Captain Lawrence Kid gloves on Nathan

[ScootsieDoubleday]

There are lots of little tweaks that are made to the information the brewer provides. If we just took the information from the interview and brewed it, chances are it would not work out. You need to make lots of adjustments between a pro scale brew and a home scale brew and it isn't just the amount of grain.

Of course if you want to disagree with our consensus, since you weren't there and couldn't taste the beer.... I guess that makes perfect sense.

So, for those of us playing along at home:

Little tweaks = OK
Tasty's "artistic licence" = A little too far

[nahthan]

Thanks all for the feedback, that was definitely a show where the consensus was mixed! I honestly thought that to my palate it was 95%+ cloned. However, Jamil and Justin were definitely picking up other fermentation flavors that were undetectable to me - especially when it came to the dryness of the beer. To make sure I wasn't just fooling myself, I went back home & re-measured the gravity of the homebrew batch with a couple different hydrometers: 1.009. Very interesting. I think that the commercial beer is either finishing lower or maybe even starting lower (all the while keeping the same IBU, and the additional alcohol might increase the perceived sweetness) Keep those things in mind if you want to clone this beer exactly 100% as Captain Lawrence is. I think the homebrew recipe we gave will get you VERY close, and you can tune your equipment & process from there.
We were definitely going in blind on this one, having not tried the commercial beer beforehand. This recipe makes a great beer, and one that I'm definitely going to re-brew just for my own enjoyment. I might re-pitch off WLP530 from a fresh batch of Belgian Single, otherwise I don't plan to change it as far as other hops, malt, yeast or process.
Hopefully the discussion was an interesting follow-up to some other ideas and techniques that have been proposed on other Brewing Network shows, and the back & forth dialogue was entertaining.. Cheers!!

-Nathan

[jamilz]

So, for those of us playing along at home:

Little tweaks = OK
Tasty's "artistic licence" = A little too far

Well, I think the difference in this case was that Nathan was explaining the changes as a way to ensure he cloned the beer. If he said he made a change because he thought it would make a BETTER beer, then we would have slapped him down.

[Shooter]

I'm still anxious to see how some of the second attempts work on some of the non-cloned beers. I believe those shows will most likely feature several non-cloned beers in a single episode with a discussion of what changes were made and a new evaluation of the results.

I do sort of understand calling certain beers cloned when they are REALLY close and the differences can easily be explained away through some subtle process changes or aging. I don't know how much it would benefit everyone to rebrew something that close and then spend another 15-20 minutes discussing it again when that time could be spent on beers that were clearly off the mark.

All that being said, I also came away from the Captain Lawrence show with the question, "So, um, was that cloned or not?!?!"