Recipe Recap: #16 - #20

Today's Recipe Recap will cover brews #16 through #20. My brewing is definitely getting better. I improved my process, lowered my efficiency, corrected my pH, cleared my beer more, carbonated properly and controlled my fermentation better.

#16, Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA Clone
First, the bad news. This didn't really taste like Union Jack at all. I bittered with Columbus hops for 60 minutes instead of Warrior for 90, giving it a much harsher bitterness. My OG was off, and it attenuated more than it should have. My high efficiency led to a lack of strong malt character, so it was hop dominated (more like my pliny clone). My lack of pH control led to a little bit of phenolic off flavor and astringency, but very very little.

Finally, the carbonation was higher than I'd like, making the beer seem harsh. Oddly enough, I have to carb around 2 - 2.2 volumes, using BeerSmith's calculator, to reach a level of carbonation that is close to what you'd get from a commercial bottle or draught. This beer was carbed to around 2.6-2.7 volumes.

Also, I tried to dry hop without a hop bag. That was a huge mistake, and I lost almost a gallon of beer to hops before all was done.

The good news is that it was a pretty good beer. It just wasn't a clone, and it wasn't perfect.


#17, Janet's Brown Ale
Holy cow, this stuff was good out of the gate. I had one after only being in the bottle less than two weeks and it was fantastic. I carbed it properly, to around 2.3 volumes. The head was thick and creamy and lasted a long time. The hop aroma was strong and pleasant. The hop flavor and subtle roastiness of the chocolate malt went hand in hand. The mouth feel was nice and thick but never sweet, and very drinkable. My best beer so far!

If there was any complaint, it might be that the specialty malt flavor wasn't as pronounced as I expected and there was a hint of phenolics in the background. I only noticed it when I compared mine to a commercial Black IPA that had a similar flavor.

I'd love to try the real thing and compare! I've also rebrewed this one with some improvements to my process. I carbed to 2.3 volumes, and will probably reduce that to 2.0 - 2.1 next time I bottle.



#18, Stone Levitation Clone
Light, dry and orange-y. Drinkable and full of flavor, though more and more I prefer beers with a very thick body. I can't detect any off flavors, though.

Carbonation is a little high at 2.5, and I would reduce that to 2.3 next time. I had to sub Mt. Hood for the Crystal, which may have had significant impact on the flavor. Aroma and flavor are definitely dominated by the orange citrus of the Amarillo. Over time, the flavors have 'melded' together into a more cohesive single flavor, where before it felt like a combination of different flavors competing for my attention. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's the only way I can describe it.

This will probably taste closer to the original if I lower my efficiency and adjust my specialty malt percentages. Of course, I haven't compared it to the original. I'll come back and update this post when I do, or create an entirely new post.



#19, JZ's American Pale Ale
Well, I'm not the biggest fan of Pale Ales in general. They're usually pretty dry and boring. For me, a glass of beer is an event, not something I drink pints and pints of. It tastes decent, though a little young, and the carbonation feels higher than it should. I think the flavors need time to merge. It currently tastes like hops and malt, instead of a single combined 'pale ale' flavor, if that makes sense.

This is my first beer made with a lower efficiency, 5.2 pH stabilizer and gelatin finings. I can definitely tell. The beer is clearer and cleaner than any before it. I detected no off flavors. Very clean and very drinkable. The flavor is similar to Levitation, probably due to using the same base malt (Great Western American Pale Ale malt, a US version of British pale malt).



#20, Triple-X Sweet Stout
Heaven in a glass. This will be gone in no time, even though I'm only drinking on weekends on my diet. Thick but drinkable. Slight milk-like aftertaste. Creamy espresso and chocolate flavor, with a hint of alcohol. Not hot alcohols or off flavors that I can detect. This one has been in the bottles only two weeks and yet is nicely carbed, creamy and delicious. Proof that if you need to age your (lighter) beer more than a few weeks, you probably did something wrong.

I carbed to 2 volumes, and will probably reduce that to 1.8 or 1.9 next time. There *will* be a next time.

All Grain Recipe: #23 Pliny the Elder, v2.0

I decided to give the Pliny clone another go. The problems I had last time were these:

• Slightly fruity; maybe even hot alcohol. Possibly high fermentation temp.
• Bitterness was too harsh. I'm not a huge fan of Columbus for bittering. Something smoother like Warrior or Magnum would be better.
• Not dry enough. Needed to do something to dry it out: more sugar, less crystal, lower mash temps.
• Carbonation was too high. Reduce it to 2.2-2.3.
• Too dark. Not really a problem, per se, but Pliny is very pale and mine was more dark bronze.

I ended up following the MoreBeer pliny clone recipe pretty closely this time, here.

The recipe can be found here, if you search for "Pliny" on the page. Note that this recipe uses dry yeast, while I recommend the WLP001 liquid + starter. The recipe is also for 5 gallons. If you brew 6 gallons to account for a gallon of losses to trub and other stuff, you'll need to scale up.

This version definitely came out better, even if it still doesn't taste like Pliny. Even with my lowered mash temp, lowered Crystal amount and increased sugar, I still ended up with something pretty thick. My version is more like a typical Imperial IPA - more of a sipper. What makes Pliny different is that it is so dry and drinkable that you have chugged 2 pints of it and didn't even notice.

On the bright side, my newest brew has no off flavors or hot alcohols, and is very good regardless. It just isn't Pliny :P

All Grain Recipe: #21 Union Jack IPA, v2.0

My original version of this recipe (here) had a lot of problems, but also a ton of potential. I've resolved to solve as many of those problems as possible in my first re-brew!

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).

All Grain Recipe: #16 Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA

I finally tried Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA and I was floored. It has an incredible hop character, strongly pine-y and resin-y with hints of citrus. It is balanced by just enough malt sweetness to combine with the hops to create a candy-like, vanilla, date, cake sort of flavor. However, it is dry enough to not be cloying. It has a very similar character to Lagunitas Hop Stoopid and Green Flash Imperial IPA, but way drier. Where Hop Stoopid is thick and chewy and Green Flash is sweet to the point of cloying (I could barely finish the bottle), Union Jack manages to hit the same level of complexity without becoming overpoweringly sweet.

I immediately sought out a clone recipe and found that The Brewing Network did an episode of Can You Brew It on Union Jack. Huzzah!

Episode here.

It turns out to be a pretty complicated recipe.

The flavor is primarily tons of Cascade and Centennial in the boil, followed by a whirlpool aroma steep of more Cascade and Centennial, followed by two huge dry hop additions.

The mash is done really low (145) to dry out the beer, but then they use WLP002 English Ale yeast to maintain some residual sugar. Their mash is also a double infusion, where they raise the temp for the last 10-20 minutes to make sure it is fully converted.

Even their fermentation is complicated, requiring that you pitch at a low temperature and keep it there until yeast growth is complete (a day or so), probably to minimize ester production by the english yeast, then raise the temp (but still not too high).

The main thing I learned when making this beer is to always use a hop bag and make sure it is tied off super tight so no hops come out of the top. Holy shit was it a disaster!

The centennial I got from MoreBeer was not fully pulverized. Instead of a thick hop sludge, I had a chunky mass of hop leaves. Some got out because I didn't tie off my hop bag well enough and the hops clogged my siphon. I ended up just dumping the whole pot into the fermentor because I couldn't siphon it all out.

I also had the bright idea of dry hopping without a bag (note: I used a bag for batch #12, my last dry hop experience, and it was fine). I ended up losing close to a gallon of beer due to absorption by the hops and spigot clogging. To avoid losing even more, I ended up pouring from the top of the keg through a sanitized strainer into the bottling bucket. Bottling took forever.

I will never go without a hop bag again. I don't care if you get better extraction, or more flavor, it isn't worth the hassle.

Here's my recipe, immediately followed by the original 6 gallon CYBI recipe.

All Grain Recipe: #13 Stone Arrogant Bastard Clone

So I was listening to JZ's Can You Brew It? podcast and, after just finishing up a previous clone, I thought I'd try one of their clone recipes. The first thing that came to mind was Stone's Arrogant Bastard, a hoppy, malty, delicious and super drinkable (for its ABV, anyway) beer. The problem was that they had deemed it 'not cloned' on the CYBI episode I listened to a few months back.

Lo and behold, they had a rebrew, and it was good! I whipped out BeerSmith and started calculating faster than you can spell 'inebriated'.

The episode is here.

Here's the recipe, scaled to my system. Unfortunately, my evaporation rate was way lower than my tests had predicted. The recipe is *designed* for 12 quarts. Please remember that before you try replicating it!

I messed up quite a bit here, not just with the evaporation rate. I also accidentally used Simcoe for the bittering additions instead of Chinook. Arrogant Bastard is (according to CYBI) a SMaSH recipe: Single Malt, Single Hop. The malt is Special B, a Belgian crystal malt that gives a very rich, raisin-y flavor. The hop is Chinook, which I think tastes very strongly of pineapples.

I also wrote down the recipe wrong, scaled it improperly, mashed a degree or two too high and overall just missed my OG and FG by a ton. The important thing is to use 90% 2 row, 10% Special B, only Chinook hops, OG of 1.066 and ABV of 7.2%.

This brew was also my last time doing a triple sparge. I found that double sparging works just as well and requires less work. I found no evidence of tannins in any brew where I triple sparged.

In fact, I messed up so much that I'll post the original 24 quart, 70% efficiency recipe from the show after this one. I went back and made sure the recipe is 100% correct.

Here is my recipe, followed by the original 6-gallon recipe.

All Grain Recipe: #12 Pliny the Elder clone

I don't know when it happened, but I'm a hophead now. Just a couple of months ago I didn't care for the overpowering hop flavors and aromas of west coast IPAs, and now I'm suddenly craving hops. I can only imagine it's a combination of drinking more craft beer and doing hop taste tests. Chewing on raw hop pellets can really desensitize you.

So of course, once I realized this I went out and picked up some Pliny the Elder from Russian River Brewery. I've had this before, but it was too much for me. Now it is like heaven in a glass. Dry and drinkable, with a very complex hop character that makes it far tastier than typical IPAs that tend to have a one-sided hop flavor. It is bursting in hop flavor and while the bitterness is high, it is a smooth bitterness that doesn't stick in your mouth unpleasantly (see Stone Ruination, Green Flash West Coast IPA for examples of IPAs that taste like you've been sucking on a grapefruit long after you've finished off the bottle).

Thus, next up is a clone of Pliny. Vinnie from Russian River has made no secret of his recipe - it is freely available, and many people clone it. You can get a clone kit from MoreBeer, or you can see this pdf of the recipe. The MoreBeer kit doesn't quite match the original PDF. Also, the recipe has changed over the years and apparently uses hop extract to achieve a higher bitterness than is possible with hop boiling alone.
edit: I tasted this recently and it is definitely extraordinarily bitter. It also didn't come out as dry as the real thing. The hop flavor profile is pretty close, though.

My goal is still to iron out the kinks in my process. However, I might as well make something delicious in the process. Plus, this recipe will teach me about dry hopping. I also plan to increase the batch size to make up for the large amount of trub I'm getting after boil. I'll be transferring the cooled wort to a sanitized bottling bucket, which will let me measure out exactly how much volume I ended up with and allow the trub to settle out before I transfer it via the bucket's spigot.

Here are some other things I'll be doing that are new with this batch:
Rinsing the grain only twice, but with a larger amount of water each time.
Using my new refractometer to get a feel for how well it works. I'll measure the efficiency after first, second and third runnings.
Repitching my WLP001 from batch #8 (my first all grain), and making a starter with it a few days before.
Preheating the oven to 200 F and turning it off in the hopes that it keeps temp better than leaving the oven on.
Using 200 F sparge water so that the grain is about 168-170.
Boiling 90 minutes.

In practice, I messed up a few times. The biggest one is that I calculated the water for a 60 minute boil, but the hops for a 90 minute boil. I had to adjust the amount of bittering hops to compensate for only boiling 60 minutes. Fortunately, there isn't much difference between 60 and 90 minutes when it comes to bitterness extraction, due to diminishing returns.

My 24x24 grain bag from MoreBeer finally gave up the ghost. I saw holes in the bottom and sides after this batch, so I tossed it out with the spent grain.

The second fuckup was underestimating the amount of trub. I made an 11 quart batch (actually ended up with 11.25 due to less evaporation than expected), but only racked about 9 quarts instead of 10.

Pitched from my starter mason jar and got a nice quick fermentation. The taste of this beer was incredible, even before finishing. A week later, I dropped hopped by putting the first dose in a sanitized & boiled hop bag and hanging it from the lid of the fermentor. I did the same thing with the second dose a little over a week later.

The main thing I've noticed about the result is that it is pretty harsh and not as dry as the original. The recipe gives 152 as the mash temp, but newer recipes use 148. I will probably adjust this to use 148 to attenuate more. I'll also give it a few weeks to age (it hasn't actually been 3 weeks bottled yet) before assessing the hops again. If the bitterness remains harsh, I will try a smoother 90 minute bittering hop like Warrior. Note: The morebeer.com Pliny recipe uses Warrior for the 90 minute addition.

Here's the recipe, from the PDF linked at the start of the post:
(edit: I've included the original 5 gallon recipe at the end).