (both domestic and imported) which were available at the time.