carling clone?

[brewers droop]

its nice to know im not alone in the world of lager drinking

[Operator]

Drink what you know you like, but always try new things. That's my motto, I've got quite into mild with it being in all the pubs this month, can't beat coopers stout though! I generaly prefer ales but I still like lager, although my personal opinion of carling is similar to most of the above posters, gnats piss.

[brewers droop]

the point im making is that ive just done a coopers euro and its looking like a holstan pils type lager which is not my type and im going to be stuck with 25 litres of the stuff whereas a carling type is what i know i like and as ive only just started making my own i was hoping for some help from the more experienced brewers on here

[shandypants5]

the point im making is that ive just done a coopers euro and its looking like a holstan pils type lager which is not my type and im going to be stuck with 25 litres of the stuff whereas a carling type is what i know i like and as ive only just started making my own i was hoping for some help from the more experienced brewers on here

I am not an experienced brewer, but I am an experienced "fizzy pi$$" drinker.

To be honest ,I have done quite a few lager kits now, and Coopers Euro is about as good as I can get it. ( I doo like the mexican though and I have a Canadian blonde conditioning...)

BUT, its still not the same as canned fizz. (almost, but not quite).

I am begining to think that if I want lager, then Tesco will sell it to me at about 50p a pint, so its hardly worth making.

But if I want to make ALES, with a bit of character, then Tesco cant match my prices..

[mat69]

mate if ya just wanna drink carling forget about homebrew and just buy carling from the shop,your never gunna recreate a perfect clone,the joy of homebrewing is sampling different kits,styles,flavours,aroma,it seems to me that your after some sort of recipe for carling i dont think anyone has one,its trial and error,but if ya keep going im sure you will find one that suits your taste..

[simple one]

I would advise going to the shop and buying a Peroni, Pilsner Urquell, a Carling, a Hoeggarden and Fidlers Elbow by Wychwood. Pour them all in to glasses. Put on a blindfold and ask your girl/wife/mate to pass them over one at a time. These are all quite light beers. Decide which you like the best. If it is carling, then you know what you like. To replicate that just brew the cheapest lager kits (they will taste like carling or better, unless you proper bodge it).


But I'll hedge my bets that you will prefer one of the others though.
If you do, then buy a kit to match the style you like. Get a really good one. It'll cost about 20-25 quid. Its only the price of a round at todays pub prices, and the beer can be just as good (depending on what you drink and where).
You want you can change the kit slightly to suit the style of beer you like, for instance to darken it up, make it taste a bit more caramely and hoppy..... you could buy some hops and a bit of crystal malt, boil a small amount of the hops and the crystal, add it, and a small amount of dry hops toward the end of the fermentation. Its easy, it makes the kit more personal. There is a great kit section on JBK. With adaptions for kits, which make them (usually) better than the original kit.
Also, as many people do instead of adding sugar add spray malt. This will increase the quality.

People get a hard time on here for liking carling, bud, modern greene king..... etc, because they are typical examples of badly and cheaply made beers. And Home Brewing is all about trying to achieve the most perfect pint that you, your kit, your ingriedients and equipment can make.

In summary. Research beers (carling should be no one favourite beer, trust me), research the kit section on this web site, buy quality, take your time, ask people for advice, adapt your final product to your personal tastes.

I hope this helps.

[TC2642]

One of the problem's you may encounter, being due to the fact that there isn't much in the way of hops or malt flavour, is that faults are shown up more readily than if you where to do a stout or IPA. Something to keep in mind anyway, I know I would find it very hard to make an American Budweiser for that very fact. Remember that you need to be fermenting at a much lower temperature for lager yeast aswell.

[joel_m]

just to put in my 2 pence .. If you want an ale that is usually a pretty good introduction for Larger drinkers (although alot or realy ale drinkers turn thier nose up at it). Try Tanglefoot and/or Wells Bombadier Burning gold both are ales my larger drinking mates found they liked and good beers.
If you want to brew an ale but something closer to a larger Try either Woodfordes Great Eastern or Muntons midas touch, Both take a little bit of a while to condition though as like larger they don't have the heavy flavours to hide the green beer tastes. But Very good pints once done and you can sparkle them up to near larger fizz in the bottle without spoiling the flavour too much.

[brysie]

tc youre the first one to point out the most important bits.

that lager being such a light tasting drink will show up any imperfections, that a stronger tasting drink could hide.
and that lager yeast brews at much lower temperatures and for much longer, than traditional ale yeast.
[it seems that most lager kits sold in the uk come supplied with ale yeast]

add to that, the long,low temperature conditioning required to properly `lager`a brew, and you have something far more difficult to replicate
in the average home.

droop, the cheap kits mentioned so far, if brewed with the supplied yeast as recommended, will never produce anything like a true lager. [trust me,
ive been searching myself for some time] -apart from the coopers european which comes supplied with a proper lager yeast. so far, seems very promising
but then i did brew it in the cellar and the temperature stayed between 13 and 16 degrees.and it took nearly 3 weeks.

if youre seriously looking to brew lager, then lager specific yeast and slower lower temp brewing with long low temp conditioning is the only way forward.[imho]

[mshergold]

Personally I hate Carling, but do (not so much now) drink beers such as Carlsberg. I think there are some very good points made here and that some of the negative comments were maybe a little tongue-in-cheek. If you're dead set on only ever making a Carling clone, then I think that maybe homebrew isn't for you (a bit like joining a forum on food on cookery and only wanting a recipe for Big Mac and fries - it would be easier and cheaper to just go to McDonalds). However, Simple One makes a good point about blind tasting. See if any of your friends might be interested in blind tasting some beers. That way you could try more beers (you might even be able to persuade them to chip in). You could even try testing some of the very cheap supermarket own brand lagers against Carling and see how they fare.

Joel also makes a good point about beers such as Wells Burning Gold being popular with his lager drinking friends. Don't think that you won't like a beer just because it's in a style you don't usually drink. Just like a lot of German beers classed as lagers don't taste anything like Carling, Fosters, Carlsberg etc, there are ales, stouts etc that don't taste anything like you'd expect. For example, I'll drink Guinness when there's no ale in a pub or if I fancy a change. It's OK, but thought that was how pretty much how all stout tasted and never in nearly 20 years of drinking (and having also drunk Murphys and Beamish) gave it another thought until few months ago I tried a stout by Bath Ales which was served from a hand pump at the same temperature as ale. It tasted about as far from Guinness as you could get. A few days later, I tried Samuel Smiths stout which poured the same as and was served at the same temperature as regular Guinness and expected it to taste about the same as Guinness. It didn't (it had hints of coffee and chocolate) and made me realise just how little tasted Guinness has.

[joel_m]

To be fair I'm partial to a pint of the fizzy stuff from time to time hence why I'm thinking of brewing a larger at the moment. Sometimes on a hot day an ice cold pint of larger is just what the doctor ordered!
One big demonstrator in how much one type of beer can vary is taste test Carling against Bernard dark larger (sold in tescos and it comes in a nice 1pt amber swing top bottle that you can fill with homebrew after ). It looks like a thin Guiness but tastes nothing like it.. or light largers for that matter!
Try Some Wells Burning Gold ... go on you know you want to.. ice cold out the fridge

[Invalid Stout]

At the risk of repeating what other people have said, I don't think there's much point at all in trying to recreate Carling as homebrew. For two reasons: it's always on special offer in the supermarkets, so you won't save a lot of money; and because you just won't be able to get close to it with homebrew technology. The brewers of Carling have invested millions in making sure that every can tastes the same and have extremely shiney filtration and carbonation gear. You would need to spend a ton of money to get anything close to that even on a small scale. Ironically these light-tasting beers are the most difficult to brew.