I want to start off with, I’m no expert, just posting about my journey. So like any Brewer you want to create some unique recipe that will be the next big thing or you want to clone one of your favorite beers. Some Brewers can hit that perfect beer on there first time, other take the time to perfect it. Taking a recipe and doing it multi times and have the same outcome is hard, so doing a recipe multi times trying to perfect it by making small changes makes it even harder. I had learned, early on, from reading and doing, If you make a lot of changes at once its hard to know what change effected what.
I started off my journey looking for my own clone of Sam Adams Boston Lager, as I love this beer living in Massachusetts but like most things I do, I need to tweak it. So I jumped right on Sam Adams website and really looked at all the stats from the beer. I got a 12 pack and really sat down and drank a few making notes of items that I’m tasting. From all this I tried to make a simple beer recipe as a starting off point.
After reviewing the stats and looking at what they posted from ingredients I took a stab at a recipe. I kept with standard 2 row and crystal 60 and really looked at the German Noble hops. My first attempt at this beer was pretty good. Flavor was there, a little high on ABV for me, and there was a very big hop punch. Having 5 gallons of this beer was great as I was able to sample at different times and along side the Sam Adams Boston lager and realized I went a little crazy on the hops. Okay so version 1 is in the books but needed to see if the second tasted similar.
On version 2 of this beer I decided to do a pressure ferment on the warmer side just because I picked up an Fermzilla All Rounder. Very similar beer from my notes and still a little to bitter. So I was able to get very similar results on the beer and realized I needed to drop the hops back.
Onto version 3, with this version I decided I wanted a little less ABV so dropped off 1 lbs of row and kicked the crystal 60 back to .5lbs , just enough for the color and a little flavor off of it. I also backed the hops way off and as you can see in the notes of my BrewersFriend recipe the change of the hop schedule. “Changed up the hops dropped the oz of Spalt at 60 mins Dropped .4oz hersbruker at 10 and 5 mins, and dropped the hersbruker .5oz dryhop.”
Version 3 was getting a lot better, enjoying the flavors but something still missing and not 100% happy with it. So figured Id reach out and see if I can get some feed back on what I need to do to make this beer better and with that said sent a few bottles over to the Brew-Dudes and they reviewed it on their YouTube Channel.
What some great feedback on the beer. I feel my malt build is good just need to work on the hop schedule a little more and also tweak my water profile. So that is what I did, I went back to my notes from the previous brews and tweaked version 4, bumped the Gypsum from 3g to 7g to get away from the balanced profile and try and make the hops pop a bit. With the hops I added another .5oz of Tettnanger at 60 mins and added another .5oz Tettnanger to the dry hop. I was just going to add the .5 oz at 60 mins but I hate .5 of anything so added another .5 at dry hop to use up the 1 oz bags I purchase 8). Plan on brewing this on Saturday morning so watch out for the brewing notes here.
