BEER CLONES
A LITTLE DETECTIVE WORK MAY ENABLE YOU SPEND SUMMER QUAFFING YOUR FAVOURITE ALE — WITH YOUR OWN NAME ON THE LABEL
Have you ever tried a beer and thought, How can I make this? Or maybe you had a favourite brew in past years that you can no longer buy. Could you reproduce or clone this brew today?
To clone your favourite beer, or make something similar or even better, is the dream of many brewers. Sometimes we can find a recipe that someone else has created, but if you need to create your own recipe or if you want to check someone else’s then there are some easy little tricks to help you.
Online recipes
A simple search on Google might locate you a recipe. If you type in the name of the commercial beer you want to make and add the word ‘clone’ or ‘recipe’ after the name you might find several recipes.
The trick is to separate the good recipes from the not so good ones. If you find three recipes, print them and lie them side by side. You will see common ingredients across the recipes, so that’s a good sign that those ingredients should be in your recipe. If one recipe looks quite different then it probably won’t be a good clone. For example, if the recipe is for a commercial beer for a New Zealand pale ale and the hops in the recipe are Galaxy, Victoria Secret, and Pride of Ringwood then this probably won’t be a good clone, as those hops are all Australian hops not New Zealand hops.
I’m not saying Australian hops aren’t any good, but rather that you would not expect them in a New Zealand pale ale. New Zealand pale ales usually have New Zealand hops.
Ingredients list
Before you start building your own recipe do a little research. Look on a label of the beer you want to clone, as there could be clues to the ingredients. Some craft breweries list the hops that are used. For example, Macs Three Wolves Pale Ale lists on the label the three hops used: “Amarillo, Simcoe & Nelson Sauvin hops dominate this elaborate Pale Ale, bursting with citrus & tropical notes and a well-balanced bitterness.”
So, while you don’t have quantities, at least you know the hop varieties used. Other beers may list the malts, such as Pale Malt, Biscuit, Carapils, and Caramalt. Again, you won’t know the quantities but you could start with the premise that 90 per cent of the grist will be Pale Malt with the balance made up of the other three malts.
Alcohol percentage
Look for the alcohol by volume (ABV) on the bottle. Under New Zealand law, breweries must list the ABV on the bottle. This is a great clue to working out how much malt you need for your recipe. As a guide, a 23-litre recipe for a five per cent ABV beer would have a grain bill of around 5kg. This will
differ depending on which brewing system you use, so you might need slightly more or slightly less. However, knowing the approximate total grain bill is another clue in building your clone recipe.
Similarly, for extract brewing, two cans of 1.7kg liquid malt for a 23-litre recipe will give you close to 4.5 per cent ABV. If you reduced your volumes to 20 litres then those two 1.7kg cans would give you around 5.2 per cent ABV. Knowing this, you can easily work out if you need more malt or less malt to reach the desired ABV percentage of the beer you are cloning.
Bitterness
Some beers list the bitterness, although this is less common. The industry standard is referred to as ‘IBU’ or ‘International Bittering Units’. This is helpful when calculating what quantity of hops to add as a bittering addition as well as the total bittering from all additions in your recipe.
Looking again at Macs Three Wolves, the label states “Alcohol by volume 5.1%, 40.0 IBU”.
Best guess
Sometimes there is very little information to enable you to clone a beer. Apart from the ABV there might