Blue Moon Clone Experiment

So I tried out a Blue Moon clone today that I found online. They had an all grain option and an extract option which being new to the brew world I opted for extract.

1# white wheat
1# 2 row
.75# flaked oats
6.6 # wheat lme
1 oz hallertau @ 60
3oz orange peels
1.5 tsp coriander

Partial mash the white wheat, 2 row and oats at 155 for an hour. Then the rest was normal extract brewing.

My issue with this is that this is a huge amount of sugars in the mix. The site said OG would be 1055. Brew pal says 1063.

Here is the part that bothers me most.. My OG was 1080. I also had a strange coagulation going on in my finished product. View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1430525346.197753.jpg

Any thoughts?

Here is the link. http://www.eckraus.com/blog/blue-moon-recipe-clone-extract-all-/grain

Also for my flaked oats I uses regular old oat meal.

It looks like break material to me, did you put hot wort into the beaker then cool it? Give it time and break will settle. Might want to try take a reading with clean wort without the junk in there to see if that changes things.

Beersmith gave me 1065 for partial mash with 72% efficiency. Did your volumes come correct, what was the volume of wort at the end of the boil.

The link did not work for me, but i think I found the kit(steam freak blue moon clone) and it had the gravity listed at 1061 in the detail.

There is a long thread on this site regarding a blue moon clone, I brewed it a couple and it came out pretty good.

brewtus-maximus said:

Also for my flaked oats I uses regular old oat meal.

Click to expand...

If they were quick or instant oats that is OK, but if they were old fashion oats supposedly they need to be cereal mashed to get them to convert. It sounds like not converting was not a problem, but maybe that could account for coagulated stuff if you had extra unconverted starches in the wort.

They were quick oats. The coagulated stuff settled though. Also, it's fermenting like crazy! Almost had a full on blow off this morning. Went to check it and wort was bubbling out of my air lock so I changed over to my blow off tube.

Ba-brewer, the wort was chilled and I came out to 5.25 gallons. I went over a little on purpose since it seemed like a strong recipe. Also,what is break material?

So I might know what I did. I started off brewing with LME and hated the mess, stickiness and difficulty so I switched to DME. I have always assumed that LME and DME we equal pound for pound but I am starting to doubt that now. I was just reading a dogfish clone recipe that called for 9.5 pounds of LME or 8 pounds of DME. Is DME actually stronger?

With that said, yep I used DME. And not only did I use it I felt compelled not to waste the .4 pounds that the recipe had as a remainder (as the recipe called for 6.6 pounds). What can I say?

All in all, if the dogfish head article is correct, I used the equivalent of 8.3 pounds of LME on top of the grain that I mashed. 1080 might make sense.

Also, I accidentally added LME into Brew Pal instead of DME. When I change it to DME, the estimated gravity goes to 1074 which is closer than Brew Pal usually gets me.

Break material is coagulated proteins that form in the wort during heating and cooling.
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter7-2.html

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=200083

Sounds like your may have figured out why your gravity was so high. I suppose you could say LME is stronger, there is still some water left in the syrup.

If you like blue moon, take a look at this thread, it is sort of long but there is a lot of good information in there.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=65328&highlight=bluemoon

What ba-brewer says about the post, it even has (#6) someone who worked at the sand lot brewery where BM was introduced.

DME is much higher gravity per pound than LME by about 20%, as LME (liquid) has weight of water that DME (dry) does not.

Yeah, I started reading that thread and got lazy... It's really long. And while I love how much I am learning, I am pretty disappointed in myself for not already knowing that DME would be more concentrated since I just read Joy of Home Brewing cover to cover and he goes into great detail about the process of creating extract. Hindsight... Oh well.

I do however have some options now. I have a friend who thinks that this will attenuate much further south than I'd like. He is guessing 1015 which, without breaking out the old gravity calculator, would yield ~8.5% ABV. Thus, he is not optimistic about this tasting ANYTHING like Blue Moon and so his vote is to dry hop and try to salvage its drinkability. He thinks that added aroma could offset some of the bite.

I used Muntons Wheat DME. Anyone know how much convertible sugar vs non-convertible sugar is in this? That might give me a better idea of how far it will drop.

So far, the best plan of action that I have is to taste it at 14-21 days and see if I want to dry hop ( which all I have is chinook).

ba-brewer said:

Break material is coagulated proteins that form in the wort during heating and cooling.
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter7-2.html

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=200083

Sounds like your may have figured out why your gravity was so high. I suppose you could say LME is stronger, there is still some water left in the syrup.

If you like blue moon, take a look at this thread, it is sort of long but there is a lot of good information in there.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=65328&highlight=bluemoon

Click to expand...

Never mind, I read a different Blue Moon CLone. This link is way more helpful! Also, I loved the ebook from John Palmer. All of these links were very insightful. Thanks!

glad the links were helpful. In the blue moon thread look at post #439 for an extract recipe (there may be others) and at post #447 for link to a list of different recipe experiment he made trying to perfect his version. Nilo's recipe list is for all grain recipes but there might be some useful in there you could use.

So I tried this the other day and took a gravity read. Gravity was down to 1019. It tasted ok.. Nothing like Blue Moon obviously, but drinkable. It tasted a lot like a farmhouse ale with a bit milder yeast factor, but I could definitely taste the yeast(could have still just been in suspension). Now I am wondering, could I boil some more orange peel and coriander and throw that in for a few days before I bottle? I know I can't make it taste like actual Blue Moon at this point but I wonder if I could get closer.

Welp... I got no replies so I talked with a friend at work. He wanted to see what would happen if I steeped more orange and coriander in my priming sugar mix. So I did. We'll see...