Do Clone Recipes Produce Clone Brews?

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Cloned sheep

There are an abundance of homebrew clone recipes in the homebrewing literature. (We even have a couple on our site. See the links at the bottom of this article.) These purport to give you a recipe that will produce a beer that tastes like the commercial example. But can you really brew a clone brew by following a homebrew clone recipe?

The short answer is that it is highly unlikely. I am not saying this to be needlessly contrarian, nor to disparage the skills of homebrewers. It’s simply is a fact that a clone brew recipe is highly unlikely to produce an exact clone of its intended brew. However, if we carefully examine why this is, we can get on the path to actually brewing a very respectable clone brew – if that’s what we wish — or simply to become better homebrewers who are more aware of the sources of variation in beer.

A Thought Experiment

Let’s start with an imagined scenario. Let’s say that we possess the actual commercial recipe for a famous commercial beer. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Let’s further say that we scale this down to a 5.0-gallon (19-L) recipe and arrange a contest in which 100 randomly-chosen homebrewers  brew this recipe, and submit it for judging. The judges would include tasting panelists from Sierra Nevada, who regularly assess the commercial brew, and a fresh bottle of the commercial beer would also be entered. The brewers would understand that the point of the contest was to produce a clone. What would the results likely be?

Without actually doing this experiment, we could never know for sure. However, a knowledgable homebrewer with experience at judging contests could make some guesses that would very likely turn out to be true. Here are mine.

I would expect there to be a fair amount of variation within the entries. I would not suspect that the judges would believe they were tasting 101 bottles of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I would suspect that at least a majority of the beers would be recognizable as an American style pale ale. I would also suspect, however, that some beers would fall outside that boundary. I would expect that at least a majority of the beers would be “good,” in the sense that they showed no major faults. However, I’d also suspect some would show minor faults and a small minority would be seriously flawed. Among the better beers, I would suspect that some were very solid examples of an American pale ale in general, and that others were additionally very reminiscent of Sierra Nevada in particular. Would any be able to fool the Sierra Nevada panelists? If this were the brewer’s first attempt at brewing the clone, I don’t think so — although I would suspect that a couple entries might come close. If any of the brewers had previously brewed a similar clone recipe, tasted and tweaked it, the odds would go up a bit.

So where would the variation in the finished beers come from? There are many variables that could contribute this, and here are some of the major ones.

 

Differences in Ingredients

If the brewers were scattered across the country, they would be getting their ingredients from different sources. And, of course, their water profiles would vary (although many would treat their water). If the recipe specified 2-row pale malt and crystal malt (40 °L) for the grain bill, different brewers would get their grains from different maltsters. All 2-row malts do not taste exactly the same, and crystal malts certainly vary from maltster to maltster, even if the color rating is the same. If the brewer made an extract version of the beer, that would be an additional factor that would differ from the commercial beer.

 

Differences in Equipment

A homebrew clone of Sierra Nevada pale ale would obviously be brewed at a different scale than the commercial example. You would expect that many variables — including how well the mash temperature is maintained, boil vigor, evaporation rate, wort chilling time (and method), etc. — might differ. In addition, some breweries do things that you are not set up to do. For example, it’s fairly common for breweries to have a whirlpool tank — a tank to which the hot wort is pumped after the mash. The wort is held here, whirlpooling (and hence the name of the tank) until many of the solids have dropped out, until it is pumped through the chiller. In addition, differences in extract efficiency and other measures would be expected. And these things would have an effect on the beer.

 

Differences in Fermentation

In the case of Sierra Nevada, homebrewers have access to the appropriate yeast strain. This is invaluable in producing a quality clone brew. However, in order to produce an exact clone, you would need to know many details of Sierra Nevada’s fermentation profile. For example, you would need to know their pitching rate (rumored to be 0.75 million cells per mL per °Plato, about three-quarters the standard rate given for ale). You would need to know how well oxygenated their wort (in ppm O2) was and what their fermentation temperature was. Pitching rate, wort aeration, and temperature all play a role in the fermentation profile, and especially the production of esters. All three of these work in unison to produce the fermentation profile of the beer. In a clean ale like Sierra Nevada, small differences might not make such a large difference, but if you were cloning a Belgian-style ale with a distinct fermentation profile, they would be very important.

Even if you knew all the relevant variables, you would still be fermenting at a different scale. And differences in fermenter size and fermenter geometry have both been shown to have an effect on beer at the commercial scale. Beyond that, many breweries require two or more batches of wort to fill their fermenter. If a brewery has a 10-bbl brewhouse, but 40-bbl fermenters, they would need to brew 4 times to fill their fermenter, and this would affect the course of fermentation.

 

Catch 44?

Of course, the skill of the brewer also plays a role. However, even in the hands of a talented homebrewer, there are unavoidable differences in beers brewed at a homebrew scale. Some of these could be discovered; for example, you could potentially find the aeration rate of your intended clone brew. Others are unavoidable.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, this situation produces two Catch 22s. The first Catch 22 is that the exact recipe from a commercial brewer is guaranteed not to produce an exact clone brew. This is due to differences in scale, equipment, and procedures. In order to produce an exact clone, you would have to compensate for these differences. This might include tweaks to both the recipe and adjustments to your procedure. In other words an exact homebrew clone brew of Sierra Nevada pale ale could not be made from the same recipe they brew on a commercial scale.

Also, the exact clone recipe — if you hit upon it — would only work for you and your brewery. This brings us to the second Catch 22 — although a clone recipe made from scaling down a commercial recipe is bound to fail (in the sense of not producing an identical beer), it is conversely the best place to start in trying to clone an beer.

There are a lot of homebrew clones published these days. Many are produced from information straight from the brewery. In the hands of a skilled homebrewer, they should produce a nice beer and get you within the ballpark of your intended brew. (And if that’s all you’re shooting for, in most cases a good clone recipe should deliver.) However, to get from something similar to your intended beer to a copy that could fool the brewmaster, you would need brew the beer and taste it side by side with the commercial example. Then, you would need to tweak and rebrew the beer, most likely several times, to start approaching an exact clone.

 

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Comments

  1. Phil Weatherly says

    “0.75 million cells per mL per °Plato, about three-quarters the standard rate given for ale”

    I thought that WAS the standard pro brewer pitch rate. Are the yeast calculators I’ve been using missing something?

  2. I think Clone recipes are most valuable because they can help me make commercial beers that I like the taste of. I’m not interested in duplicating something exactly. For example, I’ve been in love with G’Night from Oskar Blues recently. Clone recipes say they use Columbus Hops, a hop I’ve stayed away from due to the “dank” descriptions. Now that I know that from a (hopefully accurate) clone recipe, I’ll use Columbus hops in my next Amber IPA.

  3. At NHC in Orlando ( I think you were there, Chris), I tasted 10-12 versions of “my” Rye IPA recipe. Each brewer claimed to have used the exact recipe I use. Not one of them tasted like mine.

  4. Eric from Long Island says

    We need a commercial example of Denny’s Rye IPA so we can taste it next to our brews and try to figure out where we are going wrong. I’d be curious if you have tasted any commercial (craft commercial) size batches of your recipe and if any of those tasted much like yours.

  5. Clone recipes are great for learning but, nothing else. First- why go through all the labor, love of the brewing process, and expense of making something that can be obtained from a reach in cooler at a retail outlet. Second- Water. Water is the main ingredient in beer. If you don’t have the same water you can’t make the same beer. Rolling Rock was a great beer when it was made in Latrobe. When the operation was moved to St. Louis via an Anheiser Busch buy out it became just a beer. Water is the heart of any and all beer.

  6. Mr Minutia says

    It’s almost impossible for any brewery to clone its own beer, let alone a homebrewer. I notice differences in commercial beers from year to year. The particular growing season for barley, hops, wheat, etc…any variations in the water whether it’s a consistent source from a well or a more variable surface water source. If you listen to interviews from professional brewers, they frequently talk about adjusting hop amounts, times and even changing specific hops out depending on the flavor of that year’s batch. A large brewery could even out the differences by blending them to round out the subtle changes, but there’s little opportunity for a homebrewer to do that.

    Even trying to brew the same recipe over is going to be somewhat of a challenge depending on the equipment. If you pitched fresh yeast right out of the pack to control for pitch rate (vs a guess at pitch rate with using a starter), and used an ultra consistent process like a RIMS or a Speidel braumeister, that’ll be a lot easier than using a single infusion in a cooler mash tun for replicating.

    But where things get difficult is ingredients. Without buying in bulk and having the exact same lot of barley, and the same source of hops that’s going to be a big challenge. Not much attention is paid to the inputs from homebrewers. Winemakers have known this for years and used it to their advantage. But year after year, homebrewers just assume that all american two row pale is essentially the same from year to year. But it’s not. When I look up the malt lots from various bags of “two row” is find pretty significant differences in extract, protein and color. I have no idea if it’s Metcalf, Harrington, Alexis, Baronesse, Tradition, etc. They all have different flavor. Are you getting a single variety, or a blend? What’s the ratio of blends? A large brewer could decide what they want in the malt, but the homebrewer gets the luck of the draw.

    As for hops, are the Wilamette hops I buy from Oregon, Idaho, Washington? Are they 2011, 2012, or 2013? If you buy hopunion packs, they don’t have a date on them. How were the stored from harvest to my house?

    If you made back to back batches drawing from the same lot of grain, the same equipment, the same water (RO with minerals), and the same pound of hops, you might get close. But good luck when those run out.

    For the curious, here’s a 2013 survey of malt types per western state. There’s a *lot* of malting barley out there.

    http://ambainc.org/media/AMBA_PDFs/Pubs/Variety_Surveys/2013/2013_USMAP_District_Level.pdf

  7. Clone Recipes are great for several reasons:

    1) They are a starting point for your home brew. If you like a certain commercial beer, you can brew your version with more or less hops, more or less gravity, or more or less bittering.
    2) Home brewers can make a beer that is now longer brewed commercialy.
    3) Many beers do not travel well, so you can brew a fresh version of a beer brewed far away.
    4) Clones are often as good as the beer you can buy, since you can brew with the same ingredients as commercial brewers.

    My wife Tess and I have operated our home brew shop, Maltose Express for 29 years now. We first wrote the book CloneBrews in1998 and the publisher wanted us to include beers from every country possible, that is why there are so many lagers in the book. The first version had 150 beers and we updated the book in 2010 to include 50 more beers. To get the 200 beers in the book we tasted and tested around 1000 beers, selected the ones we liked the most, created the recipes for them, brewed them, compared them to the originals and then brewed them again when necessary to tweak the recipe. We visited breweries both in the USA and in Europe and bought beers whenever we traveled.
    We started our home brew shop, Maltose Express, in 1991 and it has grown into the largest shop in the Northeast. Once the internet became popular, customers started showing up with recipes they downloaded off the internet, some of which were not very good. We started cloning beers so that customers had a good starting point for their brews. We brew these clones and our own recipes often and we always have two beers and two wines on tap at our store and sell over 4000 recipe kits a year of our clone recipes.
    We have many more US beers and only a few lagers in our second book of clone recipes, Beer Captured. Since 1991 we have probably brewed over 2500 batches of beer. These have been extract with specialty grains, mini mash and all grain and we opened our brewery, Veracious Brewing in June 2015.
    Locally we offer free home brewing classes and give all grain brewing demos throughout the year and teach classes at our store, at libraries and other locations around 10 times per year. We also run homebrew contest each year to help brewers make better beer.
    The main focus of our books is to help home brewers make better beer and to give them a starting point for a particular style. For our brewery we started all our recipes by taking great examples of the style and then making it our own. We are on our 30th version of our pale ale and the 25th version of our double IPA. Each time we tweak the hops or grain or yeast a little to see what result we get. We also make a lot of single hop beers to see what flavor and aroma come from each hop.

    Recently breweries have been changing recipes a bit and our book does not reflect these changes. If you look on our website maltoseexpress.net we list all our 500 clone recipes and the year that we cloned them. Some of the beers are no longer brewed but we believe part of the beauty of home brewing is to be able to re-create a beer that is no longer brewed or no longer brewed well. Many beers do not travel well, especially from Europe so you can brew fresh European styles that often taste better than what you can purchase.
    If anyone has any questions about the recipes they can email us at info@maltoseexpress.net and we will get back to you. We have been helping brewers for over 29 years now and have enjoyed it.

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