Selecting Ingredients

I've only made two batches of beer, one as a beer kit, and the other buying separate ingredients based on what a home brew book told me.

I want to create a beer by selecting ingredients that I think of, but don't know how I would go about doing that. I understand about alpha acids, and some basic understanding of DME/LME but how do you decide which would go good together?

Can I simply select a few varieties of hops and mix them together based off their alpha acid solely?

Is selecting the DME/LME is it just based off what kind of a beer you want? As in a Pale Ale, Heffeweisen, Lager, etc?

And what about the yeast? One recipe called for an American Lager type yeast for an IPA...

So how would I even begin to know which can mix with what, apart from taking years to sample as many hops, extracts, grains, yeasts as I can..

Some of this will come with experience, but when I decided I was ready to stop brewing other peoples' recipes and make my own, I picked up Ray Daniels' book "Designing Great Beers".

It covers the history of many beer styles and gives guidelines on the types and amounts of malts and hops used for the styles.

It is, hands down, my favorite brewing-related book.

edit: it reads like a hybrid history and science book.... lots of charts and tables, which suites me very well.

Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely check it out!

+1 on the Daniels book. It's great for understanding how to balance, adjust, or create a recipe from scratch so you can hit the various marks you may be aiming for in a beer.

Along with Designing Great Beers, I would recommend Sam Calagione's Extreme Brewing and even more so Randy Mosher's Radical Brewing. I know the titles are lame but they really are written for the kind of brewing interests you are expressing here. You will find more detailed information on hops and grains in Mosher then you would in Daniels with much less information on how to put it together. But more than anything he really shows what can be done with imaginative brewing. After you read him you may feel he doesn't go far enough in creative brewing, but before you read him you really have no idea what the potential is for unique, delicious beers.

It's great that you want to explore the different elements of brewing (reminds me of myself not even a year ago). The only real way to understand what parts of your recipe contribute to what parts of your beer is to brew it, but as an amateur it doesn't hurt to read up on it just to give you some basic ideas of what affects what. Then as you get experience brewing what is being said by the authors makes even more sense.

I'd also check out this sticky if you haven't seen it yet in the meantime: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f39/recipe-formulation-ingredients-descriptions-164140/

As for the hops, you can check this out for examples of which ones are typical for certain styles: http://***********/resources/hops
there's also a similar chart their for yeasts

And for the DME/LME, if its a wheat use wheat extract, otherwise use light or extra light extract and steep / partial mash the characteristic malts.

edit: the BJCP style guidelines can also be used to steer you in the right direction for ingredients: http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/catdex.php

Would A Premium Supporter get this guy a Gravity/Hops Ratio graph? Here's a link: https://cdn.homebrewtalk.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=10141&cat=all&ppuser=636

Do you mean post the image directly in here?

I've never seen this before. Printing it now....

Actually... I don't know if I agree with that chart at all.

I make a lot of beers in the 1.050 to 1.055 range and would not consider 35 IBU as "extra hoppy". My porter is 1.055 OG/34.9 IBU and I would actually call it "slightly malty".

ya, i've used it before, but it doesn't seem to work all that well. Part of it is poor choice of words. Like a stout with 1.05OG and 35IBU, wouldn't be thought of as extra hoppy, but an APA of the same could be. I prefer balance value ( http://beercolor.netfirms.com/balance.html ) to BUGU

One of the most important tools I have used to create my own recipes is BeerSmith brew software. It is so versatile. It allows you do all but taste a recipe before you brew it. You can get the demo version of BeerSmith for free to try it out and buying it is only $20. There are also other brewing programs out there too, so shop around. I think it would help you a lot in designing your own brews.

I would also put in a plug for Jamil Zainasheff's and John Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles. I think it a great baseline for extract brewers and has a lot of other information (such as the hops chart and carbonation volumes) that help a lot. I like listening to the brewing network (particularly Brew Strong) so I have learned a TON using this book.

Walker said:

Actually... I don't know if I agree with that chart at all.

Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the chart Walker, that is what I was talking about. When I first looked at that chart I didn't agree with it at all either, but after working with it some I've come to understand it and like it a lot.

If you are looking to make a pale ale that is only slightly hoppy then the chart cannot steer you wrong. It is the world of a difference between a 25 IBU pale ale and a 35 IBU pale ale. For me, understanding the IBU a little more made me much more confident in my homebrew recipes and it was with this chart that I really began to understand.

Walker said:

I make a lot of beers in the 1.050 to 1.055 range and would not consider 35 IBU as "extra hoppy". My porter is 1.055 OG/34.9 IBU and I would actually call it "slightly malty".

Click to expand...

I think when you are relating porters and stouts to the chart it is very important to note that you are working with a very malty dark beer. The thing about the chart (and even more so with the measurement of the IBU) is that it is only concerned with actual bitterness in the hop, not the perception of bitterness we get from drinking the beer. No, a 35 IBU porter probably does not taste hoppy but it's not suppose to. Try to make an 'india' porter and you may find it requires a ton of hops to get any of the characteristics to come through, and drink your 35 IBU porter next to a 25 IBU porter and you may find that a lot more hop character comes through than you originally thought. Here is something from the Complete Joy of Homebrewing that might help explain it better:

"...More IBUs in a given beer mean more bitterness perceived. But there is an enigma here, because 20 IBU in a rich, full-bodied malty stout will be perceived by the tongue as having far, far less bitterness than 20 IBUs in a American-style lager beer. Both have the same amount of bittering substance but the perception will be different. The lesson here is that a given amount of IBUs (i.e., hops used for bitterness) in a beer does not always equal the same amount of bitterness perceived. " (Italics are his.)

Sure, the chart is not perfect but it works great as a guide and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is trying to figure out how to balance the hops and grain to achieve certain results.