Introduction
We haven't made too many clone beer recipes, we've been more inclined to blaze our own trail, experimenting with recipes from scratch. But when Flamin Galah shared the recipe for their award winning Hazy Pale Ale on their YouTube channel, we figured we'd give it a go - it had to be pretty good, right?
Appearance
Starting off with appearance, and as you can see from the photo above which has two samples of our version side by side with two samples of the original, there's no way to really tell them apart. For the record our version is in the two glasses on the left.
It pours with a decent fluffy white head, but this dissipates quickly, a known short coming with including oats in the grist.
The colour is identical, as is the level of haziness, so in terms of appearance we're calling this one a match.
Aroma
Hops. Lots of hop aroma. Mosaic and Citra hops are a well known combination and it's clear to see why with this beer. There's a bit of El Dorado as well on the hot side, but the Mosaic really dominates the aroma with loads of mango, stonefruit and other tropical fruits, with a little bit of floral and earthiness in the mix as well.
Compared to the original the aromas are very similar, but not identical. Even though we used the same hop varieties, there are no doubt subtle differences between different batches and hop providers that would account for this.
In any case, the aroma profile is still very close between the two versions of this beer and you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart just from the aroma alone. If we were to try and distinguish them from one another we'd say the original version had slightly cleaner fruit notes compared to ours.
Flavour
The flavour of this beer is excellent, and definitely one of the best hoppy beers that we've made to date. Similar to the aroma there's loads of hop flavour - tropical, mango and some citrus flavours at the fore. There's a restrained bitterness, exactly what this style of beer requires. Just enough to balance out the hop flavours.
We did two head to head comparisons. The first one was when the beer was quite young, so still had a fairly prominent grainy flavour and was a little overcarbonated - noticeably more than the original when you drank each in succession. Aside from these differences though we could tell the beers were very close. Perhaps a tiny bit more bitterness in the original than in ours.
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| The Hazy Pale Ale as it appears on the Flamin Galah website |
A few weeks later, with the carbonation now dialled back we did another test. There was still a little bit of that grainy flavour lingering, but aside from this there was very little to go on to tell these beers apart. They were both excellent.
Mouthfeel is good, so we feel like the water profile was where it needed to be with a heavy chloride to sulphate ratio to help prop up the mouthfeel and round out the flavours. We felt like the mouthfeel was slightly fuller in our version compared to the original.
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| Big thanks to Flamin Galah for sharing this recipe |
S04 yeast is not a variety we've used much before, but we must admit we're pretty impressed with how it performed in this beer. We feel it may be a little underrated for this style of beer, with most people opting for other strains like Verdant IPA or Pomona for hoppy styles like this. We'll definitely be using it again for some hazy's in the future.
Conclusion
We feel we really nailed this beer, and we're very glad that we made it. The recipe itself has a couple of things we probably never would have tried in our own recipe - like a 15 minute hop addition, and a whirlpool/hop rest at the conclusion of the boil where no extra hops were added.
It's a great baseline or template for a little bit of further experimentation. If we were to brew it again we'd probably increase the amount of oats in the grist as we love that silky mouthfeel you get with a decent dose of oats like in a Hazy IPA. We'd also mix up the hops to try out some different hop combinations.
We'd strongly recommend anyone who loves a hazy, hop forward beer to give this one a try. If you do decide to make it we strongly recommend you stick to the recipe exactly rather than tweaking it (at least when brewing it for the first time)
Thank you to Flamin Galah for sharing this recipe with the homebrewing community!
Want to read more? Check out the links below to the Recipe and Brew Day articles.
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