Designing a grain bill

How do you determine which grains you are going to use in a recipe? I'm not just talking about types, but also percentages too....

How do you get to the point of 'I want about 30% of the grains to be Pilsner 2 row and 10% Munich....'

I know part of it is based on the style of beer you are designing, but I'd like to know if there are any guidelines or resources out there that people use when designing a recipe. Do people come up with their own, or just look at multiple recipes for the same style and piece something together from them?

Also, if anyone has a link to a good grain resource page (for info, not to buy), I'd appreciate it. I know there are specialty grains, and base grains, etc... I'm looking for something, or a list, that breaks them down. These are base grains, these are specialty, etc...

Hopefully that isn't too vague or hard to understand. In short, I'm wanting to design a recipe from scratch and naturally it all starts with the grains.

There are two excellent resources for quality recipes:
1. Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer
2. The recipes section on this forum.
Additionally, I can highly recommend Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels.

With those resources, you should be able to design your own recipes, but it takes a bit of experience and experimentation to fine tune the recipes to get exactly the results you want.

-a.

ajf said:

With those resources, you should be able to design your own recipes, but it takes a bit of experience and experimentation to fine tune the recipes to get exactly the results you want.

-a.

Click to expand...

Thanks. I'm trying to take the first step on that road of experience. I have a batch 2 weeks in the bottle that is a combination of 2 different recipes, so I'll find out here in a week how that worked for me. I might stick with that route until I have a little more experience before 'striking out on my own', but the more info I can gather now I figure will help me down the road.

A lot of info is in the wiki.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Grain

The best way is to brew a bunch and get to know your ingredients. As long as you stay close to proven recipes you will end up with decent beer. I like to read the BJCP guidelines if I'm making something to style. Many times I brew something just to use a new ingredient and get to know it. Personal experience is worth more than many books.

For some reason, my brain isn't working today and I didn't think about looking at Wiki. Thanks Conroe. That is definately a step in the direction I was looking for.