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E. & O. E.
Copyright www.petespintpot.co.uk 2008. First published 17 October 2008, last updated 7 Mar. 2010.
Pete’s Pint Pot is dedicated to the home production & sensible drinking of beer, wine, cider & meads plus a little bit of china painting & a few bits of photograph tampering.
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e all have our favourite beers that we would love to emulate but to what lengths do we go? To some the Holy Grail is to get a perfect clone but I personally would be perfectly happy to end up with something similar, who knows, my beer made in the style of a world renowned brew may even better (to me at least) than the original. The page title may be somewhat misleading as the idea is not really to clone recipes but to give some ideas of how to create a beer “in the style of” our desired brew. Whenever one designs recipes it is always useful to have a recipe calculator handy but be ready for lots of trial & error work.
I shall only consider malt extract recipes here, this limits the additional grains to roast barley & black, chocolate & crystal malts as other grains need a full or partial mash recipe to extract the sugars etc.
Bottle conditioned beers normally get that way by the brewer adding fermentable materials to a “live” beer containing a viable yeast content, unfortunately for the would-be yeast cloner, the yeast added at bottling can be a different strain to the brewing strain(s).
Yeast recovery is a more apt name than cloning & can be performed by following these steps:-
1) The beer containing our wanted yeast should be stored somewhere cool for a few days, thus allowing more yeast to settle to bottom of the bottle.
2) Make a yeast starter. When cooled to around room temperature, carefully open the donor bottle & slowly pour the contents into a glass, leaving the last centimetre or so in the bottle as this should contain most of the yeast.
3) Whilst drinking & enjoying the beer, swirl & shake the bottle to dislodge any yeast that has compacted in the bottom & pour this into the starter.
4) To ensure you have enough yeast it may be a good idea to use a second bottle but if still in doubt you could add a third but if ....
I suppose the big question is: “Where does one start?” If, for example you like Woodforde’s ales, the answer is simple, buy one of their kits & Irish stout lovers will find lots of suitable kits available from most manufacturers. Staying with kits, Brew It Yourself have a database of kits that people think are similar to commercial brews but I’m a bit dubious about some of the comparisons - Woodforde’s Great Eastern is like Old Speckled Hen? Not to me it aint! I would sling in 500g of crystal malt & increase the bitterness by about 5EBU, you can always modify a kit, thus making it more to your own personal taste.
The best way to clone a beer is to have the exact recipe, ingredients (inc. Yeast), exactly the same brewing equipment & cloned brewers, you may then end up with something quite similar. Now that’s not very helpful is it? Fortunately quite a few clone recipes are readily available on the internet, some are very complex & some are easy but a lot seem to just be repeated (cloned) with a new “designer’s” name added. So which do we chose? I’m all for the easy option but I like to compare the published & (my) calculated figures with any known facts about the original. Some figures may seem to wildly disagree but facts such as hop alpha acid, brew efficiency, yeast efficiency & priming sugar should be taken into consideration. Another very good source of information can be the brewer’s web site, The American Summit Brewery & our own Coniston Brewing Company are just two good examples.
When sampling a “clone” it is a good idea to have a bottle of the original handy for comparison, your recipe can then be modified if required. A glass or two of the stuff may also help inspire you when compiling your recipe, as will any information printed on the label such as the ABV & the list of ingredients, you can also make a guess at the colour of your beer but it’s not very easy.
Below are a couple of “clone” beers I’ve “designed” purely as examples, I have not brewed them & so cannot comment on their accuracy or quality.
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I’ll start with Duvel as most beer lovers accept it as a prime example of a good beer. My research tells me to expect an OG in the low to mid 1070s, an FG of <1010, a colour of <10 EBC & a bitterness approaching 30 EBU, bottled Duvel is 8.5% ABV. This immediately rules out an internet recipe I found that uses 6 different grains, two different sugars added in 5 separate lots, two different hops added in 5 stages. The OG was quoted as 1211 with 64EBU & over 21% ABV, even high alcohol wine yeasts would struggle to attain that!
Another recipe I found was Jamil Z's Strong Golden recipe, classed as a Duvel clone & carbonated to a very high 4 volumes (Atm.) of CO2. I assumed the original recipe was for 23 litres with a brew efficiency of 75% & converted it from using Pilsner malt to a wet malt extract recipe using the same hops but with an assumed 4.25% AA. For safety reasons I reduced the carbonation to around 2.5 Atm., this is attained by adding 6.3 or 2 level 5ml tsp of priming sugar per litre when using glass bottles. After juggling things around a bit, I settled on the recipe below. The effective OG (after priming) is about 1070, all the other figures seem a reasonable fit & it is nice & simple. | |||
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Malt extract - extra light Sugar Priming sugar g/litre Saaz hops (4.25% AA) Coriander ground (optional) Orange zest (optional) White Labs WLP570 or Wyeast 1388 yeast |
3600g 1200g 6.3 (2 level 5ml tsp/litre) 80g 4.6g (2 level 5ml tsp) 8g |
O.G. (Excluding primer) F.G. Alc. % (Including primer) Initial volume litres Bitterness EBU Colour EBC |
Calc. 1068 1007 8.5 23 28.5 (for 20% hop utilization) 9 |
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RECIPE NOTES:- The yeasts specified can be replaced by any Belgian Golden ale or Trappist ale or, if you can’t get them use the best “ale” yeast you can get, strong ales like a lot of yeast at the start of fermentation & so it is best to use a yeast starter, failing that, 15 mins before pitching, re-hydrate 2 sachets of yeast in about 50ml of water with about ½ a tsp of sugar dissolved in it. Moortgat’s Duvel uses two separate strains of yeast, both developed from a McEwan’s yeast which originally contained 10-20 different strains (does this make them re-strained yeasts?). Duvel has coriander & orange peel in the taste, the amounts specified are added for the last 10-15 mins of the boil & estimated to be on the low side, it is better to add too few than too many, later recipes can be modified to give better results. The hops can be replaced by Styrian Goldings or even just plain Goldings, a lot of recipes use a mixture of Saaz & Styrians. Note that different hops have different % AA (Alpha Acid) or bittering properties & so the quantities may need re-calculating. Jamil’s original recipe started fermentation at around 18°C & built up to about 82°C over 7 days, I would personally ferment at a constant temperature in order to keep things simple. | |||
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Another well-respected ale, the Coniston Brewing Company’s site tells us that their award winning Bluebird Bitter is 3.6% ABV, 21-22 EBC in colour with a bitterness in the 36-38 EBU range. Pale & “a touch of crystal” malts are used with Challenger hops.
With a little bit of patience & number crunching I came up with the following recipe. | |||
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Malt extract - light Crystal malt (light) Priming sugar g/litre Challenger hops (7.5% AA) English Ale yeast |
2250g 400g 3.16 (1 level 5ml tsp/litre) 56g
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O.G. (Excluding primer) F.G. Alc. % (Including primer) Initial volume litres Bitterness EBU Colour EBC |
Calc. 1034 1008 3.6 23 36.5 (for 20% hop utilization) 23 |
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RECIPE NOTES:- Malt colours are always difficult to estimate & the manufacturer’s quoted figures generally have around 20% tolerance, my calculations assume that a pale crystal malt is used with a mid-range figure of about 78 EBC for a 10% solution, in practice it depends what our local shop has in stock. Having said that, who cares about colour? | |||
Work In Progress
Beer colour is normally measured in EBCs (European Brewing Convention units) or in SRM (the US Standard Reference Method - Lovibond units are similar.)
The EBC colour is for a 50mm “depth” of beer whilst the SRM is for ½ an inch. When the beer, in a plain, un-stemmed glass, gets down to the required value, stick the glass on a piece of white paper, view from above & compare the colour with a beer colour chart. OR hold the glass up to the light & take a guess! The latter could be the most accurate as the chart is rather dubious & also appears to be non-linear & non-logarithmic.
1 SRM ≈ 0.508 EBC (may be assumed to be one half for most purposes).
Bitterness is measured in EBUs (European Bittering Units), these are the same as IBUs (International Bittering Units).
One Atmosphere (Atm.) is our “standard” atmospheric pressure & is approximately 14.7 psi, & so 4 Atm. is approximately 4 x 14.7 psi, say 60psi.
“Death Of A Clown” by Dave Davis 1967, written by Davis & Davis (presumably Dave & brother Ray). It’s worth visiting this page just to hear that, isn't it?
For a strong Christmas lager see the “Sammy Clause” recipe, based on Schloss Eggenberg’s Samichlaus.