Enjoy By is a 50/50 mix of English and US base malt with some dextrose on top, word straight from the brewmaster. I imagine the US base malt is standard 2-row, the English could be Marris Otter, Golden Promise, not sure.
Mitch Steele did an article in Zymurgy recently about hop bursting and he mentioned Stone have had a lot of success with FWH in their beers. I thought that was rather interesting because as far as I know there isn't an "official" Stone recipe that calls for first wort hopping, maybe they use it in recipes that they haven't revealed to the public (Arrogant Bastard?).
Assuming Arrogant Bastard is what Stone say it is (their pale ale scaled incorrectly), Stone pale ale has about 1lb/bbl hops total. The pale ale uses about 30% of the hop weight for bittering and 70% for flavour/aroma in the whirlpool. If I scale the recipe up to 1.5lb/bbl and replace all the hops with Chinook, 30% weight at 90 minutes, 70% at whirlpool / hop stand, I get ~85 IBU (12.1% Chinook) which is interesting since that's pretty much exactly where people estimate the IBU's to sit.
Could just be coincidence of course but in a 5 gallon batch that's ~4oz hops total, 1.2oz at 90, 2.8oz at whirlpool.
TrickyDick's version is obviously too dark, according to what I can figure out his recipe amounts to around 23 SRM?
Using 90% base malt + 10% Caraaroma (~150 SRM) which is the malt I suggested earlier as a roastier replacement for Special B, no other malts, I calculate about 20 SRM which seems like it would be closer to the real colour?
I need to learn to multi quote....
I heard the Enjoy By used Golden Promise. That's what I used in my attempt. Very very close. mine not as bitter, but was battling boilovers and had to turn down intensity of boil. I also didn't use extract for mine. the nose and flavor were bullseye though. Its a great brew...
I'm not sure AB uses FWH. Seems too aggressively , no arrogantly, bitter for a FWH. That said, I'd love to experiment with tasting a brew done with FWH and without. I've done a few times, and truly I find it hard to discern a real "Wow this FWH bitterness is great" impact... but thats just me. From what I've read therefore, it seems the bitterness is huge in AB, and I'd be surprised that they got it that way with FWH. I'd bet that hop extract may be used though. Anyway... I think Chinook is the right Hop used. Whether or not they add any Athanum or not, who knows....
The Caraaroma usage was proposed earlier in the thread. I don't recall who. Has anybody brewed it with Caraaroma yet? FWIW, Beersmith predicts my SRM at 21.8 on that brew. I've noticed they come out a bit darker than intended. I haven't figured out why, but I suspect mis-labelled crystal malt sack (not this batch though). anyways...
I had proposed trying to do an experiment by adding steeped specialty grains, strained and the liquor boiled then cooled into 1 gallon jars/bottles. This will be blended with wort from a batch of AB clone brewed without any specialty grain. Racking near high krausen into 1 gal vessels each containing the appropriate dose of said cooled liquor. Multiple Mini mashed 1 gallon stovetop boil batches could do the same, but seems like that'd be more work. I haven't really committed to doing this yet, since I don't have any 1 gallon vessels to ferment in. Plus I still need to figure out how to do the proportions of malt properly. Ideally the specialty malts would be ones not requiring mashing, which I think is probably the case with the usual suspects in question here. Of course, in order for this to hone in on AB, the hops would need to be right from the get go. Mine were not quite there, but as I've previously mentioned, at that time I brewed, my burners weren't getting the boil as rigorous as they needed to, AND I didn't have whirlpool ability for steeping hops. The whirlpool seems to make a difference in the extraction of the flavor and aroma character in my opinion versus just a stand still steeping.
So I guess we need say 5 (though I often like to do 10 gal batches) candidates for the specialty malts for my experiment. I really wonder if anyone has tried this type of experiment and if it will really work as intended, for zeroing in on a clone recipe?
TD