Hill Farmstead Everett Clone

My thought was that the lactose, being not fully fermentable, helps achieve the 1.030+ finishing gravity. Plus, while I may be wrong, Hill Farmstead Everett simply tastes like it has a small lactose addition. A little milk in the coffee keeps it from being too roasty and bitter

 

RECIPE UPDATE 3: upped the caramel malt, roasted barley, and mash temp a bit, while dialing back the pale malt and ibu's slightly. also moved the hop addition from 60 min to 30 minutes. also adjusted my efficiency numbers to what they should be closer to for my normal brew day.

11.25 gallon batch
35# grain + 2# lactose addition
74% brewhouse efficiency
79% mash extraction efficiency (remove lactose from recipe formulation when calculating actual malt extraction)

28# pale malt (75.7%)
4# caramel 80 (10.8%)
1# 12oz chocolate malt (4.7%)
1# 4oz roasted barley (3.4%)
2# lactose (5.2%)
2oz columbus @ 30 minutes (26.5 ibu's)

1.087 OG
1.031 FG
7.45 abv
WLP002 English Ale Yeast (since I don't have fresh HF dregs)

Mash around 155F
90 minute boil

RO water with salt additions that favor a malt forward flavor profile

 

Brewed this one today and my numbers were a little different than the plan. Most by design, a few by circumstance. Here is what I ended up with....

11.25 gallon batch
38# grain + 1# lactose addition
77% brewhouse efficiency
79% mash extraction efficiency (remove lactose from recipe formulation when calculating actual malt extraction)

28# pale malt (71.8%)
2# chocolate malt (5.1%)
2# roasted barley (5.1%)
3# caramel 80 (7.7%)
2# carapils (5.1%)
1# caramel 120 (2.6%)
1# lactose (2.6%)
2.5oz columbus @ 20 minutes (28 ibu's)

1.095 OG
would have been 1.092 w/o the lactose, which still would have been 5 points above target. This is mainly due to my improved brewhouse efficiency today. But in part, it's due to the extra 2 pounds of grain I added to the recipe.

I decided to add the lactose because I wanted to clearly compare my version of this beer (with lactose) to an actual bottle of HF Everett. Perhaps it was still the wrong idea and comparing my version without lactose to an actual bottle would have been a better way to go. But I added the lactose and now I should at least be able to clearly detect whether lactose is in the HF version or not. The cost of that decision is that if I don't believe lactose is in the HF version, I won't really be able to tell how close my base is to HF Everett now that I added lactose to my base. So again, probably not the best decision for a clone attempt but I'm sure my beer will be tasty regardless of whether it's an accurate clone attempt or not.

Also, I planned on fermenting exclusively with WLP002 English but used 1 vial of WLP002 + 1 vial of WLP004 Irish instead. That's what I bought at the homebrew store by mistake and I just decided to roll with it. My guess is that the slightly higher attenuation rating of WLP004 will help get this beer down to the proper FG (1.031) in spite of the starting OG being 8 points too high. So if all goes according to plan on the cold side, the resulting clone attempt will be about 1% abv higher than the real deal.

 

I love the "day after" look back at a brew day. In retrospect, my preliminary thoughts about yesterdays brew include:

1. I set out to do a clone and ended up making the beer I wanted instead
2. My grain profile is basically that of an Imperial Stout with extra caramel malt and a dash of lactose
3. The "real deal" is probably more along the lines of:

76.4% pale
9.7% caramel 80
5.6% carapils
4.9% chocolate
3.5% roasted barley

 

Just took a gravity reading 52 hours after pitching (beer was at full krausen when I checked on it 18 hours after pitching) and I'm down from 1.095 OG to 1.035 SG so far. Hydrometer sample was sweet, silky, and didn't have much of a detectable roast character at this stage. Color looks pretty spot on (based on my memory of Everett) and I'm excited to see what becomes of this beer. Kind of nervous about my measly 28 ibu's trying to balance the sweetness out, but I'll have to let it ride!

 

Actually, if the resulting beer is too sweet I can probably dry hop 1 keg with a small amount of columbus. If I give the dry hops prolonged contact time they will produce some perceived dryness which might help to take the edge off. I'll leave the other keg plain and drink it sweet of course.

 

Gravity is down to 1.031 and a recent hydro sample tasted much better than the previous one.

Still not a big roast character, but definitely a tasty malt presence now. I should probably also mention that I decided (at the last minute) to cold water extract the roasted barley that went into this batch. So I'm sure that is also factoring into the lack of a big roast character.

I'll also mention that my actual mash schedule on brew day was 40 minutes @ 155F, then 20 minutes @ 160F

I'll probably be kegging this one next week and will post again after I try it in mid-October.

 

Kegged but conditioning still.....

 

Haven't done a side by side comparison with Everett yet, but plan on doing one soon. Will report in more detail after I don.

I know I made three distinct mistakes on my clone that will already separate the two.

1. Mistakenly bought 1 vial of wlp002 and 1 vial of wlp004 instead of 2x wlp002. The irish ale fruitiness comes through and isn't correct.

2. Fermented a bit on the warm side, producing a touch of unwanted alcohol presence

3. Overshot my starting gravity and ended up with an 8.4% beer instead of a 7.3% beer