Sour Raspberry Ale

So the tiny side experiment I spoke of here just got bottled.  You hear that V, one down!

I really need to work on my thought process for these types of things in the future.  I had 1/2 a gallon of sour and 1/2 a gallon of raspberry ale, so it's going to be fairly sour and took the ale's abv% from 8.8% down to 6% and I'm very concerned about the carbonation levels.  I left the sour sitting in the carboy with a cap on for 3 or so days and it was all I could do to loosen the cap, and when I did get it loose the beer exploded out!  I left double the normal headroom, and only used swingtop bottles so that will hopefully help contain the pressure, but the blend needs to be like 25% or so.  I will give until Sunday to carbonate up and then I'm going to put in in the fridge at very low temps to try and crash the yeast out and keep it from going too crazy.  As it is, I got too much oxygen in there so the yeast is going to come back with a vengence and a blended final gravity of 1.008 there is still a decent amount of sugar for that Lambic blend to work on.

The taste was really nice at blending, but once the other flavors get a chance to work on this in the bottle it isn't going to be nearly as balanced as it was right now.  The funk was there, but muted and the raspberry was very prominent in the flavor the color was a creamy red, and really nice to look at.  I'm glad that I didn't figure out hop utilization beforehand and the ale ended up as bitter as it was given that I blended with an unhopped sour.  In the future, I will definitely dry hop the small sours just to give it some aromatic qualities.  And my final though goes out to the Mad Fermentationist, I have to disagree on the smackpacks not being enough.  I fermented a 1.040 unboild wort with just six drops the liquid Wyeast Belgian Lambic Blend (3278) aka the dregs from my Sour for blending and it took it down int he 1.005 FG range in less than optimal conditions (ie I fermented in a growler with no airlock with the second wash of grains that stayed in my cooler overnight)

P.S. might be handy for others too, but I needed a weighted average calculator for figuring out my blended abv%.  This one did the trick