cloning or creating a beer from scratch...

ive been brewing beer from extract to all-grain for about 3 years now. im nothing thinking about stepping it up to creating or cloning a recipe from scratch. my favorite styles are lambics, saisons, pale ales and wilds. when i had a bottle of Anna from HF, i decided that i need to try and make this beer or similar.

The thing is, i dont even know where to start. i know its a saison, but how do i create a base recipe for this? all i know is that im going to culture and harvest the yeast and use that as the primary fermentation yeast and hope that gives me the flavors im looking for.

anyone care to share some tips?

I used to follow recipes but have recently gone away from them. I build my own trying to stick to the style. It requires some research, reading and drinking beers of that style. I am pretty much only making Vienna Lagers right now and plan on keeping that style up (European amber lager) till I perfect it. (I really like the way they taste lol)

Making a clone of a certain brand of beer is a different story and think its pretty hard for the home brewer to completely clone certain beer due to yeast strains. Aside from getting the exact strain from the brewery it's a shot in the dark.

Although not impossible i would say it's a bit more difficult than brewing to a style of beer.

website only says they use 20% raw wildflower honey. maybe base recipe for saison dupont to start with? something like 9.5# pilsner malt, ~2# wildflower honey, 4oz caramunich, and 8oz flaked wheat?

light on the hops, 1oz of a 5%AA like styrian goldings or something for bittering, and maybe 1/2oz EKG for 15 minutes (dunno if the original tastes of oranges or anything, if so also add 1/2oz bitter orange peel here as well), and 1/4oz of EKG for final 5 minutes. wyeast 3711 is a great saison yeast.

(Also, I just compiled this from their website and my recipe books, so if you brew it or anything similar, let me know how it goes )

Thanks. I'm also trying to find out on my own how to create something and what makes tastes like what.

Read designing great beers and wild beers, both will give you an insight to recipe formulation and explain what ingredients do what they do in beer.

In addition to the two books mentioned above, I'd suggest something like Clone Brews or another recipe book. I used them initially to clone beers I liked and then moved to looking at the similarities of grain bills and hop usage among beers of a particular style.

neosapien said:

website only says they use 20% raw wildflower honey. maybe base recipe for saison dupont to start with? something like 9.5# pilsner malt, ~2# wildflower honey, 4oz caramunich, and 8oz flaked wheat?

light on the hops, 1oz of a 5%AA like styrian goldings or something for bittering, and maybe 1/2oz EKG for 15 minutes (dunno if the original tastes of oranges or anything, if so also add 1/2oz bitter orange peel here as well), and 1/4oz of EKG for final 5 minutes. wyeast 3711 is a great saison yeast.

(Also, I just compiled this from their website and my recipe books, so if you brew it or anything similar, let me know how it goes )

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm might go with that recipe but I'll be harvesting and collecting the dregs from a bottle and use that. Now I have to search far and wide for that wild flower honey

I haven't had Anna, but I've had another saison from Hill Farmstead that had citrus zest in it, and it was lovely. I've had a couple of hoppy beers from him as well, and both were great.

My advice for cloning would be to do good old fashion research. I'd start with getting all of the basics about his ingredients. Then, email the brewer with a specific question about a specific process or ingredient. My experience is that most brewers are open to helping with questions, but they don't want to hand out recipes or give basic brewing advice that you can get by reading books, etc.

Then, browse around to see if anyone has info that they have garnered from him, or ask another question later with a difference piece of the puzzle. You won't make the exact same beer without a clone recipe (or even with a recipe, because his equipment and yeast will be different), but you'll have a much better chance of making something in the ballpark over time and with tweaking.

I enjoy cloning commercial beers that don't have public recipes. You could get started just by searching for Hill Farmstead Anna clone recipe and see where that takes you. I know there are some HF clones out there, you can read them and figure out if there are things they do similarly in each batch, like a certain base malt or a certain hop technique. Then apply that knowledge to the tasting notes of Anna and build a recipe. FWIW, Anna has Brett and bugs in it, it'd be very useful to get a bottle and pitch the dregs into whatever clone recipe you make.