Blending is how several of the world's best-known beers exist in the first place, and it is also what you are doing when you tip a third of a stout into a pint of mild. Those two activities share a word and very little else. One is a professional job carried out with stocks of beer held back for the purpose, a fixed target on the tasting bench and a bottling line arranged around the result, while the other is a five-minute experiment that will tell you a great deal about the two beers you started with and rather less about a new one.
How To Blend Two Beers
- Start at one part of the second beer to three parts of the first, because the stronger or more characterful of the two goes in last and in the smaller amount.
- Bring both beers to the same serving temperature before mixing them, because a cold beer poured into a warm one tastes of nothing at first.
- Treat a home blend as a same-day beer, since mixing two finished bottles introduces air and the mix never keeps longer than the least stable beer inside it.
- Do not expect blending to repair a fault, because a lightstruck or oxidised beer passes that character straight through to the mix.
The Blends That Are Actually Famous
A gueuze is a blend of lambics of different ages, usually young, middle and old, and it is blended because no single age works on its own. A one-year-old lambic is sweet, sharply acidic and still fermenting, while a two- or three-year-old is drier, softer and more complex. Blending gives the young beer the sugar and yeast it needs to carbonate the bottle and gives the old beer its structure, which is why the blender's palate rather than a written recipe is the most important equipment in a lambic house. The same logic runs through a Flanders red, where young beer is married with older beer that has been sitting in oak to get the balance of fruit, acidity and tannin the style is known for.
Newcastle Brown Ale is the example most readers here have already drunk without noticing the trick. It was created as a blend of two beers, a strong dark ale called Old Newcastle and a paler, lighter one, married in a fixed proportion so that the bottled product tasted the same every year instead of tasting like whatever that season's brew had turned into. That is the real commercial reason blending exists at all, since consistency across batches is worth more to a brewery than novelty, and it is achieved by holding components back and letting somebody with a trained palate set the ratio.
Champagne works on the same instinct, since a non-vintage bottling is assembled from reserve wines precisely so that the house style repeats year after year. Every blending tradition in that family was built around one commercial fact, which is that a customer who liked a bottle should be able to buy the same experience twice.
Blending Two Finished Beers In Your Own Glass
When you mix two beers you have already bought, you are combining two different levels of carbonation, alcohol, residual sugar, protein, polyphenol and hop residue, and none of those things average out politely. Carbonation is the first casualty, because the second beer arrives full of nucleation sites for the first to dump its gas onto, which is why a mix poured straight into a glass foams up and then goes flatter, faster, than either parent. Clarity follows the same route, since proteins from one beer bind with tannins from the other and drop a haze that neither bottle showed on its own. Everything else is a question of proportion, and of whether you wrote the proportion down.
The workable method is dull enough to write out on a card. Bring both beers to the same serving temperature, because a cold beer poured into a warm one tastes of nothing at first, then measure the pours rather than free-pouring, starting at something like one part of the second beer to three parts of the first. Make the trial in a glass before you commit a jug, note the ratio and the date, and if you want to test a whole range at once, line up five glasses at none, a quarter, half, three quarters and all of the second beer, then taste across the row. That is how a professional bench does it, and it takes about ten minutes.
Some combinations are worth the ten minutes. A dry stout poured into a mild or an ordinary bitter adds roast and dryness without adding much alcohol, which is roughly what a black and tan achieves in a glass without being blended at all. A sweet old ale or a barleywine at a quarter will lift the body of a porter and add dried-fruit depth. A sour brown or a Flanders red at a small proportion will sharpen a flat-tasting pale ale far more cleanly than lemon juice would. And a hazy, hop-forward pale ale stirred into a lager will make the lager smell like something while softening its bite more than you wanted, so go gently there and expect less foam than either bottle had.
Why The Same Blend Never Comes Out Twice
Accounts of home blending usually put the variation down to the person doing it, on the grounds that every attempt somehow turns out different. The cause sits in the bottles rather than in the hands. Two cans of the same beer from different production weeks are not the same beer, because hop crops vary between seasons, a lager that has been cold-stored for eight weeks has lost aroma it had at four, and the bottle that sat in a warm back room has aged faster than the one at the front of the fridge. Repeat your exact ratio a month later against those two and it will land somewhere else, which is a fact about the components rather than a mystery about the process.
The other limit is that nothing happens after the pour. A home blend has no say over fermentation, so the flavours available to you are the ones the two beers already carry, and the only real decisions are proportion, temperature and timing. That is still a genuine exercise, but it is a different exercise from what a brewery is doing when it blends, and any promise of a flavour profile that can never be replicated is describing a very short-lived achievement.
How Long A Blend Keeps
A blend poured into a glass or a jug is a same-day beer, and a blend bottled from two finished beers is good for a week or two in the fridge at most. The reason is that combining them has mixed air into both, and a blend never keeps longer than the least stable beer inside it. A hoppy pale ale that has already lost half its aroma in three weeks will not be rescued by being poured into a stout, and the stout is worse for the oxygen it picked up in the process. That is the honest shelf life for a mix you make yourself, and any figure measured in months belongs to a different operation.
The exception is a professionally blended, bottle-conditioned beer such as a gueuze or a Flanders red, where the blender added a measured amount of fermentable sugar and live yeast specifically so the beer would carbonate and then change in the bottle. Those can be cellared for years because they were built for it, and a gueuze from a house such as Cantillon, Boon or Drie Fonteinen will taste noticeably different at two years old than at two months. Nothing about a home mix earns you that same permission, and bottling a blend of unknown residual sugar and leaving it somewhere warm is how you end up with a pressure problem rather than a beer.
What Blending Cannot Fix
Blending averages, and averaging is not repair. A lightstruck beer smells of skunk because the compound responsible, 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, has already formed, and no proportion of fresh beer un-forms it. An oxidised beer tasting of cardboard and sherry will pass that character on rather than dilute it away, and a beer with a spoilage organism is not made clean or safe by being mixed with a good one. A flat, stale beer dilutes a fresh one rather than the other way around. The single fault blending genuinely helps with is excess in one direction, since a beer that is too sweet, too strong or too roasty can be brought back to something drinkable with a larger pour of something plain.
Serving And Glassware
Use a clean glass, which matters far more than the shape, since detergent residue or a dried beer film on the inside will strip out what little head a blended beer has left. A stemmed tulip suits the roasted and sour blends because it holds aroma at the top of the glass, and a nonic pint is right for anything you intend to drink quickly and cold. Serve the darker and stronger blends around 10 to 12 C and the pale, hoppy ones a couple of degrees colder, and judge the head a minute after pouring rather than immediately, because a freshly mixed beer foams extravagantly and then settles.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you mix a lager and an ale?
You can, and nothing harmful happens, since both are finished beer at roughly the same pH and alcohol range. What you get is the lager's crispness carrying the ale's fruit rather than the two of them meeting in the middle, and the usual disappointments are a flat, foamy pour and a hazy look that neither parent had. If you want to try it, use the lager as the base at about two thirds and taste before you add more, because the ale will dominate a mix far sooner than the lager will.
Does blending two beers create a new style?
No, because a style is a description of how a beer was made rather than what it was mixed with. A blend of a stout and a pale ale is a mixed beer that will not appear in any judging guideline, and the reason professional blends do define styles, like gueuze and Flanders red, is that the blending is part of the recipe and happens before packaging rather than after.
How do breweries keep a blended beer tasting the same?
By holding back components and working to a target. A lambic house keeps barrels of different ages so that a shortage of acidity in one year's fruit can be covered with older beer, a Flanders red brewer blends young beer out of tank with older beer out of oak, and both taste against a reference sample rather than against a written formula. The output is a fixed flavour, which is the opposite of what a home experiment is for.
Can I bottle a home blend and let it age?
Treat it as a drink-now beer, because you cannot know how much fermentable sugar or how much live yeast you have put in the bottle, and both of those are what decide whether ageing helps or whether the glass simply goes stale faster. A blend kept cold and sealed for a fortnight is worth tasting again out of curiosity, and a blend kept warm for six months is a bottle you will be nervous to open.
What ratio should I start with?
Start at one part of the second beer to three parts of the first, because the stronger or more characterful of the two will usually be the one you added last and in the smaller amount. If the quarter pour is already good, try a half before you decide the blend needs more, and if it needs more than half, the honest conclusion is usually that you preferred the second beer on its own.
Buy The Serious Ones And Experiment In The Glass
If you want to hear what blending does when somebody has spent years doing it, open a bottle of gueuze and a bottle of Flanders red side by side, since both are built from young and old beer and land in completely different places. In this province those are bottle purchases rather than tap pours, mostly imports, while the do-it-yourself version costs you two beers and a measuring cup and needs no equipment at all. Do both, write the ratios down, and the useful thing you will learn is which of the two activities you were actually interested in.
