Recipes
Perennial Artisan Ales’ Anniversaria clone
St. Louis, Missouri-based Perennial Artisan Ales’ anniversary ale, Anniversaria, is blended via solera. Their goal isn’t to release the same beer each year, but as brewer Jonathan Moxey put it, “create a thread that will run through each year’s release.”
Gordon Strong’s American Wheat
Recipe author Gordon Strong states, “My recipe is towards the upper end of the strength range for the style since I don’t think of the style as purely a summer quencher. Feel free to scale it down to around 4.5% ABV if you do want it more sessionable.”
Nitro Stonefruit Sour
The vanilla helps to make a more sherbet-like balance. You can add lactose to taste at packaging if you want more sweetness. The hop extract increases head retention, improving the perceived creaminess of the body and appearance of the beer. Lowering the pH before souring reduces protein breakdown by the bacteria, improving body and head retention.
Bierstadt Lagerhaus’ Slow Pour Pils clone
Slow Pour Pils is aptly named due to the 5-min duration that a proper, multi-step pour of it demands. What you’ll be rewarded with is a strikingly clear, straw-colored beer served in Bierstadt’s trademarked tall, narrow glass. Search as hard as you’d like, you won’t find a fault. Instead, the high-quality German Pils malt and hops, specifically Hallertau Mittelfrüh, shine brightly. Dry biscuit, crackery malt, and hints of honey more than support the white pepper and floral hops. It’s decidedly bitter with a dry, crisp finish that encourages the drinker to immediately take another sip.
A Beer to Guard
Recipe author Horst Dornbusch states of the style, “The brew is not refined, but it is not coarse either. Instead, it is full-bodied and hearty, slightly fruity, unabashedly strong in alcohol and has a medium hoppiness — but with a powerfully malty, almost Port-like, finish. Bière de garde is clearly a sipping, not a quaffing, beer. I simply love bière de garde . . . but when it comes to beer, I’m a hopeless romantic!”
Choc clone
This beer has had many different variants. This clone recipe is close to the current version, which is a cloudy, unfiltered wheat/barley beer with some funky ale flavors, 4.0% alcohol, lots of fruitiness from a warm fermented Hefeweizen yeast. Choc is bottle conditioned, and not filtered prior to bottling, so it can have large amounts of sedimentation at the bottom of the bottle. There is also a bit of lemony flavor to Choc, typical of a wheat beer.
Dixie Brewing Co.’s Dixie clone
Dixie is an American Pilsner style beer, with adjunct levels a bit lower than most of “Grandpa’s beers.” This extra maltiness gives a bit more robust flavor to it, and a slightly darker color. Its yeast flavor leans more toward the Pilsner style, but uses American hops so that their characteristic citrus flavor comes through.
Olympia Premium Lager Beer clone
Olympia has a very clean flavor, a little malt flavor, a little corn flavor and a little rice flavor, with just a bit of citrus from American hops. There is debate whether the “new” version brewed in California is as good as the original version brewed in Olympia, WA. Afterall, supposedly: “It’s the water.”
Petit Saison
The inspiration for this beer was a play on De Baets’ remarks that traditional saisons were low gravity and heavily hopped. When it was still brewed with the Rodenbach strain, De Ranke’s XX Bitter was a rough approximation of a traditional saison, but with its cleaner character today you’ll have to brew your own for a taste of history. This recipe makes for a refreshing summer beer with the gravity dialed down and aromatics pushed to the fore.
Wheatwine
Gordon Strong provides readers with a recipe for a wheatwine. “Stan Hieronymus writes in Brewing with Wheat that wheatwine has its origins in modern American craft brewing, but that it was not intentional. A happy accident produced a higher gravity American wheat ale. The first modern commercial version is credited to Rubicon Brewing Company (Sacramento, California) in 1988, but many breweries now produce it as a limited edition winter release. Some examples are vintage-dated and oak-aged, suggesting they likely will continue to improve with age.”
Not-Quite-Amber Waves of Grain
The American wheats I’ve been tasting at competitions lately take the best of American pale ale, add some nice low-Lovibond character maltiness and wheat, and back off the IBUs so you can actually appreciate the flavors. This one was a silver medal winner at the Philly Homebrew Cup.
Summer Cellar BdG
Biére de Garde’s are a remarkably flexible beer that can be brewed as a pale, amber, or brown, depending on your preferences, pairings, or the season of service. This recipe aims right down the middle in terms of the style and its color/flavor options, and is a gold-medal-winning amber Bière de Garde (at the 2012 BUZZ Off, hosted by the BUZZ Homebrew Club in West Chester, Pennsylvania).
