Racking into half-full keg

Brewing Processes
1

Have any of you ever drank half a keg, then racked a new beer on top of that? Sort of like, blending beers? Obvs you wouldn’t rack an IPA on to a stout…Or would you? Black IPA? Maybe that’s not a terrible idea…Ok, bad example. You wouldn’t want to rack a tripel onto a helles. That sounds like a disaster. BUT, if the styles are similar or you think they might blend well, then why not…right?

Here’s the story: I just kegged a 5 gal batch of a pretty standard table saison. I was thinking about brewing a pumpkin saison in the next week or so. If the standard saison isn’t gone by the time the pumpkin saison is ready to be kegged, I thought maybe I’d just rack half of the pumpkin saison right on to the regular saison, effectively blending the two beers in the keg. Then I’d bottle the rest of the pumpkin saison. OR, just make a small 2.25 gallon batch of pumpkin saison and rack that right onto what is left of the regular saison.

Part of me feels like this idea this is exciting and interesting and could be a new avenue for exploration and flavor complexity and part of me feels like this idea is dumb. I can’t decide which part is winning.

For sake of argument, let’s say this IS a good idea. Are there any technical issues should I be aware of? Racking procedure…Re-carbing a half carbed/half flat beer…stuff like that. I’m thinking it would be pretty straight forward, but I don’t know…There are smarter/more experienced beer people out there and I need your input.

2

should be fine technically. but your kind of shooting blind blending without tasting first. but if you want to go for it… go for it.

3

I did this once.  It worked great for me.  Saves a ton of time cleaning the keg etc.  For my case both beers were the same recipe.  However blending should work fine as well.  I would only do this once and then clean the keg thoroughly after the second batch.

4

I would only consider blending beers if I was looking for different yeast characters from each.  If the beers have a similar yeast character I would just formulate a recipe to brew a beer that matched the desired outcome vs blending.

5

Both are true and I think you should let neither notion win!

But seriously, it’s a great idea when you want to kill two kegs with one tap–Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang!

If you have a lot of different batches on tap, sometimes you need tap space for some new arrivals, and you happen to have a magical idea.  For me it twas recently, 1 gal of wit into 1.5 gal Belgian blond and add a marble-weighted bag of minced goji berries, and a new ale was born coldside!

Empty 3 gallon keg and tap freed up in no time.  Never looked back.  Not that it would have helped.

6

In my enthusiasm to answer, I neglected to say, welcome to the forum!!