Chai Metheglin Blend

Notes

Both of our chai brews seemed to be excessively tannin-heavy, and in an effort to address this, I made some of my first forays into acid-tannin balancing. A single drop of cocktail bitters in a taster made the brew virtually undrinkable, whereas increasing the acid levels a little bit seemed to make the brew far more tolerable.

So on one of the chai brews, I tried adding a little lemon juice. While personally I thought it was an improvement, I was told that lemon and chai were a horrible combination... hah. So I got my hands on some tartaric acid to try balancing the other batch with. I still don't think the lemon was that bad, but to be fair, yes, the tartaric acid was better.

I let both modified batches sit for a while before racking them together hoping to dilute out any noticeable lemon, and get a consistent batch that I could try balancing again before splitting it back up into my 1 gallon carboys (for lack of any 2 gallon carboys).

This time around, I realized that the increased acidity had essentially opened up space in the brew's flavor profile for oak additions. Before attempting to balance, the oak was awful since it was even more tannins in an unbalanced batch.

I think I'm still not really a fan of fermented chai tea, and doubt whether I'll make one of these again, but we're getting closer, and I definitely personally think the oak is a big push in the right direction.

All this testing did use up some of my brew though, and I had a little too much headspace leftover by the time all was done. But then I remembered - the Leftovers Blend, was about 66% a blend of these chai brews anyway! So I used that to fill the headspace, and now I've got 2 x 1 gallon carboys full of what should be a pretty consistent chai tea metheglin with light oaking and a hint of bochet.

I'm expecting these will sit for at least a few months as the flavors meld and some of that lemon haze has more time to settle out. We'll check in on it again down the road, and see if it requires further finishing touches.

It's totally possible that I should have just left this untouched for a year or more before trying to balance and finish anything here - I originally started messing with it because these had cleared beautifully, looked like they might be ready to bottle, and I needed open carboys.