Beck's Clone

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Jester4176

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Just as the title says. Does anyone have one? Have looked everywhere, and even posted in the Recipe Locator thread that's stickied. Would like to make a batch, but either nobody else likes the beer enough to make a batch, or Beck's has had the cloners offed to keep their recipe a secret. Surely I'm not the only person who's trying to clone this beer am I?
 
This type of question comes up on all the internet boards very frequently, with somebody asking how to make a very specific clone of a particular brand of beer. Most frequently, the type of beer is either a European or North American lager

If you wanted to know how make just a generic style instead, you'd gets lots of opinions, and probably even a recipe that might suit your brewing equipment and methods. It might even end up yielding a beer that's within the style.

Since even the 'real' brewers have trouble getting their own beer to taste the same batch after batch, there's very little chance of one homebrewer having a recipe that will work in someone else's brewery and still taste just like Beck's and not Warsteiner or Heineken or (yeccch) Bud.

There's lots of recipes around for 'European Lagers', why not start there?
 
Maybe this isn't nice, but why? Seems like there are so many more interesting beers one could attempt to clone...
 
cweston said:
Maybe this isn't nice, but why? Seems like there are so many more interesting beers one could attempt to clone...

Maybe he just likes the taste of it? One of the first lagers I did was a Dortmunder clone because I like DAB. I still haven't found a Dinkelacker clone but I am sure I could get close just by style. I know this will get a laugh from the Texans but I also did a Lone Star clone. It looked simple and I was trying to perfect my lagering skills at the time.
 
2nd Street Brewery said:
Maybe he just likes the taste of it? One of the first lagers I did was a Dortmunder clone because I like DAB. I still haven't found a Dinkelacker clone but I am sure I could get close just by style. I know this will get a laugh from the Texans but I also did a Lone Star clone. It looked simple and I was trying to perfect my lagering skills at the time.

To each his own...

I personally don't find cloning all that interesting, so that's part of my bias. I mostly do clone brews only if the orginal is something very distinctive, like, say, Westmalle Tripel or Aventinus or Saison Dupont or Anchor Steam: a beer that practically defines a style.

Everyone's tastes and personality are different. I also don't cook from recipes all that much--same logic, I guess. I prefer to create something rather than recreate something.

I just think of Becks as a fairly "generic" German lager. Just throwing my $.02 in...
 
cweston said:
Maybe this isn't nice, but why? Seems like there are so many more interesting beers one could attempt to clone...

Well, for a mass produced beer, I think it is one of the better tasting ones. Not the best...but better than Bud/Miller/Heineken/etc. Basically I was wanting to brew a batch of this to bottle and have on hand in case my kegs run dry. So I'll have a little something to tide me over until the next batch makes it to the kegs. Also, several of my buddies like Beck's, so if they don't like the dunkel/stout/insert dark beer here I have on tap, they can still enjoy a brew with me.

Mikey - Thanks for the suggestion. Think I'll find a Euro recipe and give it a go.
 
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