GF Fat Tire Clone Attempt

I am attempting to create a clone of a Fat Tire Amber using GF ingredients. This is the recipe I have come up with. Let me know what you guys think.

3.3# Sorghum syrup (late addition)
2# Roasted Buckwheat
1.5# Roasted Steel Cut Oats
2# Brown Rice Syrup
2# Buckwheat Honey
1# Maltodextrin

yeast nutrient
irish moss

1 oz. WIllamette @ 60
.5 oz. Willamette @ 30

US-05 dry yeast

17 SRM
25.2 IBU's

1.060 OG
1.016 FG

5.9 ABV

Suggestions are very welcome!! I am concerned about this being too dry, but I am still trying to understand exactly what each ingredient does.

Are you steeping the roasted buckwheat and roasted oats?

I have never had the opportunity to taste Fat Tire, but the recipe itself looks good and should make a fine GF beer. I personally find that brown rice syrup goes well with sorghum. Buckwheat honey in my experience has added a nice dimension to the finished beer.

As far as being too dry, I wouldn't worry much. US-05 works well with GF fermentables.

I would be curious as to how the beer turns out. I might brew this in the future as an ale/lager split batch, using US-05 for half and W-34/70 (or S-23) for the other half.

I don't typically brew gluten free, but I can tell you that adding some fuggles brings regular gluteny brews closer to the real thing. My recipe has 1oz willamette at 60 and .5oz fuggles at 15 and 5. It is close to fat tire fresh on tap. Next time I may nix the 5 minute addition.

Not sure if/how to adjust that for a gluten free brew, though?

I am brewing this as we speak, and made a few adjustments to the recipe. I left out the steeped grains bc I isn't think they contributed to what I was looking for In The clone. Final recipe is

2.75# soybean honey
2# brs
3.3# sorghum @ 10

.5 styrian goldings @ 60
.5 Willamette leaf @ 60
.5 styrian @ 30
.25 Willamette @ 15
.25 Willamette @ 5
Dry hop 1 Columbus

Nutrient and Irish moss @ 10

Pitched us-05

Very excited about this one

Recipe and notes are at hopville. Search for la gallega amber

Makes 5 gallons? Also, how much Irish Moss and yeast nutrient?

Curious to see how this turns out....may need to add some roasted grains, molasses or candy syrup to get the color right....every sorghum/brs beer I have brewed comes out a lighter color without adding something else

Ya I thought the honey would be dark enough because its like buckwheat honey in color. I've been tasting my samples and it has fermented out to 1.014 and finally slowing. The taste is very mild but you can't always tell before bottling what the final will be like. I'm going to dry hop and hopefully bottling will bring out some depth. Ill update again on color when I rack.

I wanted to update on this. First, I was very off on my fg calculations. I used buckwheat honey stats to calculate the soybean honey, but that may have been a bad idea. My fg turned out to be 1.002, much lower than I had expected. After tasting samples, this is more of a Saison/witbier brew than an amber ale, but it tastes fantastic! I am going to brew this again as an intentional Belgian, and I think it will be amazing.

I racked to secondary this morning, and this is what I found. After almost three weeks in primary, how is it this cloudy? I am actually quite excited because if this isn't haze, I should able to replicate a wheat beer in look. This already has fantastic orange notes and if I switch up the hop schedule, in theory I could make a blue moon clone that is true in all aspects. My miscalculation in FG tells me that there is an unknown variable, and hopefully it is what has resulted in a hazy gf beer. Time will tell.

Was the buckwheat groats? If not where can i get unhulled buckwheat?

Cainepolo12 said:

I am brewing this as we speak, and made a few adjustments to the recipe. I left out the steeped grains bc I isn't think they contributed to what I was looking for In The clone. Final recipe is

2.75# soybean honey
2# brs
3.3# sorghum @ 10

.5 styrian goldings @ 60
.5 Willamette leaf @ 60
.5 styrian @ 30
.25 Willamette @ 15
.25 Willamette @ 5
Dry hop 1 Columbus

Nutrient and Irish moss @ 10

Pitched us-05

Very excited about this one

Recipe and notes are at hopville. Search for la gallega amber

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Is this the final recipe? I'm very interested in brewing a GF beer for a good friend. He has celiac disease and has not had a beer in 6 years.

His one didn't turn out well, so I would point you to some other recipes. RLBois' Dual Spires Black Lodge Ale is a popular one, as well as the IPA's by Spaced or Igliashon. Check those out for some ideas that have good reviews.

I have a friend that told me she pays 7usd for a 6 pack of GF Beer and though that was out of the world. I didn't tell her about the time I bought a 4 pack of 120DF. LOL

I told her that I would look into making her some beer, so this might be it.

$7 US for a 6-pack? Where is she getting that incredible deal? Out here in the SF Bay Area, a 4-pack of New Planet goes for $9...I guess a sixer of Redbridge might be found for $8 if you're lucky, but for $7 all you can get is a pint bottle of Green's...and it's plenty worth it, because Green's is the only commercial GF beer out here worth drinking. I occasionally pay $54 to get six 22's of Harvester's IPA shipped down here, which is $9 per 22-oz bottle (shipping is free, blessedly), because it's cheaper than driving 9 hours to Portland to buy the stuff in person.

igliashon said:

$7 US for a 6-pack? Where is she getting that incredible deal? Out here in the SF Bay Area, a 4-pack of New Planet goes for $9...I guess a sixer of Redbridge might be found for $8 if you're lucky, but for $7 all you can get is a pint bottle of Green's...and it's plenty worth it, because Green's is the only commercial GF beer out here worth drinking. I occasionally pay $54 to get six 22's of Harvester's IPA shipped down here, which is $9 per 22-oz bottle (shipping is free, blessedly), because it's cheaper than driving 9 hours to Portland to buy the stuff in person.

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My local party store just started carrying 4 packs of New Planet for $12. Red Bridge is $8 out the door.

Every beer I've made......better than either of them.

Jesus. You are paying $7 per bottle of Greens beer? That's about £4.50 a bottle. That's astronomical. The cost in my local supermarket for a bottle of Greens is £1.90! I understand there is shipping costs etc, but £2.60 per bottle just for shipping? Crazy. And it will be shipped in bulk.or have I got it all wrong and you are talking about in packs of 4 or 6 or something?

I can confirm that greens beer is 6-8 American dollars here in the states if you buy at a grocery store.

I have seen it in bars for 10-15.....yes it's ridiculous. You can see why Homebrew is the best option for gluten free...for both cost and quality concerns.

I think I have just found my new business venture. Importing Greens beer to America. Haha I thought it would at least be in a 4 or a 6 pack, but for one bottle? They sure saw you guys coming. Haha Dura or however you spell it, is about £6.50/£7 but that is at least for 4 bottles over here. I refuse to even buy that as I think it tastes rancid. Costs me between £7-£10 to make three Imperial Gallons, maybe not even that. Thats about $11-$15.

Is the Green's you get on your side of the pond the de-glutenized stuff, or the multi-grain gluten-free stuff (Endeavor, Quest, Discovery, etc.)? On their website they make it look like in the UK they only sell de-glutenized barley beers, while in North America they only sell multi-grain gluten-free beers. I imagine there'd probably be a significant price difference for a beer made with malted sorghum, malted buckwheat, malted quinoa, and malted millet, vs. a beer made with malted barley and treated with clarity-ferm. And yes, I know for a fact that Green's uses malted gluten-free grains in their export beers; I had a brief e-mail exchange with one of their brewers, where he explained that they use malted grains but occasionally have to add enzymes to get reliable conversion.

Also, $7 for a pint of Green's isn't so bad, considering it's the only decent gluten-free beer available nation-wide, and Harvester (which does occasionally make some very tasty beer, I've recently discovered) costs me $9 per 22 oz bottle to get shipped to California. Considering that most gluten-free grains are about 3x more expensive than malted barley (and chestnuts roughly 5x more expensive), it would make sense that real GF beers would be more expensive...but New Planet, Red Bridge, and New Grist piss me off with their inflated prices...they're friggin' EXTRACT beers that any homebrewer could replicate EXACTLY for less than 1/4 of the cost.

How so you get the harvester beer shipped? I'm on the east coast and would love to try their beer just have had no luck when trying to call/contact the brewery....is their ipa worth the cost? I guess that's all relative

Yeah, it's the De-Glutenised crap. I don't drink it. Figure if I am going to still drink a beer that has some gluten in it, I will just have normal beer. But that is only really when I am in the pub, and it about £2 a pint. other times its homebrew beer, wine, cider and mead. It's strange that 'normal' beer doesn't effect me (Not that I can physically see, anyway) yet probably due to the chemicals in De-Glutenised, it gives me a whopping head ache after 1 or two and a dodgy stomach. I looked at the Greens website the other day, and the ingredients just said De-Glutenised Barley. But then on another screen it said something about sorghum being used.

But I still find it wrong that they charge you that much, even if it is for multiple grain. I don't pay that much more for my grains than what another person would pay for wheat or barley.

mtbskier said:

How so you get the harvester beer shipped? I'm on the east coast and would love to try their beer just have had no luck when trying to call/contact the brewery....is their ipa worth the cost? I guess that's all relative

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I go through letspour.com; they only ship to some states (usually those with lax liquor laws), but it's the only way to get Harvester short of driving to Oregon. However, I recently heard from them that they're trying to figure out a way to do direct-from-brewery shipments; I'd recommend following them on facebook if you're not already. Their IPA is, hands down, the best gluten-free beer on the commercial market. It's totally not a traditional NW IPA; it's heavy on the Meridian hops (as is their pale ale), which is a very unusual new hop with a velvety floral thing happening, rather than the usual pine/citrus one expects in a NW IPA.

I was very unimpressed--disgusted, eve--with their dark ale, and found their pale and red ales pretty lacking, but the raspberry was pretty good (not sure if they're still making it). The fresh hop pale ale (which was a limited release) was much better than the usual pale; I just placed another order of 3 IPAs, a red, a dark, and a pale, as I want to give them a second chance. I wish I could get my hands on their squash ales, or any of their experimental batches (dark ale made with carob, dark ale made with coffee, IPA made with great northern beans instead of oats). I must say, I think the first time I tried them, my expectations got in the way; they do not taste like regular beer or anything like my homebrew. I'll be posting a "second look: Harvester" article on my blog once I've gotten a chance to drink them all a second time.

Ash_Mathew said:

Yeah, it's the De-Glutenised crap. I don't drink it. Figure if I am going to still drink a beer that has some gluten in it, I will just have normal beer. But that is only really when I am in the pub, and it about £2 a pint. other times its homebrew beer, wine, cider and mead. It's strange that 'normal' beer doesn't effect me (Not that I can physically see, anyway) yet probably due to the chemicals in De-Glutenised, it gives me a whopping head ache after 1 or two and a dodgy stomach. I looked at the Greens website the other day, and the ingredients just said De-Glutenised Barley. But then on another screen it said something about sorghum being used.

But I still find it wrong that they charge you that much, even if it is for multiple grain. I don't pay that much more for my grains than what another person would pay for wheat or barley.

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Hmmm, checking their site the PDF for their North American products says the beer is brewed with sorghum, millet, buckwheat and rice.

I'm headed out to a bar tonight that has Endeavor and Quest available. I'm going to give them a try.

I hear the fat tire ale clone is one of the hardest, after making they want you to store like a wine bottle. anyways: I have buddies that came down from Colorado and I made a Fat Tire Clone but made it with 120L and they were more impressed with my brew than the fat tire alone. i enjoy the fat tire and when i can drive up to Georgia I pick some up: here is what I did with my recipe and It Rocked:

Extract not all grain: back than i had no confident in All Grain

2 lb 2-Row Malt
1 lb Belgian Special B Malt
8 oz Crystal 120L
8 oz munich malt
4.5lb Amber Malt Extract
1 oz Northern Brewer Hops
2 oz Saaz Hops

Glad you had a success, mate--now, if you can figure out how to replicate it without using any form of wheat, barley, or rye, do come back and share it with us! This is the gluten-free forum.

I would say maybe this?


Dark Belgian syrup to replace Special B
Buckwheat Crystal
Malted and roasted millet
Golden Syrup/Amber Candi Syrup/Sorghum to replace Amber Malt
Hop Schedule the same

Maybe some flaked millet just for the hell of it? The protein in it may help the head... Just a thought though...

I hear ya 10-4 gonna have to figure this out: Id love to share success with all grain on this subject. this clone I am telling you is a very difficult find but must be conquered

Rebel Brewer sells an ingredient kit that I think does a good job of imitating Fat Tire. The kit is called the Fat Belgian. I have brewed it twice and enjoyed the outcome both times. JT

I work about five minutes from rebel brewer and I will double check but I don't believe that is a gf kit. Hope I'm wrong though. Good guys.

Cainepolo12 said:

I work about five minutes from rebel brewer and I will double check but I don't believe that is a gf kit. Hope I'm wrong though. Good guys.

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You are correct it is not GF did not closely read the post . JT

Looks like it will probably be a pretty tasty product in any event but I don't know that you'll get that characteristic taste most clones go after. The one I'd had the most success/satisfaction was closest to Wackybrew's recipe but as has been pointed out it's not GF.

The obstacle to me looks like it would be the biscuit-like flavor. I've been toying with some of Palmer's recommendations for toasting his own malts and later moved up with a biscuitish/victoryish type target to fairly decent success. I wonder if you could take the same approach with the Buckwheat (albeit probably in somewhat smaller quantities). Roasting just doesn't quite have the same flavor to me (although to be fair I'm drawing parallels to Roasted Barley primarily). And if the belgian syrup can replace some of the Special B I'd wager it'd provide enough sweet to skip the crystal-like sub entirely. That's just me though.

sounds like an interesting beer

Why are people brewing gluten free? The beer is not very good. I know that people will Celiac disease and a couple of others need to be gluten free but I understand that is rare. Just a question- not a confrontation.

Well, you have kind of just answered your own question there, dude. We are brewing Gluten Free beers because we cannot have gluten, but still want beer. Our beers are actually quite good. Perhaps, you have only tried commercial ones and are judging all gluten free beers on these?

It's actually not so rare as you think. 1 in 100 people in Great Britain have Coeliac Disease.

And there are an absolute **** ton of people who are not coeliac but are highly intolerant. Think eating month old Mexican food.