Trough Lolly's Sierra Nevada Pale Ale Clone

[rwh]

When I do it, I use the WYeast 1056, comes out really well.

[lethaldog]

Me 2, wouldnt use anything else

[davekate]

Hi all,

Recipe- SNPA Recipe

Made this bad boy a few months ago, its pretty similar to TL's recipe.
Been in the keg for a while now, and for anyone that has actualy tasted SNPA on tap in the U.S this is pretty damn close. The stuff in the bottle we can get over here has a very different taste to it.

Cheers
DK

[Trough Lolly]

Hi all,
...The stuff in the bottle we can get over here has a very different taste to it.

Cheers
DK

Agreed! And it even tastes different on tap compared to in the bottle! But then again, don't they all?!

Cheers,
TL

[Trizza]

Hi all,
...The stuff in the bottle we can get over here has a very different taste to it.

Cheers
DK

Agreed! And it even tastes different on tap compared to in the bottle! But then again, don't they all?!

Cheers,
TL

Tonight I had some Kronenbourg 1664 on tap at my local, it was pretty damm good, noting compared to the bottles I had a few months ago that put me off French beer altogether.

Trizza.

[Trough Lolly]

I made another batch of this beer the other weekend - and I've had to keg it and leave it alone! It's too strong in hops!!

The recipe hops were based on hops that I'd had for several months and on brewday, I bought some fresh pellets and repeated the recipe to find that the fresh hops are substantially stronger than the original batch I made with this recipe!

I love Amarillo etc but sheesh, they need to balance out against the malt that's struggling to put in an appearance! Good hop head beer if you like that stuff!!

Cheers,
TL

[lethaldog]

I have done a couple more of these over the last month or 2, 1 i took ( a keg full) to a Hbs B.B.Q at my local HBs and it went down an absolute treat, there were probably about 40 ppl there and barely any of them could drag themselves away from the tap and we downed the whole keg in about 2 hours
The second keg full i have had sittin in the corner of the shed for about 7 weeks and have just put it in the fridge and hooked it up, being me i had to try it and wow i would have to put this down as one of my all time favourite recipes, it is sensational and the maturing time deffinately improved it from the first time i did it ( even though it was pretty bloody good then) cheers again TL

[Kevnlis]

Nice TL, I haven't had this but any good US beer in an AG that you recommend must be nice

Us yanks do make some pretty terrible "beer" but there are still a few microbrews left that make a decent drop.

If you ever get back and are in the midwest look for a beer called Blue Moon, it is the best US born drop I have ever had!

[Kevnlis]

Just had a bit of a look in google on the off chance someone had trieed to clone it. Seems the microbrew must have been bought out by Coors (a decent sized brewery in the US) and they are now doing a "pumpkin" version as well.

http://www.coors.com/docs/Blue%20Moon%2 ... 0Sheet.pdf

White Belgian wheat ale with "malt, wheat, and oats" can't be that hard to clone! I also wonder how I could naturaly get that orange flavour in there because this is definately best served with a nice sized slice of orange floating in the glass!

[Trough Lolly]

The current batch is now over 1 month old in the keg - took a sample on the weekend and it's very nice now....balanced with a nice malty profile and fresh hops - all I need is the weather and the pool to warm up!!

Cheers,
TL

[Stubbie]

Hey TL,

I've got the pale ale bug at the moment and your recipe sounds mighty tempting. As a relative newb, I'm not set up to attempt AG's (yet) but have done a few mini-mashes that I've been most pleased with. Think I'll try a mini-mash version of your SNPA clone by substituting the 4kg pale ale malt with two 1.5kg tins of Coopers Light LME.

Have just done Boonie's LCPA clone and my own mini-mash Amarillo Pale Ale with a Coopers Pale Ale tin, so am looking forward to sampling time.

Yes, roll on the warm weather!

Cheers

[Trough Lolly]

Go for it Stubbie! Let us know how you fare...If you do a partial mash, why not use a tin of Coopers Pale Ale and do a 2kg mash in a stock pot?

That's how I got onto grains - the missus appreciated the new stock pot too!

Cheers,
TL

[Stubbie]

TL, thanks for the suggestion.

Believe me, I have toyed with the idea of doing a partial. Our existing stock pot will take 14L chockers, but I'd rather not lug it around to the sink for cooling when it's full to the brim with boiling wort.

If I went ahead with a partial, I'd have a total of 2.8kg of grain to mash. How much, or rather how little, water, including sparge water, do you think I could get away with and still produce a reasonable result?

Cheers.

[Trough Lolly]

2.8kg is a pretty large partial mash - one more kilo and you've basically got a keg of all grain beer! Anyway, there are some good articles around on partial mash brewing - a primer, written by fellow Canberra Brewclub member Matt Tolley is worth a read - here...

My ballpark guidelines differ slightly from Matt's - I use 2.5L of mash water per kilo of grain and sparge (rinse the grains in a colander) around 1.5 times the mash volume. So, if we've got 2.8kg of grain, you'd want to mash the grains in [2.5*2.8] = 7 litres of water and sparge the mash with around 10L of sparge water.

The mash will soak up around half a litre of mash water per kilo so you'll end up with roughly [[7-1.4]+10] = 15.6L of sweet liquor / malt extract after the mash which is a bit too much for your stock pot, so I'd recommend you do the 7L mash and then sparge the grains until you fill the stock pot and away you go with the boil...
You can, of course, sparge with only a few litres and end up with a much smaller boil volume but you'd be leaving behind quite a bit of fermentable sugars which is fine if you're short on boiling gear, and mash efficiency isn't a major issue, but regardless of how many litres you get, you'll find a vast improvement in the flavour of the final product when you mash some grains in the recipe.

Cheers,
TL

[Stubbie]

TL,

Thanks once again for your help.

The mind has been ticking over and I think I have found a way to improvise. I normally use a small 2L pot and a larger 8L brew pot for my extract and mini mash brews. In the smaller 2L pot goes just enough malt extract to approximate the estimated OG and to this I do all my hop additions. The 8L takes the rest. I find it no big deal running two pots; the smaller 'hopping' pot gives me much better hopping control, I feel.

So, now I'm thinking of scaling up my usual operation. The 14L becomes my 'big' pot into which I'll drain the mash along with some of the liquor from sparging and the extract. The 8L pot becomes my 'small' pot into which goes the balance of sparged liquor. It will be my 'hopping' pot, so the OG will need to be adjusted to 1050; down with water, or up with either malt extract or liquor from the big pot, whatever the case may be.

I think my idea will work, but there's news, and it's all bad. When I started doing mini's I said that was it and that I'd resist being drawn into doing AG's. Looking back, that was such a feeble resolution. I can see now it's only a matter of time before I go the whole hog. Just today, I was pricing equipment for AG. Oh dear..............

Cheers

[Trough Lolly]

A 14L and 8L stock pot combo will be fine - you'll eventually get the hang of the correct hopping rate with experience, but I'd humbly suggest that you hop both pots. Unless you use a large collection vessel for the sparge, you'll find the pot that gets the last lot of sparged liquor will be substantially thinner and different in wort composition compared to the pot you filled first....I hope that makes sense! As you sparge the grains, the sugars present will steadily decrease until the last runnings are very low in sugar. Unless you can mix all the extracted liquor to evenly disperse the sugars, you'll find that the pot with the relatively lower sugar levels will have a bitter bittering potential since the hops will impart relatively more bitterness in a weaker solution if all other factors such as boil duration, remain unchanged.
Anyway, that's detail - the fun part is getting the hang of using your equipment to make a beer to suit your palate and preferences.

Cheers,
TL

[Stubbie]

I'm onto it, TL. That was my point about adjusting the boil gravity of the 8L pot. My intention was to adjust its SG to 1050, as per the OG of your recipe. Although I'm not certain, my hunch is that the 8L pot, which will contain liquor from the second sparge will be less than 1050. As I mentioned, I could then add either malt extract or some liquor from the 14L pot, which will be from the first sparge and, therefore, of higher gravity.

Mind you, you've made me think more and I've gone back to Palmer's chapter on Hops just to make sure. But there it is (for the 50th time), hop utilisation is largely independent of boil volume, but strongly dependent on boil gravity and boil duration. And so I keep reminding mysef. If this theory holds, then I should be able to put all your recipe's hop additions into a 1050 boil gravity and get the same result, irrespective of whether it's an 8L or 23L boil volume. That's the theory, anyway. I must admit, it's taken me a while to wrap my thoughts around this issue, but at last it makes sense (I think). That said, if I have missed something, I'm open to suggestions.........

Right, I'll organise the ingredients this week. However, the Stubbie brewery fermenter roster and yeast management program (gee, this production stuff is good fun!) dictates that I have needed to slip in an English bitter right now (Wyeast 1318), followed by a line up three pale ales, which will use 1056 in common. Ah, which reminds me; I need to ask a general question, but without hijacking this thread.....

Thanks for your help TL, and I'll be sure to report.

Cheers

[Trough Lolly]

...Mind you, you've made me think more and I've gone back to Palmer's chapter on Hops just to make sure. But there it is (for the 50th time), hop utilisation is largely independent of boil volume, but strongly dependent on boil gravity and boil duration. And so I keep reminding mysef. If this theory holds, then I should be able to put all your recipe's hop additions into a 1050 boil gravity and get the same result, irrespective of whether it's an 8L or 23L boil volume. That's the theory, anyway. I must admit, it's taken me a while to wrap my thoughts around this issue, but at last it makes sense (I think). That said, if I have missed something, I'm open to suggestions.........

It's all good!
Yep, if you have 8L at 1050 or 23L at 1050 the hop utilisation will only vary on the duration of the boil. My concern is having 14L at 1060 and 8L at 1038 or something similar. A 50/50 split of hops to bitter both pots may not give the intended bitterness since you'll get more bitterness out of the "weaker" 8L pot than the "heavier" 14L pot of sweet liquor.
One trick I used to do when I used two stock pots was half fill both with the first runnings and then top up both pots with second runnings to get roughly similar pre-boil gravity readings - but to be honest, it isn't a showstopper!
The thing is that a lot of AG brewers fret over the volume of sweet liquor extracted from the mash and subsequent sparge, and look at pre-boil gravity as a secondary issue when it's the other way around!
Anyway, enough of the techo stuff - have fun and let us know how you went.

Cheers,
TL

[lethaldog]

Did another one of these today, its one of my regular favourites now and im sittin here enjoying one as we speak as well

[Stubbie]

Finally, my partial mash SNPA clone is away.

Basically substituted a 1.5kg can of Morgans extra pale liquid malt for 2kg of base malt in TL's recipe. Oh, and used local grain instead of imported. No doubt about it, TL was so right about a 2.8kg partial being pretty close to a full batch. I had pots left right and centre; five in total. Just as well my wife wasn't home to see the upturned kitchen!

TL, your suggestion to try a partial had its effect alright. In fact I made the decision to use up my remaining 6 kits / LME tins as partials and thereafter commit to AG. As it happens this recent brew is partial No. 3 and I'm prepared to wear brewing the next 3 as partials to see me through summer. But thereafter, my multi-pot-partial approach is over. Although a novelty now, I can see myself getting jack of using and having to clean so many pots. I need no further convincing that I need to set up a proper mash tun, and once that's commissioned, I may as well go AG.

A few details. I mashed using 10L water @ 65 deg C for 60 minutes, then strained the grist through a colander. Added another 10L @ 68 deg C for 20 minutes and strained again. Into the 14L pot went 10L of wort, made up from a combination of wort from the first and second sparges to a pre-boil SG of 1046. The pre-boil SG was my rough estimate to achieve an end of boil SG of 1050. Into this went all the hop additions. The remainder of the wort went into the 8L pot along with the LME. Once all the goodies were in the fermenter and topped up to 23L, the OG was 1052. On a whim, I decided to bring the batch up to 24L, to achieve 1050, though I suppose this wasn't really necessary. In went the 1050 starter and we have a bubbling airlock 8 hrs later. Nice.

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how this brew turns out. If it turns out as well as I expect, and I think it will, this recipe will be one of my first AG cabs off the rank.

Now, what's this kegging caper all about..............?

Cheers.