designing your own extract brew

anyone know of any recipes or tips to design my own extract brew? i cant go all grain just yet cuz im in an apartment but i would like to start experimenting with different ingredients rather than order kits.

Get ourself a copy of Ray Daniels - Designing Great Beers.

This is an indespensible reference to get you self sufficient in designing your own recipes. Take the knowledge of this book and get really familiar with the available extracts and you are well on your way to making your own "Great Designs".

One caveat tho', DGB is a little out dated but, the info that IS within is pertinent to the styles it discusses and is a great springboard to "freestyle brewing".

I used this as a starting point for coming up with my own recipes using extract. How to Brew - By John Palmer - Developing Your Own Recipes

I'm in the same boat as you and can't go all-grain due to space constraints. My next batch will be a partial mash. I figure if I can do partial mash well enough that will give me a little more freedom in tweaking recipes and experimenting than if I was just using extract and steeping grains.

+2 for DGB and John Palmer's HowToBrew. Also check this calculator out: The Beer Recipator 2.2. Punch in some extract, grains, and hops and it will give you OG, bitterness, color.

there are lots of extract recipes you can use as a base if you do a little searching. check out the jamil show on thebrewingnetwork.com he almost always details an extract version (though some require partial mash). Brew it up once then make some adjustments and brew it again.

if you find an all grain recipe you real want to work with you can do a partial mash. ie just use a couple pounds of 2 row rather than 6-10 and bump up the og with pale or light extract. all you will need is a 5 gallon or so pot ( you can boil the extract and extra water and mix in the fermenter), a paint strainer bag (home depot), and some software to calculate the og based on extract. Also youll want to brew soon after you buy the grain since crushed grain doesnt stay fresh very long. check out this post easy-partial-mash-brewing for more details.

You wont get quite the potential quality of a true all grain but you can still make great beer.

Maybe I'm just a gung-ho type, but I simply bought Beersmith and decided on the type of beer I wanted and started throwing stuff at it... worked pretty well for me. Beersmith will do the calculations for you and will give you at least some idea of what the beer's final attributes will be.

Maybe you should take that advice with a grain of salt... I bought a basket case 1970 Torino Convertible when I was 17.

Look at your records of what you have done.

If you have beer to go with the records, better yet, if you stay sober enough - perhaps do just one a night (drink more if you like, but only analyze the first one.)

Open your records, open the beer (if you still have one), and ask yourself:

What do (or did, lacking beer) I like about this?

What would I change?

Write the answers in the records for future reference, too.

Either provide recipe and answers to questions and await the input of the hive mind, or read up about stuff and take a stab at it yourself (with or without refinement from the hive mind).

Here's what I do:

Get an idea of what style I want. Then I look at other recipes and kind of merge them, tweaking things as I go: changing out hops, raising/lowering fermentables, changing percentages of certain things, etc, etc. Then I plug it all in to the calculator at tastybrew and see if I'm still within style. If not, I tweak until I am, or usually just say to hell with it and brew it anyway .

I'm 35 batches in and from about #10 on they have all been partial mash. I do 2.5 gallon boils on a glass top stove. I converted a 5 gallon round cooler into an MLT using instructions found on this forum and try to pull 40% or more of my fermentables for each batch from the mash. Formulating recipes is half the fun - read up on a style you like, research a few recipes and throw something together. The tastybrew calculator mentioned above is a good tool to see if you're close to style or what you had in mind.