Carlton Draught Grain Bill?

[iralosavic]

What would the taste result be if I met Nick JD half way?

ie 85% Pale Malt, 5% Light Crystal, 10% Sugar

 

[bradsbrew]

What would the taste result be if I met Nick JD half way?

ie 85% Pale Malt, 5% Light Crystal, 10% Sugar

Get rid of the crystal. What mash temp? What yeast? What ferment temp? More to it than just the recipe.



Cheers

 

[ged]

I'd avoid crystal and go for:

89.6% pils
0.4% roast barley
10% sugar

 

[iralosavic]

Get rid of the crystal. What mash temp? What yeast? What ferment temp? More to it than just the recipe.



Cheers

66c, s189, 12c.

I appreciate that crystal will take the recipe away from being a clone - just curious as to the effect from adding crystal (as per Nick's suggestion for a better tasting APA), while keeping some of the good old cheaparsed CUB style sugar.

 

[iralosavic]

I'd avoid crystal and go for:

89.6% pils
0.4% roast barley
10% sugar

Interesting clone idea. The roasted barley would take the pils colour up and contribute to dryness without lowering the pils/sugar ratio. 10% sugar still seems low from what the rest of the fellas are saying though.

 

[ged]

10% sugar by weight / grain bill probably approximates 15% by extract
I've got a Braumeister so I do a stepped mash (52 for 20, 63 for 30-40, 72 for 20, mashout)
Previously I've done single infusion but would go down to 64.
BTW what the hell is wrong with wanting to clone an Aussie lager? There's a role for a crisp summer beer - they don't need to all taste like full bodied US APAs.

 

[bradsbrew]

66c, s189, 12c.

I appreciate that crystal will take the recipe away from being a clone - just curious as to the effect from adding crystal (as per Nick's suggestion for a better tasting APA), while keeping some of the good old cheaparsed CUB style sugar.

If you were making an APA the crystal would be fine but your making a lager? The crystal would give more sweetness. The adding of sugar and lower mash (IMO 66 is to high for style, 64 would suit me better) is more about lowering the body and increasing the percieved dryness. When I add sugar it has nothing to do with cost its more for body/style/beer.



Cheers

 

[ged]

ps you could drop the RB even further - this gives an EBC of around 11 which is at the upper end of a straw golden colour. You could halve it and get an EBC 8. That's 15g in a 45L batch or only 8g in a 23 L batch!

 

[iralosavic]

10% sugar by weight / grain bill probably approximates 15% by extract
I've got a Braumeister so I do a stepped mash (52 for 20, 63 for 30-40, 72 for 20, mashout)
Previously I've done single infusion but would go down to 64.
BTW what the hell is wrong with wanting to clone an Aussie lager? There's a role for a crisp summer beer - they don't need to all taste like full bodied US APAs.

I'm honestly not sure how to calculate the percentage by extract, as all I use is beersmith/brewmate, which seem to go by weight. Thanks for clearing up the 5% difference though.

I don't see why I couldn't do a stepped mash in my e-kettle BIAB setup, I'd just have to manually stir during the ramp ups. I'm definitely getting the feeling that a lower single infusion mash will achieve a closer end result. Yes, it will be light bodied, but that is the idea for this style.

Personally, I prefer my lagers with a bit more body and a more prevolent maltiness than CD, but that's not the purpose of this enquiry. Although, as Nick pointed out, Carlton Draught is a fair bit maltier than the other Aussie megaswills, so I don't feel overly embarrassed to actually enjoy it on tap from time to time. Understanding how such a beer is made will help me to come up with my own recipe to suit both myself and my guests; who, while less adventurous than me, still appreciate the difference between mass-produced Aussie lagers and a home brew made with deliberation.

 

[stux]

Excuse my ignorance, but how do you calculate a percentage in that manner? I went to have a fiddle with Beersmith, but realised my trial period has expired, so I need to organise getting a key. Cheers

A good estimate is 80% of of your initial grain bill is available, then of younger 80% of that into your boiler

So for a 5KG Grain bill 4Kg of extract is available, if you get 80% efficiency into your kettle, that's 80% of 4KGs. Ie 3.2Kg

15% of 3.2KG is 480g

It depends on your efficienciny into kettle

 

[Jazzafish]

I have it on good authority (ex brewer) that they use only Pilsner malt and sugar. Percentages weren't discussed, but they perform a 3 step mash (protien, sacc,mashout) to high gravity. In the mash they also add enzymes to help the conversion along with calcium carbonate for hardness and pH. They dilute the high gravity wort into the fermenter and ferment much warmer than we could get away with (fermenter geometry of tall conicals help here). They also touch up post ferment with varied amounts of tetra hop bitterness extract/malt extract/sugar/De-oxygenated water/ethanol to achieve spec. All the usual preservative 220, PPPV and filtration etc... More laboratory brewing than craft brewing.

So cloning this beer is going to be a challenging exercise on a regular home brew rig. That said, making a beer like this on your home brew rig in a traditional non extract method is a great way to dial in your brewery and process.

One challenge is attenuation. To clone this beer, I'd take a gravity reading of the real thing. This will give you your target final gravity. Take the alcohol percentage and you can figure out the target OG based on your yeasts attenuation. Hitting your final gravity will be rather important in this brew. I'd also suggest a target of 18IBU's using pride of ringwood at 60mins.

The other challenge is colour. The more sugar you add, the lighter the colour will be and I doubt you will get the same darkening on a home brew system. So the suggestion of a crystal malt makes sense in a colour point of view, but it will trhow the flavour out. If you can get sinimar extract to touch up in the fermenter then awesome. If not, try a longer and harder boil.

Keep us posted on how yo go

 

[Thirsty Boy]

CUB are happy to let it's customers know that they pile into their CD an extra burst of sulfur dioxide as a preservative, I can foward you their emails if u like

really? - do send the emails, because as a matter of fact the dosage of sulphur in CUB beers is so low that it doesn't even have to be declared as an ingredient. read the side of the bottle - do you see it listed as an included preservative?

far, far, far, far less S02 in any australian beer, cub, megaswill or otherwise than there is in virtually any wine you care to name. there is metabisulphite added, but its a really quite surprisingly small amount, or you'd see it on the label.

 

[levin_ae92]

I'm pretty sure that most of the sulphur in cub beers comes from their yeast

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I have it on good authority (ex brewer) that they use only Pilsner malt and sugar. Percentages weren't discussed, but they perform a 3 step mash (protien, sacc,mashout) to high gravity. In the mash they also add enzymes to help the conversion along with calcium carbonate for hardness and pH. They dilute the high gravity wort into the fermenter and ferment much warmer than we could get away with (fermenter geometry of tall conicals help here). They also touch up post ferment with varied amounts of tetra hop bitterness extract/malt extract/sugar/De-oxygenated water/ethanol to achieve spec. All the usual preservative 220, PPPV and filtration etc... More laboratory brewing than craft brewing.

So cloning this beer is going to be a challenging exercise on a regular home brew rig. That said, making a beer like this on your home brew rig in a traditional non extract method is a great way to dial in your brewery and process.

One challenge is attenuation. To clone this beer, I'd take a gravity reading of the real thing. This will give you your target final gravity. Take the alcohol percentage and you can figure out the target OG based on your yeasts attenuation. Hitting your final gravity will be rather important in this brew. I'd also suggest a target of 18IBU's using pride of ringwood at 60mins.

The other challenge is colour. The more sugar you add, the lighter the colour will be and I doubt you will get the same darkening on a home brew system. So the suggestion of a crystal malt makes sense in a colour point of view, but it will trhow the flavour out. If you can get sinimar extract to touch up in the fermenter then awesome. If not, try a longer and harder boil.

Keep us posted on how yo go

your ex brewer is at least 50% full of it - i can say that with confidence given that yesterday I personally made approximately 1/2 a million liters of Carlton Draught, and completely failed to do a number of the things you mentioned. However quite a few of the things you say are indeed spot on. High Gravity, trimming bittering, deoxygenated water etc etc

Pale lager malt from Barret Burston, not pilsner - lager malt. you will struggle to replicate CUB's malt because we have a proprietary blend. But BB pale malt will be pretty close.

Hop extract from the CUB brewery's own production plant. ISO from your HB shop will do the trick. 18-20 IBus will get you pretty close. No tetra at all, tetra is completely different and tastes different to normal isomerised extract.

A combination of Sugar Syrup and a high Maltose syrup is what we use - I personally just use table sugar when I try to brew an aussie lager.

No plant matter type hops in Carlton Draught at all, just pre-isomerised extract, and no crystal malt or RB, just brewers caramel. So for a home brewer the nearest thing would be sinmar from weyerman (as suggested) or possibly a very small amount of a very dark crystal. RB will give you a noticable nuttiness, even in amounts low enough to give you the small colour increase you need, and that would imho be worse than the slight flavour impact of a little dark crystal.

now, all that will bet you "closer" to CD - but you still wont get exactly there because you arent a big production brewery, and you haven't go the propriatery yeast etc etc - and if you cant nail it.... then you might as well go for better. Ai think your suggestion of meeting Nick JDs recipe halfway to the "suggested" sugar amount is a great one.

BB Pale malt, 5-10% by weight sugar, POR to 20ish IBUs, mash at 65, 34/70 or S189 fermented "high" by their standards. Good beer, with a similarity to Carlton Draught. The clearer and drier, the more like the riginal product it will be.

TB

 

[Thirsty Boy]

I'm pretty sure that most of the sulphur in cub beers comes from their yeast

yes, thats correct.

 

[_HOME_BREW_WALLACE_]

your ex brewer is at least 50% full of it - i can say that with confidence given that yesterday I personally made approximately 1/2 a million liters of Carlton Draught, and completely failed to do a number of the things you mentioned. However quite a few of the things you say are indeed spot on. High Gravity, trimming bittering, deoxygenated water etc etc

Pale lager malt from Barret Burston, not pilsner - lager malt. you will struggle to replicate CUB's malt because we have a proprietary blend. But BB pale malt will be pretty close.

Hop extract from the CUB brewery's own production plant. ISO from your HB shop will do the trick. 18-20 IBus will get you pretty close. No tetra at all, tetra is completely different and tastes different to normal isomerised extract.

A combination of Sugar Syrup and a high Maltose syrup is what we use - I personally just use table sugar when I try to brew an aussie lager.

No plant matter type hops in Carlton Draught at all, just pre-isomerised extract, and no crystal malt or RB, just brewers caramel. So for a home brewer the nearest thing would be sinmar from weyerman (as suggested) or possibly a very small amount of a very dark crystal. RB will give you a noticable nuttiness, even in amounts low enough to give you the small colour increase you need, and that would imho be worse than the slight flavour impact of a little dark crystal.

now, all that will bet you "closer" to CD - but you still wont get exactly there because you arent a big production brewery, and you haven't go the propriatery yeast etc etc - and if you cant nail it.... then you might as well go for better. Ai think your suggestion of meeting Nick JDs recipe halfway to the "suggested" sugar amount is a great one.

BB Pale malt, 5-10% by weight sugar, POR to 20ish IBUs, mash at 65, 34/70 or S189 fermented "high" by their standards. Good beer, with a similarity to Carlton Draught. The clearer and drier, the more like the riginal product it will be.

TB

My god...... I take my hat off to you evil megaswill brewer / sir :lol: I thank you for giving everyone on here such a direct push in the right direction.
I too have been playing around with recipies that resemble close to the above (and other megaswill) but will be more inclined to jump in and try this approach now.

Thanks TB! :icon_cheers:

 

[Thirsty Boy]

happy to help, but its nothing you cant get from the tour guides if you take ther brewery tour - and combine that with what you know as an AG homebrewer.

I'd love to be able to tell you guys exactly whats in it and all the time, temp, spec details - but not as much as I love having a job, so i keep it to stuff that I know for sure CUB is happy to tell people. And besides, its a HB forum - people dont really want to exactly clone a mega beer, they'd just go buy it - they just want some clues on how to make something thats "like" a beer they find friendly and familiar.

Oh - OP, to calculate the extract I just use promash. Or you should be able to look at the extract potential of the grain in your software ingredients list. For instance Aus pale lager malt is about 79% extract. so for every kg of grain, you can potentially get 790g of extract - and if you get 75% efficiency out of your mash tun, then you get .75x790=593g of sugar in your kettle. Sugar on the other hand is 100% extract and you add it to your kettle at 100% efficiency. So if you made a beer and used 20% sugar by weight - that would actually equate to 200/593 x 100 = 34% of the extract

I'll let you reverse enigineer the maths to get you to the percentage you decide to use.


cheers and happy New Year

TB

 

[MHB]

Not a beer I personally have even a slight interest in brewing, but recognise and respect the skill that goes into being able to consistently produce beer on the scale that the mega brewers work on.

Scale and the effect of sheer size on the beer is one of the things home brewers often over look when they are trying to emulate a commercial beer, its imposable to make exactly the same beer even if you had the exact recipe and were given all the ingredients including the yeast and in this case hop extract.
Just to sight one example, think about the effect on yeast of brewing in a 60 meter tall fermenter, given the beer is over gravity so assume somewhere around 1.065 (could be higher up to the low 1.070s)
From p = Density X Head X g = 1.065 X 60 X 9.81 = 626 kPa acting on the yeast at the bottom of the tank, even if you took home fresh brewery wort and yeast the beer would be noticeably different.
In modern high speed commercial brewing the yeast pitch rates can be very high, much higher than a home brewer would consider reasonable (4 million cells per mL per point of Plato and above). Naturally the heat produced during fermentation requires immense cooling capacity in the case of CUB I believe its liquid Ammonia jackets on the fermenters

When trying to make a clone we have to look at the beer we want and often do some considerable working around rather than make an exact copy, that or buy a very large brewery.
Mark

 

[Nick JD]

Is the fermenting beer in the huge fermenters circulated? Or does convection manage to counter the pressure gradient?

 

[Jazzafish]

your ex brewer is at least 50% full of it - i can say that with confidence given that yesterday I personally made approximately 1/2 a million liters of Carlton Draught, and completely failed to do a number of the things you mentioned. However quite a few of the things you say are indeed spot on. High Gravity, trimming bittering, deoxygenated water etc etc

Pale lager malt from Barret Burston, not pilsner - lager malt. you will struggle to replicate CUB's malt because we have a proprietary blend. But BB pale malt will be pretty close.

Hop extract from the CUB brewery's own production plant. ISO from your HB shop will do the trick. 18-20 IBus will get you pretty close. No tetra at all, tetra is completely different and tastes different to normal isomerised extract.

A combination of Sugar Syrup and a high Maltose syrup is what we use - I personally just use table sugar when I try to brew an aussie lager.

No plant matter type hops in Carlton Draught at all, just pre-isomerised extract, and no crystal malt or RB, just brewers caramel. So for a home brewer the nearest thing would be sinmar from weyerman (as suggested) or possibly a very small amount of a very dark crystal. RB will give you a noticable nuttiness, even in amounts low enough to give you the small colour increase you need, and that would imho be worse than the slight flavour impact of a little dark crystal.

now, all that will bet you "closer" to CD - but you still wont get exactly there because you arent a big production brewery, and you haven't go the propriatery yeast etc etc - and if you cant nail it.... then you might as well go for better. Ai think your suggestion of meeting Nick JDs recipe halfway to the "suggested" sugar amount is a great one.

BB Pale malt, 5-10% by weight sugar, POR to 20ish IBUs, mash at 65, 34/70 or S189 fermented "high" by their standards. Good beer, with a similarity to Carlton Draught. The clearer and drier, the more like the riginal product it will be.

TB

Thanks Thirsty Boy,

I think the error is more on my interpretation... I was recalling a conversation from around 5 years ago. Happy to stand corrected