5 gallons of Chardonnay Juice

So what would you do if 5 gallons of Chardonnay juice showed up in your brewpad? That was the question we were faced with a couple weeks ago.  I was talking to a friend of mine whose family have some vineyards down here about wine and beer and somehow we got to talking about a hybrid wine/beer.  He asked if they could spare 5 gallons for us to experiment with and a couple weeks later  we had a carboy full of Chardonnay juice.  We quickly racked it into a keg and stuck it in the keezer just so nothing funky would start going as we planned out what to do with 5 gallons of Chard juice.

The first idea was to combine it with a blonde beer. At GABF this year Blue Moon won an award for their Chardonnay Blonde.  Their’s tasted all right be we figured what the hell let’s give that a try.  Based on our wild non-scientific guess we would use about 2 gallons of the juice in that beer, and pair it with a basic blonde ale recipe.  We added the Chard juice in secondary and are just waiting for it to ferment out.  We are going to call it the Blonde Wino.

Our next idea was to combine some chardonnay juice with some pear juice and make a cider.  I love pear ciders and had been wanting to play with some pear juice anyway so we did an experimental 50-50 pear-chard cider with champaign yeast.  Finally we still had about 2 gallons of juice left so we decided to try an apple-chard cider.  Everything is fermenting away and we’ll let you know how it all goes.

So that’s what we did with 5 gallons of chardonnay, what would you do with it?