Extract Heady Topper "Like" Clone - Recipe Review

For the hop schedule I would recommend checking out signpostbrewing.com's recipe. I did their version 3.0 (which includes turbinado sugar) and took a taste last night while taking a gravity reading - it was so Headylike. I'm excited for this one.

I used Magnum/Warrior for the bittering contribution to get to the right level of IBUs instead of the Hopshot/extract.

 

You can get all your IBUs from late hopping (aka hop bursting), without necessarily needing a 60 minute addition. I think you'll have a pretty tasty beer from this recipe.

that's 0.75 each of all four, 1.5 each of all four etc ... right?

That's about a "metric shit-ton" of hops. I think it will be tasty.

 

To me this beer demands a hop spider, otherwise loss to trub and hop material will be about 4.5 gallons.

 

You are missing your bittering addition, be it from hops, or hops extract at the start of the boil.

The key to the beer being so great, is the late additions, hop stands, and dry hopping. Hit it all pretty late, and just give it one big ol' charge early to bitter.

 

I'd be adding some sugar as well, some LME can have problems attenuating for some reason. I have never personally experienced this, but my LHBS has super fresh LME.

 

For me n=1, so...

On my PtE pseudo-clone, I used a pretty big charge early (3oz) to get (nearly) all the IBUs, then added six ounces of various hops at flameout (and nothing at any other times, other than dry hops). Came out great.

That being said, you'll still be fine with the hop bursting method you chose too. The APA IPA was nearly all late additions/hop bursting, and it also came out great.

I'd like to do a side-by-side comparison of a similar recipe using both methods and see how they compare.

 

Okay, I'm not disputing how cool hop bursting is if you want to throw it all in late, but that wasn't what I was talking about.

He's asking about trying to get the clone somewhat as close, since he's using extract. He wasn't saying he was going to hop burst at all, and even asked why there wasn't an early addition for bittering.

He pulled parts from other peoples guesses, and missed where people were all using a big charge of something like Magnum, Nugget, or something clean to get their roughly 80-100 IBU's.

He's going to have a damn mess trying to toss all those hops in that late to get himself somewhere to the 100+ IBU's and calculate it all out enough to manage to get the flavor he wants as well as the bitterness.

You aren't really looking for a smoother bittering note in the beer anyways.

But anyways...

 

One other thing that the signpost site had - I was looking up the newest recipe to see how much Apollo hops they used and I saw this:

This sounds like a possible alternative for the mythical ECY-29. I have no idea which company would make this (the letters don't fit either White Labs or Wyeast's format and for some reason I'm not seeing Safale or Danstar making a dry version of this before the wet guys get to it. Either way, it sounds promising.

 

Ah, didn't quite get that the first time around.

It is true that a lot of hops in a beer will likely be a tad messy... mostly in that you're pretty much guaranteed to lose some volume to the hops. Boil-overs are going to be ugly if you don't pay attention, which is also messy. I didn't do the math on his plan, so can't really comment there. OP, did you use beersmith or some program to figure out your hops for this one? A bittering charge may be the ticket to get that many IBUs, whilst still leaving room for lots of late flavor and aroma hops.

 

I would use the one(s) with the highest AA for bittering. You don't need to make major changes, BTW. But you could add a lot of IBUs early with a small amount of hops, but still put plenty of them in late too.

Definitely get centennial and simcoe in there late, and the others according to your taste. I don't think there's just one way to do it with those hops.

I like the dry hop schedule too.

Beersmith is worth the price if you're doing hand calculations. It's worth the price anyway.

 

Is there wheat malt in HT that I'm oblivious to?

 

If you didn't have cultivated Conan, what would you use? I suppose I could trade for some Heady but as long as we are rolling extract and a pseudo-clone already, I'd like to pump a batch out before summer.