Anchorage Brewing Company: Love Buzz clone

Anchorage Brewing Company: Love Buzz clone

(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.057   FG = 0.997
IBU = 40   SRM = 8   ABV = 8%

Ingredients
7.5 lbs. (3.4 kg) Pilsner malt
3.5 lbs. (1.6 kg) wheat malt
12 oz. (0.34 kg) crystal malt (60 °L)
1.3 AAU Simcoe® hops (first wort hop) (0.1 oz./3 g at 13.2% alpha acids)
13.2 AAU Simcoe® hops (0 min.) (1 oz./28 g at 13.2% alpha acids)
11.7 AAU Citra® hops (0 min.) (1 oz./28 g at 11.7% alpha acids)
3 oz. (85 g) Citra® hops (dry hop)
1 oz. (28 g) fresh rose hips (0 min.)
0.5 oz. (14 g) fresh orange peel (0 min.)
0.1 oz. (3 g) freshly ground peppercorn (0 min.)
2 oz. (57 g) medium toast oak staves or oak cubes (French oak preferred)
White Labs WLP568 (Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend) or The Yeast Bay Saison Blend yeast
Your favorite strain of Brettanomyces bruxellensis yeast
Neutral wine yeast or Lallemand CBC-1 yeast (if priming)
7⁄8 cup corn sugar (if priming)

Step by Step

Mill the grains and dough-in, targeting a mash of around 1.3 quarts of water to 1 pound of grain (2.7 L/kg) and a temperature of 150 °F (66 °C). Hold the mash at 150 °F (66 °C) until enzymatic conversion is complete, about 60 minutes. Sparge slowly with 170 °F (77 °C) water, collecting wort until the pre-boil kettle volume is 6 gallons (23 L). Add the first wort hops early in the sparge phase. Boil time is 60 minutes. Add flameout hops and spicing then start a whirlpool by stirring wort for at least a minute, and then let settle. After 30 minutes, chill the wort to 70 °F (18 °C) and aerate thoroughly. After 3 days, allow the fermentation temperature to rise up to 83 °F (29 °C). After primary fermentation is complete, transfer to a long-term aging vessel and pitch your Brettanomyces bruxellensis yeast. Anchorage Brewing Co. ages Love Buzz for eight months in French oak barrels that previously contained Pinot Noir wine. There are several alternatives. First, you can try to soak oak staves or cubes for several weeks in a sealed bottle of Pinot Noir (warning: the resulting wine will probably taste more like plywood than wine). Or you can boil the oak then add that along with several ounces of Pinot Noir directly to the beer. Age until the oak presence is detectable, but you don’t want it to overwhelm the beer. Try to taste once a week until this nuance is achieved. At that point, rack the beer off the oak and add your dry hops. Dry hop for 1–3 weeks, then either bottle or keg. Aim to carbonate the beer to around 2.8 volumes of CO₂. If your Love Buzz clone was aging for more than 3 months and you plan on bottle conditioning, we recommend pitching either a neutral wine yeast or brewer’s yeast such as Lallemand’s CBC-1.

Extract with grains option:
Replace the grains in the all-grain recipe with 4 lbs. (1.8 kg) wheat dried malt extract, 2 lbs. (0.91 kg) Pilsen dried malt extract, and 8 oz. (0.23 kg) crystal malt (60 °L). Place your crushed grains in a grain bag and place in 6 gallons (23 L) of water in your kettle. Heat until temperature reaches 170 °F (77 °C), then remove the grain bag and add the first wort hops. When the water comes to a boil, remove from heat and add the dried malt extracts and stir thoroughly to dissolve and then return to a boil for 60 minutes. Follow the remaining portion of the all-grain recipe.

Tips for Success:
Unless you invest in oak barrels and don’t mind transferring the beer back and forth, the nuances of Love Buzz are going to be difficult to achieve at home. You could try to add the oak when you pitch the saison yeast instead of at the time of pitching the Brett B, since this may better simulate the oak-barrel fermentation that Love Buzz undergoes. But this may be a challenge if you need to transfer the beer into another vessel for secondary fermentation. A conical fermenter allowing for a yeast dump would be helpful in this situation. Otherwise, save the oak for secondary fermentation. Also if you are having trouble acquiring the suggested saison blends, you can try making your own blend based on the strains more widely available. There are several strains now commercially available of Brettanomyces bruxellensis. Finding the strain that is most appealing to you would be ideal. You could utilize dregs of a favorite beer, but Gabe states that Anchorage Brewing Co. pitches a neutral wine yeast strain at the time of bottling, so using the dregs from a bottle of their beer most likely will not get you the results you are after.

This recipe calls for fresh rose hips. We would recommend that you first smash the fruit, then freeze the rose hips in order to help open the fruit up. If fresh rose hip is not available, dried rose hips can be substituted. Cut the quantity by 1⁄4 if you plan to use dried rose hips.