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I am a fan of sam adams boston lager.

I am after a recipe that give me similar taste & profile that I can make.

Any advice would be appreciated!

bandit broower wrote:
I am a fan of sam adams boston lager.

I am after a recipe that give me similar taste & profile that I can make.

Any advice would be appreciated!Boston Lager is one of my favorite beers too. It is a lot like a German Pils, but has noticable caramel malt flavor. Jim Koch started as a homebrewer and is pretty homebrewer friendly. I'm told he used to put a homebrew recipe for Boston Lager on the Sam Adams website, but it isn't there any more.

What you can get from the website is that it has an original gravity of about 1.052, a final gravity of about 1.014, it uses 2-row base malt with some 60 degree caramel malt, and is hopped with Hallertau Mittelfruh and Tettnang hops. The Hallertau Mittelfruh hops can be really hard to find (unless you go to DRock's LHBS) but Tradition and Mount Hood are both good substitutes. Ironically, the domestic Hallertau hops are not as good of a substitute. He also says he uses a decoction mash which is an unusual, traditional method that is said to enhance the maltiness of a beer. If you look around the internet, you'll find lots of recipes. I got the following all-grain recipe from the owner of my LHBS(5 gallon batch):

10 lbs. Pilsen malt
0.5 lb. 60L Crystal malt
6 oz. Carapils dextrine malt
Mashed with a single infusion at 158 degrees

If you want to do this with extract, I would suggest you could steep the Crystal and Carapils, and use about 7.25 lbs of Pale LME.

I hopped it as follows:
½ oz. Tettnang whole hops (First Wort Hopping)
1.0 oz. Brewers Gold pellets (60 minute boil)
½ oz. Tettnang whole hops (5 minute boil)
½ oz. Mt. Hood pellet hops (0 minute boil)
½ oz. Mt. Hood pellet hops (Dry Hopping)
1 oz. Tradition pellet hops (Dry Hopping)

Again if you want to do this with extract, just put the "First Wort Hops" into the boil for 60 minutes. The Brewer's Gold hops might have been a small mistake. (That was the worst part of the hop crisis.) Maybe an additional 1.5 oz of Tettnang would have been a good substitute for the Brewers Gold.

I used White Labs WLP830 German Lager liquid yeast.

I thought it turned out very close to Boston Lager. I did a couple of side-by-side taste tests with friends. Everyone said rather matter-of-factly that my beer was very similar to Boston Lager. I liked the Boston Lager a little better than my own, but mine definitely had more hop aroma and, I think, a bit more bitterness (and a sharper, less pleasant bitterness to me, but one friend actually liked that.)

there's a book series called clone brews sam adams is in one of them they're all 5 gallon recipes and are mostly for all grain brewers
Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers (Paperback)
by Tess Szamatulski (Author), Mark Szamatulski (Author)

Thanks for the recipe!
The fact that it is a lager means it needs to be fermented in a fridge @ around 50 degrees--correct! So, the fermentation stage takes a bit longer as well.

I am looking forward to the challange!

The best advice I can give on fermentation temperature is to follow the manufacturer's recommendation for whatever yeast you use. This is definitely a lager. There should be no yeast-produced flavors (like fruity esters or spicy phenols) in this beer. It gets its distinctive flavor from all those Noble hops and how they work together with that slightly sweet caramel malt. If you can use a lager yeast and ferment at lager temperatures, that's ideal. If not, you could, in a pinch, use an ale yeast like White Labs WLP001 or Fermentis US05 and it probably would be pretty good.

In any case, you are right that everything takes longer for a lager. Good things come to those who wait.

thanks big dave
I'm going to find the products and have a go at it!

I believe I have become a member of the beerborg collective!!!!!

bandit broower:


The BeerBorg Pledge:

I, (insert name here), have been Assimilated. Resistance was futile and stupid. I now have beer.