Last ditch advice for Palo Santo Marron Clone

Yakima 728
Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
B

b33r_br3w3r

Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2011
Messages
15
Reaction score
0
Location
St. Paul
Hey everyone,

I've been looking all over for a clone recipe for Dogfish Head Palo Santo Marron. I just ordered some palo santo wood from amazon and am going to pick up some sucanat after work. I know it's basically an imperial brown but I'm pretty new to all grain (this will be my 4th batch only) and am looking for a tried and true recipe that I can learn from. Has anyone successfully done one? Or even a really good imperial brown that they think I could try the palo santo in?

I know this much for the ingredients (as mentioned in the youtube vid) but am not real sure on amounts.

Malt - Chocolate, crystal, black patent, wheat (base???2 row???)

Hops - Glacier, Warrior, Palisade

Yeast - Wyeast Scottish Ale 1728 (should work from what I'm reading)

Sucanat

P.S. I will definitely heed the advice of the many that have used too much palo santo. I was thinking less than .5oz per 5gal.
 
yeah i'd do 2 row for your base. probly about 20 pounds. then just a few onces of each specialty grain. enough to get your color. the main flavors in there are coming from the alcohol and the wood itself so. you might want to just take the specialty grain amounts for a basic brown ale (6% or so) and use those with a lot more 2 row. Hitting 12% isn't easy. make sure you have a huge yeast starter and tons of aeration
 
+1 on the tons of aeration for a beer of this size. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.
 
Alright, here's what we ended up going with. (heating up H20 right now...)

16lbs domestic 2-row
3lbs white wheat
2lbs sucanat
1lb Crystal (120)
4oz english chocolate
4oz black patent

1oz Warrior hops at 60min
.75oz Glacier at 30min
1oz Palisade at 15min

We're not expecting it to be very close but hopefully this will be a valuable experience at least. I'll let everyone know what happens.
 
I have no idea what sucanat is but you're specialty grains look good. looks like a real solid recipe. when i tried to clone WWS I didn't hit the flavor exactly but i wasn't terribly far off and now i know what i would change to get closer to the right flavor. I think you'll see the same thing. brew that beer and see how it compares to palo santo then you can decide what to change to make it work.
 
Thanks, good to know we weren't incredibly far off. Sucanat is just pure dried cane sugar, still with the molasses content in it. In the youtube vid where they go through the "making of" they mention sucanat as an ingredient. That was the 1 ingredient I really didn't have a clue about so it was a total guess on the amount. Seems like it was probably a lot in retrospect but we'll see.

The one thing to point out if anyone else is planning on attempting this and has never done a high gravity beer is that you'll probably want to do a longer boil time. We do batch sparging and we didn't realize how much more sparge water it takes to do that much more grain so I'm sure our efficiency was not so great. The next time I'd use more water and do a larger boil and a much longer boil. I saw someone say a 120min boil somewhere but I didn't put 2 and 2 together when I saw it but that's probably why.

Right now we've got the beer in the carboy but I'm waiting for my yeast cell count to go up yet. I made an initial starter with 1 smack pack but now I was going to add more wort to the starter in order to ramp up the cell count even more. I read that on John Palmer's site, hopefully it works...
 
Any update on this? How did it turn out? I'd like to try this soon. what yeast did you use?
 
Patirck said:
Any update on this? How did it turn out? I'd like to try this soon. what yeast did you use?
Click to expand...

Ah, thanks for the reminder. Well the beer turned out really boozy. Also, .5oz of palo santo wood for only 4 days was still too much. I'd probably cut that in half again, the amount and time it sits in there. I'm also thinking I'd maybe try about 1lb of sucanat and ramp up either the wheat or 2 row to make up the difference.

Looks like I didn't mention this but since I didn't plan that well for the yeast starter I had to wait overnight after the beer was already in the carboy before pitching. People freak out about not pitching right away but I didn't think it'd be that big of a deal since I've done it before with no problems. Well, this time we apparently clean and sanitize the carboy good enough because there was a small amount of fermentation the next morning from what I'm fairly sure was a NeoBrit yeast we used in a previous batch. Because I didn't know what to do I decided to just pitch the yeast I had and not wait any longer.

In the end everything fermented out good but like I said, it's boozy and I'm fairly certain it's because the yeast was over stressed since I didn't have enough to pitch. If it weren't for that I think this would have been pretty close actually. I think down the road I'll try it again with the adjustments I mentioned above. If you get to it before me please let us know the results.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I did use the Wyeast Scottish Ale 1728
 
jester5120 said:
that harsh booziness should mellow out with time if you saved some bottles
Click to expand...

Turns out you were right. So it's been over 9 months now since I brewed this. I cracked one open about 3 weeks ago now and it was much better. The booziness had dissipated as well as the overpowering palo santo notes. I guess it just takes a much longer time with a high octane beer like this to mellow out if things didn't quite go right to begin with.
 
If youtube are having problems with the palo santo i am from Paraguay And i Could look some for you, so did this recipe work Fine?

Sent from my C6502 using Home Brew mobile app
 
Thread revival - how did this turn out? I really want to make a close clone of the DFH Palo Santo Marron and I'm looking around for a good recipe. I bought some Palo Santo wood from Amazon and am going to be getting the ingredients for this within the next few days. Thanks in advance!
 
chichum said:
Thread revival - how did this turn out? I really want to make a close clone of the DFH Palo Santo Marron and I'm looking around for a good recipe. I bought some Palo Santo wood from Amazon and am going to be getting the ingredients for this within the next few days. Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

I'd try this if I did it again:
18lbs domestic 2-row
3lbs white wheat
1lb sucanat
1lb Crystal (120)
4oz english chocolate
4oz black patent

1oz Warrior hops at 60min
.75oz Glacier at 30min
1oz Palisade at 15min

Make a huge starter with Scottish Ale 1728 (use a starter calc) and I'd do a 120 min boil (see previous post). Also I'd only use .25oz of Palo Santo wood for 2 days and then see where that leaves you.

Good luck!
 
Thanks! Going to make it this weekend. How long primary/secondary? Did you put the wood for the first 2 days of secondary or did you wait until the last 2? Did you soak the wood in anything?
 
I ended up using 0.25oz of raw wood. Thought, "there's no way it's that powerful, I'm just going ot keep it in the secondary the entire time" - I was very wrong. It's a VERY powerful wood. So if you did raw, do a very small amount and taste it every couple days. 4-7 days with that small amount will likely make a big difference.
 
Schumed said:
Here is my attempt ...and it was pretty damn close...I preferred mine over the real thing

This made it to the final round of NHC last year and won several medals in the wood age category

http://kcbeerblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/can-you-brew-it.html?m=1
Click to expand...

The 1oz of wood for 3 months - you didn't have a very strong licorice flavoring from it? I got my wood from the same place as you, used 1/4 what you did and that's the only flavor i can taste.
 
chichum said:
The 1oz of wood for 3 months - you didn't have a very strong licorice flavoring from it? I got my wood from the same place as you, used 1/4 what you did and that's the only flavor i can taste.
Click to expand...

Yes ...and lots of other flavors
 
chichum said:
Okay. I plan to age mine for a few more months to see if it settles. I guess my not liking licorice could be a reason I only taste that.
Click to expand...

The beer was over a year when I entered at NHC....the flavor had settled a bit...it was super intense at first...but I kind of like that
 
Thanks for the feedback! I'll give it a try this weekend. Wood aging is still some weeks away, but looking forward to it!
 

Similar threads

BoitAHL
Recipe conversion advice
Replies
32
Views
2K
BoitAHL
BoitAHL
HeadyG
Let's figure out an Abraxas clone
2
Replies
40
Views
6K
InspectorJon
InspectorJon
Nick&Worty
Newbie BIAB Newcastle clone help
Replies
19
Views
2K
McKnuckle
McKnuckle
secretlevel
Great Notion - Double Stack clone
Replies
12
Views
3K
codysorgenfrey
codysorgenfrey
Boozy Mcboozerson
Imperial Stout 1848 Barclay Perkins Imperial Brown Stout 1st ever Imperial Stout
Replies
22
Views
5K
kevin58
kevin58
SSBrew 300

Latest posts

Back
Top