After talking with Matt the consensus so far is for the Flanders megamix. What are your thoughts Tom?

On another note, I cracked open a bottle of #1 and it is quite tasty. Interestingly enough, the oak has come more to the front flavor wise. The aroma is still of brett and a little bit of sour, but the sourness and brett are covered over quite a bit by the oak in the flavor.

Mega mix sounds good. We going to need some more secondaries then, yes....?

We might, especially if we want to blend it a bit....take a sample from each one and decide on a mix that would work well. Or we could mix all of them together regardless, which would mean that we could begin mixing with this or the next batch. Which speaking of the next batch....it's almost that time of year again!

I'll throw a wooden shoe into the machinery now. What I thought I have heard the idea with Flanders blends was that it was a veritical blend. Y1 is raw, Y2 added 1g of Y1, Y3 added 1g Y2 (not raw, blend), Y4 added 1g of Y3 (again, not raw, blend). At some point that has to restart obviously, ... unless, before you blend you also take 1g of raw from each year and start saving them for other 'brewers' reserve blends'(the one's WH mentions as seeing which would go well together). Each year, you would have 3g of beer to bottle, 1g of that year's raw to save for a 'brewer's reserve blend', and 1g of that year's blend to keep for the megablend.

This hits two things for me, both which I like. One, the standard megablend will be increasingly complex. It seems like we will know when to restart the standard blend. Two, we give ourselves the ability to create extraordinarly limited brewers' reserve blends with the raws. We obviously start with Y2, since we only have 1g of Y1 to start the megablend, but this is a journey...

That is an interesting idea. It would both incorporate the original idea of blending along with the idea of a mega blend. It would mean though that there will be a very limited amount of each year (3 gallons bottled), and the megablends will be a full bottling (5 gallons bolttled), which could be a lot of fun. This would definitely mean that we need more gallon bottles, I am thinking about 5 more. Plus it would mean that we are about 6 years away from the mega blend. So how does that sound?

Sounds like we need to start buying gallon jugs of apple juice. Maybe make another cider? Then we'll have all the gallon jugs we need. Does apple juice still come in glass jugs?

So basically, from what RH said I take it that for the Flanders #2 we have, we'll put a gallon in one 1G jug, add our gallon of #1 to the carboy, and blend them. Then, remove 1G of the resulting mixture and bottle the remaining 4G. When #3 is ready to bottle (or perhaps just before), we'll take 1G out and put it in a jug, and add the 1G mixture from the previous versions back in, blend it, take 1G back out and bottle the remaining 4G. When #4 is ready, we'll take 1G out, replace it with the mixed gallon from the year before, stir and pull a gallon back out, and bottle the rest, etc. Do I have that right? Sounds like we'd be bottling 4 gallons of a blend of 1 part #1/ 4 parts #2, and after that we have 4 gallons of an increasingly complex blended Flanders each year. Plus 1G of each year's straight to blend together as we see fit, at some date in the distant future. Did I get that right?

It sounds like WH has a different idea, where we take 2G from each batch and bottle the rest straight, then do different things with the blends. This gives us a chance to have some of each year's straight in bottle, but I think I kind of like the progressive approach a bit better-- as long as we also reserve a gallon of each one to do the reserve blends. At first I favored just saving the straight ones off for a full equal-parts mix instead of a progressive blend, but it never occurred to me that we could do both...

The flanders #2 never quite got the same type of scum on it that the previous one did. I am going to take a sample of it and see what it is doing. If it tastes as though it is close, I may bring a sample to the next brew day.

This Flanders eventually did get a layer of scum on it. At the Adios to Graford Brew-weekend we did sample it. It is quite tasty, however it needs to sour a bit more. There is a nice Brett Character, the color is a little more golden than red, so this changes the beer a bit, but the sour character is going a nice direction. The layer of scum has not dropped so I will continue to leave it where it is. However this brings up the problem that the 3rd flanders needs bugs and there is nothing free to put it in, so we may have to do some planning.