To Clone or not to Clone

[brian_g]

Being relatively a Newbie to the brewing of beer, and that I must say I really detest the commercial breweries out there. Their beer is watery, tasteless and in my opinion not worth the money.

I think that the problem with the major commercial breweries, is not that they can't make good beer, but that they don't advertise their good beer. It seems that every ad is for a light beer, even if the same companies have better beers to offer. Coors light and Miller's light don't have any taste, but Molson, Blue Moon and Killian's do; the same company makes all of them. Amber Bock is made by Michelob. The problem, IMO, isn't that these companies can't make beer, they just don't talk about their good beer. I think some of this is intentional. If I had known that Blue Moon was made by the same company that made Miller Lite, I probably would not have gave it a chance.

 

[Yankeehillbrewer]

Being relatively a Newbie to the brewing of beer, and that I must say I really detest the commercial breweries out there. Their beer is watery, tasteless and in my opinion not worth the money.
QUOTE]

I think the term Commecial is a bit general, you probably mean the BMC's of the world or Macro Breweries. Essentially anyone producing beer for sale is a commercial brewery.

Anyhow, I like the idea of cloning, but only want to do it every now and again. I'm really more interested in perfecting my own recipes. But doing clones is fun and a great way learn.

 

[david_42]

The only real reason that I can come up with for cloning is that the beer you want just is not around for you to pick up at a store.

That's related to my main reason. Just about all of my clone batches are the result of browsing through vendors' lists and buying something that sounds interesting, even if I've never heard of it.

Once in a while I find a clone that is so good, that it displaces my own recipe for the style.