If you are anything like myself, I drank beer long before I started brewing. After trying a handful of tasty craft beers, I decided to try my hand at creating something to call my own. I started off with a few recipes a friend had given me, and then moved onto trying to copy the beers I loved and purchased regularly. Cloning a beer you find on the shelf can be a great way to work your way into different styles and techniques you might not have otherwise.

The way I often find inspiration for my weeks brew is to head down to my local beer shop or the Safeway down the street (they have an surprising amount of good beer). I will find a style I haven’t tried yet, or one that I have liked in the past, and really try to break down the beer. I will usually sip at it while reading BeerAdvocate’s reviews to find out what others saw in it. I look for the malt and hop character in the nose and taste, trying to understand what the “theme” of the beer is. One of my favorite examples of this is the 21st Amendment’s Brew Free or Die! It has a malt flavor that I haven’t personally tasted in many other IPA’s, making it a unique and very tasty summer drinker. I consider that malt character to be the theme, the idea or inspiration behind it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a certain flavor, but just something that stands out about the beer (e.g. “I want to make a… light summer sipper, a citrus-y IPA, warm winter spice beer, traditional German lager”, etc.). The theme will help you focus on what your recipe will look like in the end.

Now, I’d like to preface the main portion of this post with 2 disclaimers:

What I said above about breaking down a beer should be taken with a pinch of salt. Everyone experiences beer differently, and E.B. White once said “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog still dies in the end.” This is how I feel about beer. Have fun with it, if you want to analyze it and tear it down to build it back up then feel free, but for some people drinking and brewing is just a chill hobby or something to do. I love learning about beer, but when it comes down to it, beer is beer. It is to be enjoyed.

This is just how I do things, as I am still new to this hobby and everyone has their own methods. I am writing this because I enjoy writing.

A few months ago I was talking to my dad about brewing (he doesn’t brew but enjoys a handful of craft beers and wines). He mentioned a beer by the name of Red Trolley. I did a bit of research, which I will go over in a second, and found a recipe to brew. I headed over and he brewed his first beer on my system. Once I was done with it all it came out quite similar to what we hand intended: a clone of the Trolley Ale. I would like to outline my method for finding a recipe that wasn’t widely brewed at already (I’m looking at you, Blue Moon).

I start with some google-fu. I tend to search terms like “[insert name of beer here] clone”, “recipe”, or “home brew”. A lot of the time you will find some forum postings on homebrewtalk, the brewery themselves, or brewing software websites (brewersfriend is my personal favorite).

I will click on the top 4 or 5 links to see what I can find. The first link here already has a recipe!

Now in this case, I felt like 3.25 pounds of crystal malt felt a bit excessive (I would recommend reading John Palmer’s run down of grains and their common percentages), so I pursued other sources. I kept this one in the back of my mind, though.

The next Google result had a poster who, like myself, was trying to find a recipe for this beer. I scrolled down and looked at the responses:

Awesome, here is a partial mash with some more reasonable specialty malt percentages. The next few results led me to Brewtoad, a popular brewing software website, where I found a few more extract or partial mash recipes. All consisting of caramel 60, 80, and carapils. I found one all grain recipe on Brewtoad that seemed to fit the bill.

Now at this point I felt relatively confident in that I could brew something like Red Trolley. I knew I would need around 1# pound of each caramel and about half as much carapils, with enough 2-row to meet my expected ABV of 5.8%( as outlined on the brewery’s webpage).

Off to make my recipe!!!

But wait, what if all these recipes are wrong? What if I found the world’s worst brewers and blog posters? This is why I always consult Brew Your Own:

Here is a respected resource on the BJCP guidelines on the style with a few sample recipes! It goes into detail as to where the style came from and what to expect from drinking and brewing one. Looking over the sample recipes it shares some consistency with what we have drawn up in our head. These happen to feature roasted barley, however, something we have not seen before in the other brewer’s malt bill. This is used for color and to add a bit of toasty flavor. From what I remembered from Red Trolley, it wasn’t packing those roasted flavors, but rather the caramel, biscuit-y flavors, so I felt like I could get away with doubling up on my caramel malts, and leaving the roasted barley.

Again, BYO is great to just kind of keep you on track. Obviously we had very different recipes than what the author brought in. That’s the beauty of brewing though, same style, but different recipes and many different finished drinks to sip and enjoy.

I drew up and tweaked my final recipe. I used the hop schedule from the first recipe result I got from Google (I hadn’t used Tettnanger and wanted an excuse to buy some). I mashed a bit higher than I usually do, 155, to conserve some texture and malt sweetness.

The result was pretty spot on!

My version is on the left (the cloudy one!). Here it is still young, ~4 weeks. I carbed for a week in the bottle and cold crashed for 24 hours to gauge how it was coming. I did a “blind” tasting of the two (had my fiance hand me them when I was closing my eyes) and I mistakenly chose my own as what I thought was the commercial example.

The malt flavor is definitely there, but the Red Trolley has a delicious hop aroma and flavor that was severely lacking in my version. I also don’t know what yeast the brewery uses, so that might have played a hand in how it turned out. When looking over my recipe, brewersfriend calculated a higher IBU (~18) than what Karl Straus Brewery posted on their website (17 IBU). I attributed my lack of hoppy-ness to the fact that since I brew on a small scale the extraction in the boil may not have been as effective as what I had intended.

I updated my recipe I mentioned above so it could accentuate the hops a bit more.

All done! I am satisfied with how close I came to my target. Next time I brew I think I will try a lager yeast just for shits and giggles. I hope you enjoyed reading, and I hope you all can enjoy this recipe!

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or come find me on reddit, u/darthkotor. Thanks for reading.