Guide to making your own recipes?

Howdy all. So I want to make my own recipes, but I am uncertain what say a general grain bill is, what proportional should be base malt, and how to make sure I don't make any extreme mistakes in composition. If anything, I want to be certain that if I just make it up as I go along that it is fine, or if I need to follow certain rules.


Also, is there a guide to additional sugars (lactose, candi syrup, etc.) and other adjuncts to what they do and amounts added?


I found guides grains/hops/yeast from the stickies, but haven't found something on this subject. Apologies if I did not dig deep enough, and thank you for any information!

-Yotie

That's the beauty of brewing in my opinion...there's no right and wrong to recipes. If you're brewing to make a certain style, then you'll need to go by general guidelines, but otherwise...make what you think will be good.

I highly suggest buying the book "Designing Great Beers". This book covers most styles of beer you would be brewing, and it goes into great detail about the beers. It helps with recipes formulation tremendously.

Wonderful, thank you. I am going to Belgium in a week, only have 2 days and planning on bringing a tasting journal with me so I can work on figuring out what I like the most. Will look into that book.

+2 for 'Designing Great Beers' by Ray Daniels. Probably the best book out about writing recipes.

+3 on Designing Great Beers....it addresses what constitutes each style in formulating your recipes....invaluable as a guide, but tasting a lot of beer to understand what you like and don't and how ingredients and process affect the beer you like is just as important....oh, and experience (just brew it) helps.

I started with basic grain bill recipes of a style and make additions and subtractions to dial in my beers for my tastes...of course, this takes years.

Designing great beers, is way to techie for a newbie, I would start with brewing classic styles first, try a few and you will get the hang of it. there are some rules of thumb that would be helpful to know when starting and keep it simple.

+5 on both Brewing Classic Styles and Designing Great Beers. You'll learn what is generally used for all the major beer styles which is a great starting point when looking to create a new recipe and then you can tweak it accordingly to make it your own.

yodalegomaster said:

Designing great beers, is way to techie for a newbie, I would start with brewing classic styles first, try a few and you will get the hang of it. there are some rules of thumb that would be helpful to know when starting and keep it simple.

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Brewing Classic Styles is by far the better first book of the two for the OP.

Designing Great Beers is an okay book, but it's not a great recommendation for someone who's said that he's a) interested in candi syrup and b) about to embark on a tour of Belgium--the author almost completely ignores the existence of Belgian brewing. It does a fine if somewhat dated job of covering English, German, and American beers, though I'd put BCS ahead of it as a first book even if you don't care about Belgian beer.

EDIT: Stan Hieronymous' Brew Like a Monk fills in the gaps that Designing Great Beers leaves with respect to Belgian beers. Like DGB, it's a good buy after you've already read BCS.

I agree with the previous comments but would like to add that you should also learn more about what each ingredient does and how it should be used.

This way you'll know what to expect and/or what not to use for a particular beer style.

+6 Designing Great Beers. I just got this book about a month ago. I really like the second section of the book about the beer styles and history of how they were developed.

my only advice would be:

simpler is better.

especially for beginning. my first recipe had a little of every grain imaginable. wasn't too good. my 2nd recipe had two grains and one hop. best beer i've ever made.

+1 to simplicity. Any reasonable combination of diastatic malt, fresh hops, clean water, and healthy yeast can make a tasty beverage. Each step in your process can have effects as profound as any recipe differences.

Another big + for Designing Great Beers. i've started formulating my own recipes already and though they don't always come out to the style I might be going for, they are usually in the ballpark and that book was a great help in allowing me to do that.

Another suggestion I would make is an "experiment" I watched on Basic Brewing Video. Go to your LHBS and buy a very small amount of many different base and specialty grains and make "teas" with them. Sample the flavors and observe the colors they each produce to give you an idea of where to start when developing your own recipe.

practice dude, practice. you got work to do, get started asap.. every weekend if possible, just get it done
:rockin:

1. Look up clone recipes to delicious commercial beers you have had.
2. Double the flavor/aroma hops.
3. ???
4. Delicious!

Thanks again for the replies, especially SumnerH for "Brew like a Monk" note. I will have to order a couple of these books and starting reading!