BYO December 2010 Fat Tire clone recipe

[Izumidai]

anyone brew the Fat Tire clone from the december 2010 issue of BYO? How did it turn out? It sounds like a good recipe, but how authentic is it? Apparently it is from the brewery and the ingredients themselves match what is on the New Belgium website however the numbers dont seem to work out. I don't know how they are getting to 14SRM for the color with that recipe. Does anyone actually know what the SRM of fat tire is anyway?

Also, I saw some older articles from BYO with Peter Bouckeart (sp?) and he stated that they use up to 30% of the specialty malts for fat tire. The grain bill in the Dec issue does not work out to 30% of specialty malts.

If I enter the recipe into beersmith as is in BYO it works out to 9.7 SRM (i understand there may be slight variances from grain type). If I adjust the recipe to give me 14SRM here is what it gives me:

Ingredients:
------------
Amount Item Type % or IBU
7.79 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 73.74 %
1.07 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L (80.0 SRM) Grain 10.14 %
0.90 lb Munich 10L (Briess) (10.0 SRM) Grain 8.51 %
0.80 lb Victory Malt (25.0 SRM) Grain 7.61 %
0.40 oz Target [11.00 %] (60 min) Hops 19.7 IBU
0.50 oz Williamette [5.00 %] (10 min) Hops 2.2 IBU
0.50 oz Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] (0 min) Hops -

Certainly closer to the 30% specialty malt, but I haven't seen a fat tire in a while and am not sure if 14 is too dark.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Warped04]

Not only that, but they have a proprietary yeast. WYeast released it a couple years back so maybe someone banked it.

 

[Izumidai]

I sent an email to the new belgium regarding the grain bill and color and got this back from one of their QA analysts:

"I did not get a chance to read the article that featured Kim in the December issue of BYO. I would stick with Peter’s comment about the specialties being ~30% of the grain bill. I’m not sure what the SRM of Fat Tire is either. The EBC color rating is around 30."

I am going to stick with the "around 30%" on the victory, munich and crystal 80.

Here is what I am going with for my clone attempt:
Ingredients:
------------
Amount Item Type % or IBU
7.91 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 72.11 %
1.24 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L (80.0 SRM) Grain 11.30 %
0.89 lb Munich 10L (Briess) (10.0 SRM) Grain 8.11 %
0.93 lb Victory Malt (25.0 SRM) Grain 8.48 %
0.34 oz Target [11.00 %] (60 min) Hops 16.6 IBU
0.42 oz Williamette [5.00 %] (10 min) Hops 1.9 IBU
0.50 oz Goldings, East Kent [5.00 %] (0 min) Hops -

This is for 5 gallons at 70% efficiency.

This is just based off me putting the byo recipe into beersmith and converting to adjust to 15 SRM (which is about 30 EBC).

I'll try this and see if the ratios on the specialty grains need to be adjusted, but the original byo interview with Peter Bouckaert stated that "for the signature toasted biscuit flavor of this brown-amber beer, add from 5 to 10 percent of malts with a nutty character." I am assuming he is speaking about the Victory malt here. I imagine that just shy of 1Lb of victory is going to get me close to that signature bready/nutty fat tire flavor. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[Ender]

cool, I would like to see how this turns out. Anyone have the yeast on a slant?

 

[foltster]

I did brew this and I used American Ale II WY1272 yeast.

Came out really nice but its not a clone of fat tire. It is actually better. The flavor is sort of similar but stronger and more interesting. I can detect some yeast esters from the 1272 so if you are not a fan of esters be sure to do a big starter to reduce those some. I pitched out of the smack pack without a starter.

The color is noticeably wrong, probably 2 SRM too dark or so. This may be because I used Pale Malt (3 SRM) instead of 2-row (2 SRM).

Really a nice recipe though that I like, my BMC friends like, my craft brew friends like it, and it has been well received by pretty much everyone that has sampled it, even my SWMBO's mother!