Would like to brew a beer clone like Fursty Ferret. Has anyone tried before?

[Mumathomebrew]

With a beginners enthusiasm after an elderly Coopers kit, we would like to brew something more akin to my husbands favourite beer, Fursty Ferret.

Found some clone recipes here, here, here and here, but they seem to be made of totally different ingredients to my inexperienced eyes and knowing nothing about hops and malts. So just wondered if anyone had tried anything like this particular beer clone with any success.

I've never really made any proper beer right from hops and grains, so it may be a bit too adventurous for a beginner. Happy to take advice on that.

 

[IslandLizard]

Cloning a commercial beer in homebrew is never an easy task, even if we had the brewery's recipe. Much is process related, and is impossible to replicate on small scale. As long as you get close and the beer is good, consider it a success. Refining the formulation and process may get you closer or not, small deviations can have relatively large effects in any direction. For example I have not been able to brew a beer exactly the same twice, even 2 weeks apart, using the exact same ingredients and fermentation schedule.

Fursty Ferret looks to be in the style of a Best Bitter. Since you're a beginning brewer, and not set up for brewing all grain, sticking with extracts and steeping grains is your best strategy right now.
Many beers in this style rely on a bready malt base, such as Maris Otter.

If you can source (relatively) fresh Maris Otter liquid extract* (e.g., Muntons), the right hops, some medium crystal malt, perhaps a little pale chocolate malt (suggestion are provided in your linked recipes) and use Lallemand dry ESB yeast, you should get in the ballpark.

*There's no Maris Otter dry extract available anywhere, AFAIK.

 

[IslandLizard]

For inspiration on beers and ingredients in that style, here is a link to the Best Bitters in our recipe section.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

For inspiration on beers and ingredients in that style, here is a link to the Best Bitters in our recipe section.

Thank you very much for those. The recipe for this
Partial Mash Olde Speckled Hen
in post #2 seems to be something more do-able for a beginner and is local to me so there is a nice touch. Hubby likes this beer too so we'll see if we can do anything nice with it.

I can see I'm going to have to do lots of homework first. Beer is in another language to wine.

 

[IslandLizard]

Thank you very much for those. The recipe for this
Partial Mash Olde Speckled Hen
in post #2 seems to be something more do-able for a beginner and is local to me so there is a nice touch. Hubby likes this beer too so we'll see if we can do anything nice with it.

I can see I'm going to have to do lots of homework first. Beer is in another language to wine.

OSH is wonderful, I've had the original many times, on draught, long before the brewery was bought out.

The Post #2 you're referring to is a partial mash recipe. I don't see a partial mash being necessary, complicating things for no good reason, or adding anything that the extract can't.
I'd stick to the all-extract version in #3 in that thread. Moreover, I'd use either a) 100% Maris Otter LME or b) 1 can of Maris Otter LME and the balance with a light dry extract, to get to the needed gravity.

Mind, all these are unhopped extracts. You'll need to boil part of the wort for 30' to an hour. And adding hops at certain times.

How large a batch are you going to brew and how large is your boil kettle? Fermenter?
We can help tweaking the recipe to your batch/fermenter size and kettle size.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

I have ordinary kitchen pans, many single gallon and one five gallon glass carboy as I normally make single gallon wines. I'll have a scrounge and see how large a saucepan I can scrounge or just make a smaller batch.

There are two proper plastic brewing buckets but these are currently residing in the garden so I'll examine them to see if they are still up to the job. I severely doubt they'll be hygienic enough any more if they've got scratched. I was given them ages ago and haven't brewed in them.

Found maris otter and a hop supplier. What fun.

 

[madscientist451]

I looked at the first recipe on the original post, and the brewer said it was pretty close to being a clone, so why not go with that one?
https://www.homebrewwizard.com/tag/fursty-ferret-clone/
I've been playing around with the Brulosophy "short and shoddy" brew day method ( I don't have much time for brewing) and it makes pretty good beer without very much effort.
http://brulosophy.com/2018/01/18/short-shoddy-american-ipa/
I don't really like the taste of extract beer, and I realize that others don't mind it at all, but I would encourage new brewers to skip the extract and go straight to BIAB brewing.

 

[IslandLizard]

If the buckets in the garden were used for gardening, they're probably dirty and scratched inside. I would not use them for fermentation.

You'd need at least a gallon size pot, although a gallon of beer (~8 pints) is not a lot. A gallon brew is doable for extract, but given the amount of work involved if you decide to venture into doing an all grain brew, it's barely worth it. Mashing the milled grain takes an hour, then it gets strained, sparged, and boiled for 30-60'.

How about a canning, stock, or other large pot? A 4 gallon pot is sort of the minimum IMO.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Thank you. I will save up for some new brewing stuff first. No point ruining good work with bad equipment.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

We did eventually start a Fursty Ferret-alike beer on the 1st Nov. We've just bottled it on the 7th Dec, and it's our first attempt at a 'proper' beer as such. Made in an ordinary kitchen pan put inside another larger one to keep the temps steady. Fermented in a glass wine demijohn in a warmish kitchen with a towel around it. It began fermenting again after we'd put in the dry hopped addition so I assumed it had got an infection and had very little hope for it's success. However, after three weeks +, we decided we had no more patience to wait for the fermentation lock to stop, and because the dry hopping wasn't meant to stay in too long according to some snippet I read. So we put it to bottle whilst still active but it was wonderfully clear.

It looks and tastes like beer and not infection, so wow. Just got to wait for the sugar conditioning to fizz it up and it should be ready by Christmas day in theory. The colour is bang on for FF because we did a side by side with a real one to compare.

Thanks for all the clues to the recipes. We used the beersmith recipe cloud one converted to 4L to fit the demi. Our FG was 1.014.

Differences. We accidentally put the 60' hops in the mash by mistake and we didn't have challenger hops so we used goldings. Neither did we have a whirl flock tablet.

 

[IslandLizard]

Looking really good and yummy! ^

Keep the bottles in a warmish (room temp) area to carb up. After that, best to refrigerate 3-5 days before opening, so the carbonation will be absorbed better in the cold beer. You could get away with one day chilling if you're pressed for time.


P.S. Is there a little sediment in the bottom of that bottle?

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Is there a little sediment in the bottom of that bottle?

Not yet but there will be. I think it's reflection.

Good advice. Thank you. I hadn't thought of keeping it warm for carbing.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Made this recipe again today. It was a truly lovely home-brew beer last time and hubs is very happy that we can get so close to his favourite beer. We did some side by side testing and it wasn't bad at all for a clone. The colour is perfect. The only difference from that recipe is we didn't have red wheat malt so used Cara red (both times). Plus we used goldings instead of challenger and S04 yeast.

This time we mashed a bit higher at nearer 75*c and then let it slide to 67.6*c because we didn't communicate well enough at the start. I think we did the mash at nearer 66*c last time. We'll find out what the taste difference is.

The boiling always loses so much liquid for our small four litre batches. At our beer club they said aim for a 5% - 15% loss but we lose nearly half and have to add in more water to get the SG right. We overdid that this time so this second batch started at 1.038 so it will just be less alcoholic. I don't suppose we'll ever get it identical each time and we'll be most likely be brewing this as a staple beer. We just don't yet have a big enough mashing pan to make more than a gallon demi at a time. Not unless we do it in five batches to fill the massive 5 gallon demi.

 

[IslandLizard]

Good to hear you're perfecting your brewing!

At our beer club they said aim for a 5% - 15% loss but we lose nearly half and have to add in more water to get the SG right.

5-15% boil off may be for 5 gallons/20 liters and is not linear, not a percentage, when changing the volume drastically. Much depends on your pot dimensions and heat source. A mere simmer, surface rippling, is enough. A rolling boil is not needed or even encouraged.

If you boiled off half during the hour, you should start with 1 1/2 of your needed volume. You boil off the "1/2" and left with the "1."
Or top off a few times with boiling water as you boil. In the end it all should make similar but slightly different beer.

As I mentioned earlier, a 30 minute boil is usually fine. Just use 1/3-1/2 more of your bittering hops to achieve the same bitterness.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Thank you and all kind advice taken. I've decided to make another batch tonight doing exactly the same things but with a 30 minute soft boil and half again on the bittering hops. We'll taste what it does to the beer when they're both ready.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Been watching these two clones as they ferment as a side by side. Interestingly the 30 min boil, that was made a day later, is clearing faster than the longer boil. Fascinating.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

I see comments on beers that others have made, that say they are ready in a week or so. People have brought beers to the club that are only five days old. Mine don't ever seem to be anywhere near that fast. I left my last Golden ale to clear for a month before bottling and then the comments were that it tasted sulphury. I looked that up and saw it might be because of being on the yeast too long.

If they're not quite clear yet, then is it too early to bottle them or should one wait until they're crystal clear? Is there a 'too long' or 'too short' a time before bottling?

 

[Guntash]

I see comments on beers that others have made, that say they are ready in a week or so. People have brought beers to the club that are only five days old. Mine don't ever seem to be anywhere near that fast. I left my last Golden ale to clear for a month before bottling and then the comments were that it tasted sulphury. I looked that up and saw it might be because of being on the yeast too long.

If they're not quite clear yet, then is it too early to bottle them or should one wait until they're crystal clear? Is there a 'too long' or 'too short' a time before bottling?

I would bottle it right away ( about 10-14 days after pitching yeast) to get it off the yeast. Then add your priming sugar and bottle then let it sit in a dark area at room temp for 1-2 weeks. After that put the bottle's in the fridge and they will clear up in time in the bottles.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Just bottled them both. They were still bubbling a tiny, tiny bit so maybe its a tad early for this particular beer but it doesn't matter. The SG wasn't down enough at 1.020 so the beer will only be 2.36% unless it gets higher in the bottle. This recipe will always be a staple so we'll be making it again and again. It is going to be interesting to compare notes when they're conditioned.

The raw beer is definitely two different colours because of the shorter boil on one. The 30 minute boil is much lighter and had a slightly more vegetal smell about it. The 60 minute boil was more metallic. It's good experimenting and perfecting with one recipe.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

We took these two to the beer club for comment at the end of last month. They were extraordinarily different having been left to mature a bit. Hardly the same beer at all. The 60' boil was caramellic and deep, the 30' boil was a lighter creature altogether with none of the deeper malty nuances. I'm really happy you said about a shorter boil to make me do a side by side, because it made for very interesting club discussion with the actual beers in front of us. Thank you for that.

30' comments:- Golden, grassy, brussel sprout, green, vegetal, slight

60' comments:- Amber, Caramac, more body, more rounded, brown bread and caramel biscuit, heavy, thick, toffee

Interestingly, neither beer was carbonated, and as it was still fermenting when we bottled and conditioned it, I was really surprised about that. It still wasn't very carbonated last week either. We've put it aside for now to leave it more than a month to see. It was the one beer we were worried about bottle bombs with and couldn't have been more wrong (so far).

It has demonstrated how much a slight difference to technique makes to the same recipe and it's vast. I ought to do some more experiments with mash temp differences too. I'm highly likely to attempt this beer loads of times anyway as it's still hubbies fave. But not my versions... yet!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Just as a general rule you're much better off asking about cloning British beers on the UK forums like Jims or THBF - not only will far more people know the original, there's usually somebody who has direct experience of cloning most of the major commercial beers.

I can't see any of the recipes linked above but I'd comment that the Ferret webpage says "Dark crystal malt delivers a full-bodied biscuity taste, rounded off with a subtle floral and lemon hop aroma", and the Tesco site says the only allergens are barley and sulphites - so no wheat. Dark crystal is usually around 250 EBC (90-100L), and I can't see H&W using anything as fancy as Maris Otter, even for Tanglefoot they use ordinary UK pale malt (Flagon in that case, which is one of the main "ordinary" malting varieties, albeit one of the tastier ones, maybe 4:1 pale:Otter would be a close match). Ooh, the Crisp pale from The Malt Miller in Swindon is currently Flagon.

Lemon in traditional British beers usually implies one of the Styrian Goldings like Savinjski or Celeia.

Don't worry about the colour, British brewers tend to adjust colour with caramel so homebrew ones should be a touch lighter than the commercial version if you're using the right amount of dark-coloured ingredients for flavour. It's a common mistake to target the colour and ignore the flavour...

Ah, here we go :

We have two wells on site – one 164ft deep, the other 115ft – and they produce great-quality water, high in calcium, which is excellent for brewing, particularly pale ale. Over thousands of years, the water seeps through the chalk into the well...The main malt we use is flagon, a high-quality malted barley from the south-west and East Anglia

We can trace our yeast back to 1933, when Mr Douglas was head brewer, and there is no other brewery in the world using it. It is high in esters, which give flavour notes such as banana and pear drops.

The hop variety Badger uses most is Goldings, which is found in our best-known beers, Tanglefoot and Fursty Ferret, alongside First Gold and Celeia hops, respectively. ...We tend to add a lot of hops towards the end of the boil, which produces more aroma and flavour because you're only releasing the essential oils and not the acids. It's changed a lot in the past 20 years – brewers are using more hops than ever and adding them later. In some of our newer-style beers, we even add hops into the fermenting tank to produce really dry hoppiness.

Also, the temperature of the liquor will affect the amount of sugar released in the mash. We tend to brew at around 65-66C; plus or minus half a degree is critical

So, Flagon and dark crystal mashed at 65.5C, no wheat, Goldings for bittering and Celeia towards the end of the boil, no dry hopping.

If the source of Goldings isn't explicitly mentioned it's probably the slightly cheaper ones from Hereford but Kent will be fine.

Those banana-y yeasts seem to be a bit of a thing in SW England, the Hanlons one is noted for its banana and I suspect that's what the Brewlab Devon-1 yeast (now Standard Bitter - Fruity) is. If you're using dry yeast then you might want to play around with either the Lallemand Wit yeast or say a 50:50 mix of the Wit (or even the more extreme Munich Classic) and S-04. Or just harvest some dregs from a H&W cask - perhaps someone from the club could help you with that?

 

[IslandLizard]

I'm really happy you said about a shorter boil

Now, I'm not so happy I said that.

30' comments:- Golden, grassy, brussel sprout, green, vegetal, slight

Those marked in red are (unwanted) off flavors/aromas associated with DMS formation/retention, which could be due to the shorter boil. Now grassy and green point more toward the hops or hopping routine. Either of those off flavors/aromas are not wanted either. Vegetal flavors/aromas can also come from (stale) hops.

Are you perhaps boiling with the lid on all the time? How hard/vigorous is the boil?

I'm fishing here... The extra DMS issue may lay in the British malts being undermodified, which can well be the cause of increased DMS formation. In that case a longer boil is needed.

Then controlling the boil vigor and thus caramelization vs. DMS formation/retention can become a balancing act. A short and vigorous boil may create more DMS than can be driven off. A longer, less vigorous boil may drive off enough DMS while keeping the wort less caramelized and lighter in color.

Your kettle (bottom thickness) and heat source can certainly play a role in getting too much caramelization.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

I shall try all of those things you suggest.

They're ordinary kitchen saucepans we're using. The one the boil goes in does have quite a thick bottom. No lid on during the boil, and we've been learning about how vigorous the boil needs to be. We've now made this same beer clone four times with variations, and will be doing many more till it's perfect. I think some more side by sides are a very good way to compare results.

The first one was pretty spot on with colour and taste but it had a mistake as I'd put the bittering hops in the mash being such a newb.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

The good news is, that as they mature, they are both still highly drinkable beers made by a newb. It did take them forever to carb up though. I think the lids can't have been tight enough because they were in the same warmth as their ferment temp.

However the surprise nice one has been a small beer that we made using the spent grain from both. Mashed again at 55*/60*/66*c for an hour. The SG was 1.010 so added 8 tbsp spray malt and golden syrup approx 2 tbsp. to bring the SG up to 1.020. Then I happened to find a cold teapot my son had left with rooibos tea in, so the 800ml of very strong old tea got bunged in too.
Used 1/2 oz of mongrel hops @30' then half removed them @5' as thought it too bitter
+ 1 orange peel + 1 tsp sugar
SG was then 1.026
S05 yeast didn't start, so added some s04 in the morning and that didn't start, so added some Notti which was newer, and off it went happily fermenting.
FG 1.010 so approx 1.71%
It was fruity and interesting without being too ale-ish. Was a bit yeasty but fine.

I'd definitely try to use rooibos tea again in a fruity beer with a low grain bill. It has a nice refined indistinguishable fruity note to it and a superb colour.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Hello lovely beer people. Haven't been here for ages as haven't been brewing for a long time. However, we have just been given some proper beer kit to make larger batches with. Very, very happy about that, so have set about making a larger attempt at this Fursty Ferret again. Ishy-ish as we didn't have any Goldings.

2,660g - British lager malt
190g - Crystal
190g - Cara Red
95g - Flaked Maize

Mashed at a much better constant of 65 - 67* in a proper mash tun (instead of our saucepans)
Hop schedule -
60' - 15g Sovereign (aa 6.3)
15' - 2.5 flat tsp Irish Moss
10' - 24g Cluster (aa 5.3)
5' - 47g Amarillo (aa 9.3)
5' - 20g orange peel

SO4 yeast

Pre-boil SG 1.026
Post boil SG 1.042 leaving just under 20 litres

It had got so late at night that we didn't cool it down fast, so no cold break (as we didn't know how to use the coil set up plus had a bit of wine by then) but left the tun with a towel over it overnight.

We thought we'd ruined it by doing that because it was still pretty warm in the morning, but by lunchtime it had cooled down enough to put in the fermenting bottle and add the yeast.

Despite the cooling issue, the messy mash, the jammed spigots and all the other silly beginner mistakes we made along the way, it still smells wonderful and is fermenting and flocculating nicely. Hopefully those mistakes won't ruin the beer. We'll see....

 

[IslandLizard]

Hello lovely beer people. Haven't been here for ages as haven't been brewing for a long time. However, we have just been given some proper beer kit to make larger batches with.

Welcome back, @Mumathomebrew!

Good hearing from you, your new brew kit looks good, as did her maiden voyage.
Fermenting away as she should!

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Very nice to be back. Thank you.

We re-mashed the spent grain to have another go at the nice fruity 'little beer' Rooibos tea version once again. Interestingly there was very nearly no sugar at all in the resulting wort. Just 1.006 at best after the boil. So I suppose it means this system is pretty efficient if the grain is truly that well spent. It must be a very good sign as it means all the tasty stuff is in the Fursty Ferret first beer. I'm only used to my saucepans.

I persevered anyway but I suspect it is going to be a no beer tasting beer. The must was like brown dishwater and I did wonder at wasting hops and adjuncts. Added syrup, rooibos tea, sugar, jaggery and even a dash of vanilla to try to get even a hint of a taste other than the hop bitterness. At least they were all the wild scavenged mongrel hops. Might be a disaster of an experiment but who knows.

Just a matter of whether to use something like Windsor yeast to leave as much taste in as possible.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Real FF on the left and ours in the middle. Still a bit cloudy from the thief. FG 1.010 so ready to bottle tomorrow. Colour good. Tastes and smells malty but is much hoppier than we remember it being before. I might have made a calculation mistake as the hop quantities did seem a little excessive at the time but we were considerably scaling up.

The small beer rooibos was a complete disaster. It was covered with purply grey slime with green mould patches on top. It couldn't be seen through the white bucket. The liquid looked clear underneath but we couldn't get a sample nicely through the revolting slime so we didn't fancy drinking it so we just lobbed it. Lesson learned. Don't use inferior ingredients with old yeast. Pity we forgot to take a picture though.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

Took this to our beer group for evaluation. It had really changed, not in a good way, from the early nicer version it had been. Unlike the acceptable versions we've so far made. This version, although still just about drinkable, had a sharper burny fusil flavour undermining the maltiness, and then an acrid aspirin aftertaste.

The beer club tasters reckoned it was high and/or variable fermentation temps causing this. It had been at a fairly constant 17*-18* on an inkbird, so very high ferm temps weren't present. However we had put a warming reptile mat to one side of the fermentor, so one chap reckoned perhaps the temps had varied enough from one warmer side of the fairly wide glass carboy to the colder other, with enough variance to stress the moving yeasts. The only other variable from the previous versions, aside from the bulk, is that we used Muntons drops and not ordinary sugar to carb. Plus the not cooling it fast after the boil but leaving it overnight to cool.

 

[Miraculix]

Could also be infected.

 

[Mumathomebrew]

The infected beers I've ever seen of other peoples have been uber fizzy. Is that not always the case?