All Grain Recipe: #18 Stone Levitation Clone

Levitation is a 'light' session beer made by Stone Brewing Co. Like most other beers by Stone, Levitation doesn't really have a 'style'. If you had to assign a label to it, you could call it an American Amber, even though it consists of British malts, British yeast and American hops. Levitation is a pun: it is light and thus defies gravity.

Unlike Stone's other beers, Levitation bucks the 'more of everything' trend by being a 4.4% ABV session beer. It has a lot of malt flavor and a big focus on hops (45 IBU, 4 separate late hop additions), but low alcohol and a very light body. The big flavor almost clashes with the light, almost watery mouth feel of the beer, but overall it works.

Levitation is a great beer, but my main problem with it is that it costs the same as many other bigger, more impressive beers. For a session beer, that is a bad thing. Consider that you might go through a 6-pack of Levitation instead of a bomber of Arrogant Bastard. Still, sometimes that's exactly what you need: a beer that won't get you trashed when hanging out and drinking all night.

This ends up being a pretty cheap beer to clone. If you can perfect it, you can save a lot of money over the usual $10 per six pack price.

My recipe is below, followed by the original 6-gallon recipe from Can You Brew It (episode link here).