Looking to create my first recipe

Alright, well i've just finished my second batch ever, and it turned out great.

I want to stray from the kits though and buy individual ingredients for my first unique beer. I'm looking for a nice pale ale, something with a lot of hop flavor not unlike sierra nevada.

Any suggestions for a general recipe? Looking for a lot of responses so i can pick and choose from them! Thanks.

I would browse through the recipe section on here, or maybe go down to your local book store and look for a book like "North American Clone Brews". That way you can pick something that you think sounds good, make it if you like, or tweak it some to make it your own creation.

I've got my own first recipe in primary at the moment. I believe if you really want to make something good you probably need to use some software to easily figure out all the variables to make a beer in the style you like. Something as simple as Qbrew, or the Beer Recipator online can layout all the things like target OG, color, ABV and IBU that make each brew unique. Once you pick a style, like American Pale Ale, the software shows you where the ranges lie for the style, and you can tweek away to your heart's content on the recipe. Once you have something you think is a good candidate you should probably run it by the forum here for a quick check to make sure you're not going to spend money on ingredients that you might not need, or that might make your beer bad even though it looks good in the program.

Beertools.com is a good site for making your own recipes. I made my first one the other day brewing it tomorrow.

My advice would be to find a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone recipe onine. There is one that is reputed to come from the brewery themselves.

Make this recipe a number of times in a row, tweaking it as you go along. It will be difficult to 'clone' another beer without brewing it a number of times.

This is because all of our brewing setups significantly differ. If you are only doing partial boils, your hop utilization will greatly differ from some one doing full boils. If you are using extract, the maltiness of your beer will be less than an all grain brewer, etc.

After your first batch, critique it against the real thing. If it is not bitter enough, increase your bittering hops. Not enough hop aroma, add more dry hops.

In the end, you will have your own recipe. The next challenge will be to brew it consistently.

Well currently I'm only doing extract brewing, So does all this information still apply, like using beertools? Also, im not determined to clone sierra nevada, it was just an example of the style beer im going for. i've been doing a lot of reading on this site and others, about american pale ales in general, and i've got a pretty good idea about what malts, specialty grains, and hops to use, and approximate amounts of each. Is this enough information to wing it, and then tweak, or is it a lot harder than im imagining?

If you think you have enough information to wing it, go for it! Like the others, though, I recommend some brewing software to confirm your thoughts, record your recipe, and allow for some very easy theoretical tweaking.


TL

Do you have a recipe in mind? Let's see it! I use recipartor http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator a lot bc it's pretty easy to use.

APAs (American Pale Ale) are fairly straight forward. Check out BeirMuncher's Sierra Nevada clone for an example: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=27673

It's just 2row and 2 specialty grains which for extract would mean extra light DME and those two specialty grains.

In my opinion when it comes to recipe formulation there isn't a huge difference between extract and all grain. You still have to have a target gravety and make sure the IBU's from the hops match your gravity for the style. On taht link to BeirMuncher's recipe he has a graph to help balance IBUs to Gravity which really comes in handy

Good luck!

Happy brewing!