Troegs Nugget Nectar Clone

This is one of my favorite beers. Anyone have a clone recipe for it?

I'm also interested in this one. It is SO delicious and yet depressingly out of reach at the 12.99/6pk price here in Ohio.

I'm a huge fan of the Hopback Amber Ale, got a case in the fridge now, and I've tried the Nugget Nectar on tap, also delicious. The flavors tasted very similar to me just a little more alcohol bite on the Nugget Nectar.
Anyway here's a link to the Hopback Amber Ale clone recipe I found.

Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Tröeg's Hopback Amber Ale: The Replicator -


Bob

Here's the Nugget Nectar recipe located in Zymurgy (31:4) July/August 2008.

For 5 U.S. gallons (19L)
O.G. 1.075
86.5 IBU
11.4 SRM
90' Boil


6.5 lbs Continental Pils Malt
7.0 lbs Munich Malt
5.0 oz Crystal 120L

1.00 oz 13%aa Nugget 60'
0.50 oz 13%aa Simcoe 30'
1.00 oz 16%aa Warrior 20'
1.25 oz 16%aa Tomahawk 0' or hopback
1.00 oz 8%aa Palisade 0' or hopback
1.00 oz 13%aa Simcoe DH
1.00 oz 8%aa Palisade DH

Cal-Ale yeast

Mash 152F.

Friggin sweet. Thanks for both of those.

They have a belgian triple that I had the other day that was FREAKING AMAZING. I wish I had a recipe for that beast.

Nice! Thanks for the responses! I will be sure to let everyone know how it turns out.

Buna_Bere said:

I'm a huge fan of the Hopback Amber Ale, got a case in the fridge now, and I've tried the Nugget Nectar on tap, also delicious. The flavors tasted very similar to me just a little more alcohol bite on the Nugget Nectar.
Anyway here's a link to the Hopback Amber Ale clone recipe I found.

Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Tröeg's Hopback Amber Ale: The Replicator -


Bob

Click to expand...

Thanks. I also found a clone recipe for Hopback available on Austin Homebrew here:

Austin Homebrew Supply

Has anyone tried either of these? If so, what was the outcome?

Thanks.

Buna_Bere said:

I'm a huge fan of the Hopback Amber Ale, got a case in the fridge now, and I've tried the Nugget Nectar on tap, also delicious. The flavors tasted very similar to me just a little more alcohol bite on the Nugget Nectar.
Anyway here's a link to the Hopback Amber Ale clone recipe I found.

Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine - Tröeg's Hopback Amber Ale: The Replicator -


Bob

Click to expand...

My buddy is a brewer at Troegs and they are indeed similar. The Nectar is based off of the Amber, just an Imperial version of it. I was there in December when they were brewing the stuff and it smells just as good now when I open a bottle of it. If I get a chance I'll run that clone recipe by him and see if he has any suggestions or tweaks.

According to their site, that recipe could use a tad of tweaking, but I'm sure it's close:

Alcohol by Volume: 7.5%
Hop Bitterness (IBU's) : 93ish
Color (SRM) : Straw-Orange
Availability: 1/2, 1/6 and Cask Conditioned kegs, 12 oz. bottles
Malts: Pilsner, Vienna, Munich
Hops: Nugget, Warrior, Tomahawk, Simcoe, Palisade
Yeast: Ale

Squeeze those hops for all they’re worth and prepare to pucker up: Nugget Nectar Ale, will take hopheads to nirvana with a heady collection of Nugget, Warrior and Tomahawk hops. Starting with the same base ingredients of our flagship HopBack Amber Ale, Nugget Nectar intensifies the malt and hop flavors to create an explosive
hop experience.

These are both great beers. Thanks for the recipes !

Natron -Looking forward to seeing what your buddy the brewer at Troegs says about the recipe. Well, both recipes, really. Must be nice to hang around the brewery, eh?

Troegs is a great brewery. I have been drinking there stuff in bottles / taps here for a long while, but I stopped at the brewery/tasting room for the first time in January. Really nice. Pretty much all of their brews are good, IMO. Tis Nugget Nectar season now in these parts! :rockin:

Thanks Natron. I am eager to hear what your friend has to say. I ordered the HopBack clone from AHS and will let everyone know how it turns out when it is completed.

Looks like a great recipe, and I have thought of doing this before... Seems that your biggest challenge is going ot be finding all those hop varieties... At least that was mine last year.

Also interested in hearing how close the clone of Nugget Nectar is to what they brew. I'm planning on brewing one similar to the Zymurgy one but with vienna and munich based on the information from Troeg's website.

My Grain bill is looking like:

37% Pils
31% Munich
31% Vienna
2% Crystal 120L

As for hops I'm substituting Millenium for Nugget otherwise should be pretty close to Zymurgy. Hopefully in three weeks or so I'll be able to comment on if it is similar to Nugget Nectar.

DubbelDach said:

Looks like a great recipe, and I have thought of doing this before... Seems that your biggest challenge is going ot be finding all those hop varieties... At least that was mine last year.

Click to expand...

Agreed. I'm probably going to have to tweak and get as close as possible based on availability.

Straight from the source...

Gravity is very close and the malt bill looks pretty good, NN is about 2/3 pilsner malt and the rest is Munich and Vienna. So if you can, I'd say get some Vienna in for about 1/2 of that amount, it gives a lot of the orange color of Nugget. The recipe's amt of caramel should be good, as well. Hop bill looks pretty good - lots of hops at every addition!

natron008 said:

Straight from the source...

Gravity is very close and the malt bill looks pretty good, NN is about 2/3 pilsner malt and the rest is Munich and Vienna. So if you can, I'd say get some Vienna in for about 1/2 of that amount, it gives a lot of the orange color of Nugget. The recipe's amt of caramel should be good, as well. Hop bill looks pretty good - lots of hops at every addition!

Click to expand...

I just tried the nugget nectar last night and I just had to try and find a recipe. Could you explain the amounts of munich and vienna a little better? I'm confused

Here's an extract recipe I just did based on availablity of my LHBS. I wouldn't say this is a clone per se, but I am hoping to be pretty damn close. I just brewed it on Saturday, so I can't speak of the end result - but I'll be licking my chops every day in the meantime.

Size: 5.0 gal
Original Gravity: 1.086 (1.075 - 1.090)
Terminal Gravity: 1.017 (1.012 - 1.020)
Color: 11.9 (8.00 - 15.00)
Alcohol: 9.12% (7.50% - 10.00%)
Bitterness: 94.0 (60.00 - 100.00)

Ingredients:
1 lb Vienna Malt
1 lb German Light Munich
4 lb Liquid Amber Extract
7 lb Pilsen Light Liquid Extract)
1 oz Nugget (13.0%) - 60.0 min
1 oz Warrior (16.0%) - 25.0 min
1 oz Centennial (9.3%) - 5 min
1 tsp Irish Moss - 5 min
1 ea White Labs WLP051 California Ale V
1 oz Centennial (9.3%) - dryhop

visitor said:

Also interested in hearing how close the clone of Nugget Nectar is to what they brew. I'm planning on brewing one similar to the Zymurgy one but with vienna and munich based on the information from Troeg's website.

My Grain bill is looking like:

37% Pils
31% Munich
31% Vienna
2% Crystal 120L

As for hops I'm substituting Millenium for Nugget otherwise should be pretty close to Zymurgy. Hopefully in three weeks or so I'll be able to comment on if it is similar to Nugget Nectar.

Click to expand...

I think you've got it!

If it's 2/3 Pilsner as already reported, shouldn't that be changed to 66, 16, and 16% for a more authentic profile? It comes out a few SRM dark if you use roughly equal quantities. Just some quick playing with rough ratios gave

9lb Pilsner
2.5lb Munich
2.5lb Vienna

at 75% efficiency.

Thanks for the tips guys, I can see why this is so expensive!

CHansen6 said:

If it's 2/3 Pilsner as already reported, shouldn't that be changed to 66, 16, and 16% for a more authentic profile? It comes out a few SRM dark if you use roughly equal quantities. Just some quick playing with rough ratios gave

9lb Pilsner
2.5lb Munich
2.5lb Vienna

at 75% efficiency.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that sounds better - my bad.

Yeah I priced it up using my LHBS and it came out to over $60 for a 5 gallon batch.

BeerSmith Estimates $20 for a 2.5 gallon batch. Figure 24 beers from 2 1/5 gallons. Round to $1 a beer which is still 1/2 the cost of what it would cost to pick up the real one...not so bad.

magnj said:

BeerSmith Estimates $20 for a 2.5 gallon batch. Figure 24 beers from 2 1/5 gallons. Round to $1 a beer which is still 1/2 the cost of what it would cost to pick up the real one...not so bad.

Click to expand...

Yeah, my recipe cost about $55 all total, for a 5-gal batch. And it smells wonderful!!! BTW, I was at teh brewery when they were hopbacking the Nectar - talk about a fantastic smell!!


mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....nectar

Been busy and lazy when I have had a few minutes. I haven't dry hopped mine yet and it's still in the primary. I'll dry hop tomorrow and keg next Sunday. Based on what Natron008 is saying I'll likely do 66%, 16%, 16% if I get to brew this in the future. Smelled and tasted so good going into the fermenters.

I had to pick up all the grain and 6 oz of hops that I didn't have on hand for the brew and I think it cost me about $65 to get 11 gallons at 70% eff from the LHBS. Not bad, pretty close to what I normally do since I tend to go heavy on the hops.

Kegged 5 gallons of this last night because I only had one kegged cleaned and was short on time. OG for my brew was 1069, FG is 1010. The hydro sample tasted amazing and smelled even better. Can't wait until I get it cooled down and carbed up. Now I have to see if I can find some of the real thing to compare my brew with. I'll post more when I taste it cool and carbonated up.

Don't have any NN to compare to the recipe I brewed but from memory the recipe I used with Millenium hops substituted for nugget hops isn't the same brew. It is however one of the hoppiest favorite IPAish beers I've ever brewed. I'll be doing this recipe again with the correct ratio's of grain and maybe nugget hops if I can find some at a decent price. I dubbed my brew Millenium Nectar, surly not Nugget Nectar but worthy of the Millenium Nectar name.

Just hope it doesn't kick too soon or at least not before I can brew another IPA!

Anyone done the actual nugget clone with the nugget hops that can report on the results yet? It's about $2/bottle here and I'd love to see if I can get close and possibly for cheaper!

natron, did you finish yours? Is the Austin amber version linked previously a close match to hopback amber? I love both hopback amber and nugget nectar. Would love to brew something like that.

I am really interested in the Hopback Amber recipe from BYO linked earlier. Sounds great...however, no hopback in my brewery yet, so I was gonna try to use the same/similar hops with traditional late additions and dryhops.

Anyway, any body have any experience with that recipe???

I have to say that this is one of my FAVORITES out there! So I decided to brew puppy slight over 2 weeks ago and now I'm getting ready to put into the secondary and dry hop it. I had to substitute the Tomahawk with Zeus but I think everything else was there hop wise.

I did an extract version of this and pretty much hit hurdles every way I went with this, mostly due to poor planning. I think my DME came out to about 8.5#. Which I think this is failry accurate based on all the conversions I found. In preparing I could not do a full boil so I attempted to do as much as I could with the 4.5 gallon pot I had. Yeah, I underestimated the amount of room I needed for the DME and had 2 boil overs, my wife neglected to tell me that the ice machine was broken, so I had to run to the store to get bags of ice for the cool down. Also, I out-smarted myself by putting 1 gallon of water in the freezer and one in the fridge so if I had problems cooling down my wort I could use that to bring it down the rest of the way. Well as it turns out I was able to bring the wort down to 73-75 degrees and when I added the cold water, yeah.. I was in the 60's!

Soooooo I said F'it! It was getting late and I pitched it and went to bed! It took over 48 hours but it took off and has been going strong for about a 9 days! Looks like things slowed down today, but I'm not 100% as yup, you guessed it, in my haste I didn't take a OG reading. That was about the time that I realized that I forgot to add my Irish moss.

So I think that I did everything I could to mess things up. A buddy of mine commented once, that one of his best beers was one that he was about to dump because he thought he royally messed it up.

So I will try and take a reading today to see where I stand but frankly I'm not worried. Let the chips fall where they may. I will admit I'm a little anxious to see how this will all play out.

PseudoChef said:

Here's the Nugget Nectar recipe located in Zymurgy (31:4) July/August 2008.

For 5 U.S. gallons (19L)
O.G. 1.075
86.5 IBU
11.4 SRM
90' Boil


6.5 lbs Continental Pils Malt
7.0 lbs Munich Malt
5.0 oz Crystal 120L

1.00 oz 13%aa Nugget 60'
0.50 oz 13%aa Simcoe 30'
1.00 oz 16%aa Warrior 20'
1.25 oz 16%aa Tomahawk 0' or hopback
1.00 oz 8%aa Palisade 0' or hopback
1.00 oz 13%aa Simcoe DH
1.00 oz 8%aa Palisade DH

Cal-Ale yeast

Mash 152F.

Click to expand...

Gone to the secondary yesterday! Added the 2 oz of hops and praying for the best!

Bottled this yesterday! Smelled FANTASTIC, going to be a little less in IBU since this was a partial boil but hey!!!

To follow up on my results. The was one of the quickest beers I've kicked. Everyone really liked it and it seemed to go back and forth between citrus and piney flavors. I can't wait to brew this up with the correct grist ratios and nugget hops. The brews I've done with Palisade I've been extremely happy with as well. I'm thinking I need to play some more with those hops and I'll likely sub them for cascade in my brewery from now on.

Also I used US-05 yeast on both 5.5 gallon fermentors and will likely use some different yeasts for the next go round.

Over all still need to tweak this brew but what a great brew!

Anyone have any updates for this? Im going to try this out soon for the nugg nectar using the 9lbs pils 2.5 vienna 2.5 munich ratio but I'm looking for a good hop schedule anyone narrow it down?

Great thread but a little tough to follow. What's the verdict on the final AG version with the hop schedule tweak?

Well I definitely would not follow that hop schedule from above that comes out to 85 IBU's and their website clearly says it comes out 93(ISH) which Im probably bumping to an even 95. Once I work it all out in beer tools I'll post up what I got.

Im using this for my grain bill though
9lbs Pilsner
2.5lbs Vienna
2.5lbs munich

Could anyone that has brewed a clone and had a chance to compare it to the genuine article comment on the recipes that include crystal and the recipes (plus Troegs site) that omit the crystal?

I will report back as soon as I get mine brewed....I will most likely make a new post.