Stella Artois is a Belgian easy drinking lager and in this video we show how to brew an all-grain version of this beer.
Stella Artois Clone Recipe for a 5.5 gallon batch
- 11lbs German Pilsner malt
- 1.75oz Saaz hops (60 mins)
- 0.5oz Saaz hops (5 mins)
- WLP830 German Lager yeast
The Details
Transcript: Stella Artois. It’s the easy drinking lager popular in places like the UK and it’s brewed in Belgium. Let’s brew it.
Hi, I’m Martin Keen, And on this channel, “Homebrew how to” we cover through tips, recipes, and experiments.
And in this video, we are brewing the favorite of the English bar that is Stella Artois lager.
Now I looked up the recipe for this and what I could find said that this recipe comes pretty much from the brewery itself unofficialy. And it is like no recipe I’ve ever seen before, because it has one grain and one hop. That is it.
So let me bring in my graphic here, which normally shows you all the different specialty grains you need. But instead, I’m going to show you this very simple recipe. I bring a 5.5 gallon batch. So for my base malt, I am using German Pilsner malt. That’s 11 pounds of that. And for my hop I’m using SAS hops 1.75 ounces of that in a 60 minutes and 0.5 ounces in five minutes. That is it.
Now with a recipe like this with no specialty grains, I’m assuming that most of the flavor is going to come from yeast. The yeast I’m using is German Pilsner yeast. And, uh, and yesterday I, um, well I tempted to build a yeast starter.
And that’s why you add the dry malt extra before the boil. So yeah, it didn’t work out so well. I ended up going back to my regular method of just putting a pot on the burner and doing it that way.
Um, and do you know what? I ended up destroying my glass Erlenmeyer flask. I don’t know how it happened. I ended up cracking, you can see the crack along the bottom. There is pretty deep crack, so it was kind of an expensive mistake, but luckily I had a second flask laying around. I ended up using that and that has been now fermenting for what about 24 hours.
So with the starter finally done, time to get to brewing.
So the mash 150 degrees. The recipe calls for 60 minutes. We don’t put a lot of weight on that time. I just take a measurement partly through the mash and see where we are with the gravity. Adjusting my hydrometer reading for the current temperature. And I can see that I’m meeting my target.
My target pre boil gravity is 10 30. I’m at 10 31 that’s after about 35 minutes of mashing. So I’m just cutting it there. Um, and I’m going to do the mash out and then drain into my kettle.
All right. So I’ve got a nice vigorous boil going inside there. And now it’s time to add the hops. So this is the 60 minute hop edition, which is 1.75 ounces of Saaz Hops.
Thinking about how simple the ingredients are for this beer. It kind of makes a bit of a mockery, the advertising campaign that I grew up with for Stella Artois. Stella Artois, reassuringly expensive.
Just being a lager, I want it to be nice and clear. So I’m going to go overboard with the finings, the hot side and cold side. To the hot side, tablet goes in at 10 minutes. Now begins the, uh, the cooling process. We want to get this down at 55 degrees. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do that. Uh, just using my plate chiller, but I’m going to get this as cold as possible.
After primary fermentation was complete, I did move the beer into secondary and laggered for a week before kegging.
The beer came out at 5%. Now, normally at this point, I would show the beer and just do a taste on camera.
Well, I waited too long to do that. From kegging to now has been a week and the keg is kicked. So all I can show you is a couple of thumbnails that I took, uh, earlier this week of the beer.
Now this beer is a “smash beer,” single malt, and single hop.
You can really, I think, tell in the taste profile that’s the case. It’s pretty basic beer. We did try the beer that the Stella that I’d made with an actual bottle of Stella Artois, and in terms of color and taste, it wasn’t so far different, but the one big difference was in aroma.
Stella definitely has a very distinctive smell to it that I did not replicate at all in this beer. So perhaps if you were looking to change this recipe a bit a different aroma hop, um, might be something to consider, but overall pretty pleased with this beer.
And I think the fact that it has gone in a week probably speaks for itself. That’s it. Cheers!
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