NHC 2009 both Ken Gosmann and Vinnie Chilurzo said that they hae fiven out the “recipe” for their famous beers, but you could only get close, as you don’t have their ingredients, equipment, or process. As i say often a recipe is a list of ingredients and how to process them. Most homebrewers will ignore that last part.
In 2018 Sierra Nevada sponsored a “collaboration brew” of Resilience IPA. They published the recipe and encouraged breweries to brew it and donate their profits to a fund to provide relief for victims of the Camp fire, near the Sierra Nevada headquarters in Chico. Over a thousand breweries participated. A homebrewer’s version was also published (Sierra Nevada Resilience IPA - Beer Recipe - American Homebrewers Association ). This provided an interesting opportunity to sample the same recipe brewed at different locations. I personally tried the Sierra Nevada version, my own version, and a couple from local breweries. They were all similar but definitely not the same!
I would LOVE to do that! This beer was brewed almost 2 years ago. So that will not happen. And we have to factor in the bottles of Weihenstephaner we used for comparison would not taste like the beer in the homeland.
However, a slight modification on this recipe got us a couple Gold Medals (Munich Helles / Oktoberfest), and a ticket to the Best Of Show judging at the Bluebonnet National, in 2021. I cannot take any credit for the awards, as it is all talent on loan from God.
This was with W-34/70 yeast…which we no longer care for, or use.
It is not unlike airplanes, and WWII replicas. I built a replica P-51D Mustang. It looks nice, flies nice, and to many folks looks like the real thing…but it is not.
My experience with these clone recipes for PAs or IPAs is to increase the amount of hops by 50% or so. My theory is that commercial brewers have access to fresher hops than we homebrewers have. Once I started jacking up the hops I became way happy with my hoppier beers.
I’ve brewed the clone and as others said it’s not even in the ballpark. Now a Cascade/Briess 2 row smash with the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale yeast fermented around 67F is really good!
Good to know. I am hoping to have a crop of Cascade in the near future. How much 2 row and cascade and when did you add? Any info would be awesome as I can put it on my list of tries
