Stone recently published a homebrew version of their recipe for Stone Pale Ale. Stone had announced that they would decommission their Pale Ale, to make way for other, new beers. Of course, this got people upset, and so somebody asked them for the recipe so that the beer at least survives for homebrewers. So Stone delivered. And the internet was happy about it.

The thing is: it’s not the first time Stone published their Pale Ale recipe. In 2008, the released a whole bunch of their recipes scaled down for homebrewers in BYO magazine. A bold move, certainly.

But there’s a catch: they’ve changed the grain bill and their hopping a bit.

In the 2015 recipe compared to the 2008 recipe, they’ve scaled down the crystal malt a bit. But even in the newer version, that’s a lot: 13% in the 2015 version, and a whopping 15.8% in 2008! Combined with a mash temperature of 69°C I wonder how this beer does not turn out to be cloyingly sweet.

The hopping changed as well, but not too much. They obviously changed the bittering hops. This might be just due to availability or cheaper prices. From what I’ve heard, Magnum is such a cheap source of alpha acid, some German hop growers even have problems shifting all of what they grow.

Unfortunately, the aroma hopping is not directly comparable as they deliberately changed the 2008 recipes under the assumption that homebrewers don’t do a whirlpool. At least they stuck with the same hop variety, which I think is quite an interesting choice by itself. Ahtanum hops have been around for quite some time, but have never gained quite the attraction or notoriety like the “C” hops, or Simcoe or Amarillo.

All in all, both versions of the same beer give an interesting insight how one of the big craft breweries in the US designs recipes, and at least to me, it was a bit of a surprise.

One thing that is mentioned on the side is the yeast strain. According to Stone themselves, they got their house strain from a defunct Canadian microbrewery, and is similar to WLP007. In the 2008 recipe, they use WLP002, though. There are some rumours that WY1217 might be Stone house strain, but there is no further evidence other than Wyeast’s claim that it’s from a “well-known San Diego brewery”. Stone themselves keep their yeast with White Labs, their yeast strain is WLP5036, and (obviously) not publicly available.