BeerBorg

If you make a clone of a popular beer and it tastes 10 times better than the original, is that a good clone?
I swore I would not buy any more blue moon last summer. Just don't like it.
Ssrock ... I would buy your clone
that's one of the best wheat beers I've had in a while.
A hell of a lot better than blue moon

I made a clone of Blue Moon also, recipe posted here, which I got from Russki on the other forum before we all moved here. My Blue Moon drinking friend liked it better also, and side by side it was better to us. Not a big BM drinker though, but it was one of the more straightforward recipes.

I think there's something that gets lost in scaling a recipe up to such a big commercial level that the small batch seems to just taste better.

I believe Blue Moon is technically not a wheat beer. They mimic a "white ale" through flavoring. SWMBO loves it, but won't try real witbiers.

Very glad you enjoyed it, I think it tastes pretty dang good myself! She's darker than Blue Moon but I'm not too sure how to avoid that on an extract beer, and quite frankly don't really care too much.

ssorck, you can add the majority of your extract late to avoid it getting too dark.

I too recently brewed a BM and it's good. Very different from I normally drink, but I brewed it for SWMBO. A few bottles have found their way across the country so we'll see what others think of it, too.

dbrowning wrote:If you make a clone of a popular beer and it tastes 10 times better than the original, is that a good clone?

By strict definition, no. It should taste the same

But I've made many clones and often tweak them to my own taste so, like yours, they end up being better TO ME. I've tweaked my Common, my Dead Guy and even Levitation just a bit now.
In these instances, maybe we need to call them "tributes" instead of clones!

Kealia wrote:...maybe we need to call them "tributes" instead of clones!

I like that. What better tribute to a beer we like to drink than to replicate it (to our own tastes) at home!