Founders "Black Biscuit" Old Ale - My attempt at a clone...

I love Founders. 'Nuff said.

I never got to try the now-retired Black Biscuit, but it sounds incredible, so I'm gonna make an attempt at my first clone recipe, going off the notes from Beer Advocate.

"A cross between an Old Ale and a Baltic Porter. Brewed with a significant amount of biscuit malt and molasses." Users' tasting notes often bring up the words: oak, bourbon, vanilla, maple, boozy, roasty, malty, sweet

I think I'm really close here... all figures were estimated using the calculator at Brewer's Friend.

Recipe Type: Partial Mash
Yeast: American Ale (Wyeast #1056)
Yeast Starter: Yes - 1.5L
Batch Size (Gallons): 5.0
Original Gravity: 1.105
Final Gravity: 1.026
IBU: 51.98
Boiling Time (Minutes): 60
Color: 30.73

10.5 lb Maris Otter LME
1.00 lb Belgian CaraMunich
0.75 lb Belgian Caramel Pils
1.00 lb Belgian Biscuit
0.50 lb Belgian Chocolate
0.25 lb Caramel/Crystal 120
1.00 lb Molasses

2.00 oz Newport (15.5% AA) @ 60 min (35.09 IBU)
0.50 oz Nugget (14.0% AA) @ 60 min (7.92 IBU)
0.50 oz Fuggles (4.5% AA) @ 30 min (1.96 IBU)
0.50 oz Nugget (14.0% AA) @ 30 min (6.09 IBU)
0.50 oz Fuggles (4.5% AA) @ 10 min (0.92 IBU)

1.00 tsp Irish moss @ 10 min

1.00 oz American oak cubes, M+ toast, with 1 cup Knob Creek smoked maple bourbon @ secondary (to taste)

Brew day coming soon!!

I've never tried that particular founders beer but, 3 vanilla beans is A LOT. I put an oatmeal stout of mine on 1 bean for 7 days and it almost overpowered the other flavors. Though mine was around 6% abv, I still would start with one. Can always add more, but not less!

LoMich said:

I've never tried that particular founders beer but, 3 vanilla beans is A LOT. I put an oatmeal stout of mine on 1 bean for 7 days and it almost overpowered the other flavors. Though mine was around 6% abv, I still would start with one. Can always add more, but not less!

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Thanks for the feedback! I've done only one bean before in a hefeweizen I made, and I wasn't too impressed... I'll probably meet you half-way & go with two. Also have a breakfast stout finishing up that got three, so I hope to taste that before deciding. I have to wait until at least April before Curmudgeon is released anyway.

You can always try emailing the brewery! Founders has been known to give out complete recipes for so e of their beers - even though lately they haven't been as forthcoming, I think it would still be worth a shot!

skibb said:

You can always try emailing the brewery! Founders has been known to give out complete recipes for so e of their beers - even though lately they haven't been as forthcoming, I think it would still be worth a shot!

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I've gone that route already, and unfortunately they were not forthcoming.

Bummer well it's really quite a shot in the dark then! Stinks it's such a rare beer that it will be near impossible to do any side by side with it.

Your recipe looks good, you're using malts that you know founders uses and your percentages look good. From reading the descriptions on BA it sounds like this beer finishes pretty high - I would personally shoot for 1.025-1.030.
I would probably have my starting gravity in the 1.090s and aim for an abv of about 8.5%. The reason for this is the alcohol contribution from the bourbon barrel and the sugars from the maple syrup in the secondary fermentation. Looking at curmudgeon and curmudgeons better half the beer picks up 2.1% from being aged in maple bourbon barrels. At the brewery I work at we also see about a 1.5-2% abv pick up after aging the beer in barrels (we do it for 6 weeks). I would also use grade B maple syrup because it's less fermentablr and more flavorful. Just my 2 cents!
Edit: the reason I mentioned the maple was in a couple posts people stated that this beer was previously called Imperial maple bourbon porter. Maybe in their latest iteration they skipped the syrup and just used regular bourbon barrels.

What if I use a maple-flavored bourbon to soak my oak & vanilla? If I kept it to a cup that'd bump the ABV by only 0.5%.

I've never heard of maple-flavored bourbon but if you can find some I would say that would be a good idea! With all the bourbon and oak, why add vanilla too? Seems a bit overkill on the vanillin and from the information we have, there's no mention of Founders using it to make this beer.

It's hard for home brewers to get the same type of alcohol extraction and bourbon flavor balance that commercial breweries get out of a barrel. To get a nice 2% abv jump you would have to add around whole liter of bourbon to your beer would likely overpower all the flavor of your beer. In the last bourbon/oaked beer I brewed I took 1 oz of oak cubes and soaked them in half a 5th of bourbon for a good month before introducing it to the beer at kegging, and that added a very noticeable bourbon presence but not overpowering for the big beer I had (a 10% RIS). If I were to brew a beer like this one I would probably do the same thing as well as throw in enough grade B Maple Syrup to get another .5-1% abv bump after it chews through its sugars in secondary.

Jim Beam and Knob Creek each have a version of maple bourbon. JB is a bit weaker than usual at 35% ABV. KC is a bit stronger at 45%, and it also has a light smoke flavor, which I think could work very well in this beer, given its porter-like qualities. I'm glad you brought up the vanilla flavor in the bourbon too. I totally spaced on that, that really would've been overkill.

Right now, I'm leaning strongly toward using flavored bourbon over actual maple. It just seems like it'll be the easier & cheaper method of guaranteeing I'll get that flavor. Using the proportions you provided--1 oz oak cubes to 375ml bourbon (Were you satisfied with the presence of the oak flavor at these proportions? How long did you leave the cubes in?)--would increase the alcohol content by roughly 0.75%, which would put this beer at about 11% on the dot. Black Biscuit was a 10.5%... but I certainly won't complain about that extra alcohol love! If anything, I can drop the Maris Otter LME to 10 lb.

Oh neat! I would totally go the route of maple flavored bourbon, it sounds like a perfect match for this beer. If I recall, the oak was in the keg for close to 2 months. When the flavor was where I liked it, I let it sit for a couple more days and racked off into another keg, carbed with champagne yeast and served. The trick is to keep tasting it - I let it go for a couple weeks before my first sample, but if you can keg your beer, this is a very easy/sanitary way to really dial the oak in.

Thank you, you've been a tremendous help. I've never done wood-aging before, so this information is very helpful, and will come in handy when it's time to age my BDSA! I'm using chips on that one, so I assume it will take much less time to age, but time & taste will tell.

Awesome, glad I could help!! If you do make this, please post back your results!!

I have one final thought on this beer before I go ahead with it in a couple months... since I'm going for an old ale/porter hybrid, would there be any reason not to try using both Founders Curmudgeon AND Founders Porter yeast? Also, if I were to do this, would I need to make separate starters?

I wouldn't use any yeast found in the Curmudgeon - that beer is high alcohol and the yeast that are in it are likely unhealthy and would probably make for equally poor yeast if you grew them up.

Honestly I think they just use 1056 is in their beers - so I would go the route of 1056/WLP001. That way you can make sure the yeast will be as healthy as possible going into a big beer like this (and don't skimp on the aeration!!!)

Also about the molasses - 1 lb is a lot for a 5 gallon batch. The one time I used actual unsulphured molasses they beer was crazy minerally tasting and undrinkable, even after nearly a year of aging. After revising the recipe (which was an old ale) I discovered people have used Lyle's black treacle (British molasses). This gave me the unrefined flavor I was looking for without any of the off flavors. I used .5 lb in a 6 gallon batch - it was definitely noticeable though my grain bill didn't have the roasted malts this one does (which I suspect would help mask it's flavor so you may want to use a bit more or just stick with the whole 1 lb).

Okay... after searching it, I agree with you on the 1056. Thank you once again! Now I don't have to wait to brew this.

I was going to use the other pound of Wholesome Sweeteners molasses I have leftover from the gluten-free stout I brewed. The molasses really stands out in that one--also 1 lb. in a 5-gallon batch--and I'm a fan!

One more question...

Use maple-flavored bourbon on oak cubes, as previously discussed...

-OR-

Use regular bourbon on maple wood chips? There's at least one source out there that claims this beer was aged in a maple wood barrel...

Thoughts?


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I would stick with your original idea. I dot like wood chips at all

skibb said:

I would stick with your original idea. I dot like wood chips at all

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Why don't you?

I ask because of the BDSA I've got fermenting. The plan is to add 1 oz. of pimento (Jamaican allspice) wood chips, which are soaking in Appleton Estate, for the final 5-10 days.

Well, personally I haven't ever gotten a satisfactory oak flavor from the chips when compared to using cubes - I've only used chips twice. Both times, the flavor was very one-dimensional.

I see... well I'll stick with cubes for this one, M+ toast... but I don't really have a choice with the pimento. I wonder if the issue of one-dimensional flavor with chips could be solved by only toasting half of the batch?

Thread starter has been updated with the final draft!

bobdaferret said:

Brew day coming soon!!

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Well, it took longer than expected, but this baby is brewed as of yesterday!!

A few minor brew-day adjustments:

10.5 lb Maris Otter LME
1.00 lb Belgian CaraMunich
0.75 lb Belgian Caramel Pils
1.00 lb Belgian Biscuit
0.50 lb English Chocolate
0.25 lb Caramel 120
0.75 lb Molasses

2.00 oz Galena (15.5% AA) @ 60 min
0.50 oz Nugget (13.5% AA) @ 60 min
0.50 oz Fuggles (4.4% AA) @ 30 min
0.50 oz Nugget (13.5% AA) @ 30 min
0.50 oz Fuggles (4.4% AA) @ 10 min

1.00 tsp Irish moss @ 10 min

1.50 oz American oak cubes, M+ toast, with 1.5 cups Knob Creek smoked maple bourbon @ secondary (will test starting at 2 weeks)

The original gravity measured at 1.100.

Racked to secondary on top of oak & liquor tea yesterday.

Final gravity measurement: 1.016... definitely a little thinner & boozier than I had hoped for (~11%), but the color & clarity definitely look spot-on; a darker Curmudgeon, for sure. The tasting sample was definitely forward on the biscuit malt & molasses; not too chocolately or sweet yet... and clearly nowhere's near the final result, without the oak/liquor addition.

Bottled last Sunday! Oak cubes spent two weeks in liquor, plus four weeks in secondary, for a total of six weeks of flavor extraction.

Taste test before bottling was spot-on to what I was looking for: flavors of wood, vanilla, maple & bourbon are all subtle yet noticeable, and balance nicely on top of a solid roasty, malty, chocolate backbone.

Got a half-bottle I'll be cracking open in a few weeks, the rest I'm gonna (try to) age for at least two months.

it's been a year...how did this ultimately turn out?

drgoodbrew said:

it's been a year...how did this ultimately turn out?

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Finally cracked into another on the 4th. This has really mellowed out nicely!

Early on, it was too warm, too much up-front mineral from molasses... now that those have dialed back, everything is coming together in harmony: plenty of Biscuit present, and the bbl flavors are exactly to my liking.

In hindsight, my changes would be: more time in 2ndary (with old ales, a year isn't unheard of, but I'm not that patient), and less priming sugar--probably 4 oz.

I'm late to the party. I found this looking for clones of Curmudgeon Better Half and i liked all of the comments and feedback in this thread. My question is this seems to have much more IBUs that you listed and above style. Did this disappear some with the bourbon?