Dilute (and add bittering?) to Finished Beer

I screwed up a batch of Bock and it ended up finishing at 1.024 (likely a combination of yeast abuse and mashing  a little too high). My wife likes it better than when I do it the “right” way, but I think it’s a little too much like Cherry Coke :wink:

Anyhow, I thought this might be a good chance to try out some small scale experiments and see what I can do with the flavor by diluting and/or adding a little more bittering.

I’ve done dilutions plenty of times, so I’ll likely just treat/boil/cool the water and carb it up in a PET bottle. Then I can try diluting at different ratios.

I’m curious if anyone has any experience adding bittering post-fermentation. As a malt-forward lager, this seems to me like a straight IBU thing, as dry hopping would lend too much flavor/aroma. Not sure if anyone has done this via pellet hop tea, hop extracts, etc, but any experience/advice would be appreciated.

As I said I’m just doing small scale experiments, so I’m willing to try a few different techniques. I just figured folks that know a little about this might direct me so I can spend my energy on something that at least has a chance of yielding decent results.

I have done this:  Brew a small 2-3 quart batch of 100 IBU wort with a similar recipe as the original beer (extract is easiest) then cool and add to your other beer.  It definitely works and you can actually do some volumetric calculations to figure out exactly how much you need to make and add.

Thanks! That actually sounds like fun - I get to do some math and some brewing :slight_smile: