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?