Getting your blend on

Yesterday I posted on my personal blog about my recent experience with blending beers. If you want to read the whole thing you can check it out here, but for purposes of this blog I wanted to briefly discuss the various purposes of blending (at least the ones of which I'm aware).

Blending has probably been around as long as people have been brewing beer. Historically, brewers blended old sour beers with fresh, non-sour beers to dial in the exact level of sourness (or simply make them palatable). Similarly, partigyle brewers would sometimes blend the various gyles; rumor has it that Newcastle is still a blend of an older beer and a newer beer. And for the record, I'm no expert, so feel free to correct any of this in the comments if I've been mislead or am not telling the whole story.

For those who like to win medals in homebrew competitions, blending can allow you to create new entries from your existing stock (is it cheating? sounds like the kind of pointless debate that Beer Advocate is known for!). While this is most commonly done with British beers, I tried it with German lagers. Did it work? I'll know after this weekend!

For the average beer drinker, blending should bring to mind the ubiquitous black and tan, though there are plenty of other blends out there that are simply intended to create something new and exciting (not to mention commercial examples like Ommegang's Three Philosophers).

Anyway, I was curious to see if anybody has experience with blending. If you have, please post in the comments what you blended, why you blended (competition? an experiment? you were drunk?) and how it turned out. My personal results with blending a Helles with a Dunkel (50/50 blend for a Vienna lager and 2:1 Helles:Dunkel for an Oktoberfest) has got me thinking about how I can get three different styles out of two brew days. More variety is never a bad thing, right?