OVHA Chat

I found a website that has some clone recipes for:
St. Bernardus Abt 12 clone
Westvleteren 12 clone
Chimay Grande Reserve (Blue) clone
De Koningshoeven La Trappe Quad clone
Gouden Carolus Classic clone
Westvleteren 6 Blonde clone


and much more. I thought about keeping it to myself but I thought maybe if I shared with the club there would be a better chance someone would brew one of the recipes and bring it to a club meeting.

http://www.candisyrup.com/recipes.html

good luck...

You can't drive from here to Belgium and you can't buy the yeast they make their ales with. They will sell you something they isolated under a microscope, lord knows when. From that incorrect variable, everyone is then guessing mash schedules/temps, water contents, local hops, and yadda yadda. But this is true for any beer and that doesn't make the yeast bad, but it is quite different.

My best advice is to ask yourself what you like best from these beers and what you don't like. Then play with variables to make a Chimay'like Belgian strong ale for instance, but with your personal taste twist. It's much less stressful and much more achieveable, not to mention enjoyable. I make an amber Brett that has some real similarities to Orval but is quite different. For one, I can't get myself to make a 6.2% ale. It goes against my personal religious beliefs when they finish under 7.

For these recipes, I would say that most are way overboard on the sugar content. I age quite a few of the brand ales listed and can tell you that with the amount of candy sugar shown on the recipes, aging is not going to be a good friend. However a few brands are high in sugar to taste, which I don't personally think is a good trait to try and reproduce. I think candy sugar has it's place, in a very small child seat sometimes hidden in the trunk. It's an obvious ingredient on any Belgian "clone" recipe but always fails to impress me no matter how many times I tried. Learn from budweiser, adjuncts don't equal good beer, they just improve your margin..

Regardless of your plan, brew some up and share.

Definitely agreed Jimmy! I was already thinking about scaling up the base malt and reducing the candi sugar! I know these clone recipes wont make an exact copy, even if you had the same yeast they are still probably off, but I thought the recipes looked pretty solid and would hopefully make a tasty beer