Building A Recipe

So, I have found plenty of resources on finding and making certain recipes, but I wanted to take my hobby one step further into actually making my own.

How does one go about starting out at making a recipe from scratch? I have taken clone recipes and tweaked them to make them more personal, but now I would like to make one from scratchy.

Are there any rules that HAVE to be followed?

Read Ray Daniels book:

Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles

Get Beersmith. It helped me immensely when learning to formulate recipes. I also suggest you listen to The Jamil Show over at the Brewing Network. The basics you learn about the styles can help you figure out what malts go in what beer without having to consult a recipe.

+1 to Designing Great Beers. An invaluable resource.

Familiarize yourself with the ingredients. That's the key to really understanding them. Taste them, smell them, feel them. Read about them, learn everything you can about them until you can tell the difference between black patent and Carafa III and why that difference is important in, say, Schwarzbier.

Cheers!

Bob

Excellent thread. I was just wondering this to myself the other day.

Edcculus said:

Get Beersmith. It helped me immensely when learning to formulate recipes. I also suggest you listen to The Jamil Show over at the Brewing Network. The basics you learn about the styles can help you figure out what malts go in what beer without having to consult a recipe.

Click to expand...

+1. Beersmith is the best $20 I ever spent on brewing.

Free trial...

BeerSmith Brewing Software, Recipes, Blog, Wiki and Discussion Forum

+2 on Beersmith.

It's great being able to try different things out, see what impact that has on color, OG, IBU, etc, instantly see what percentage of different grains you are using, etc.

Regarding books, I found Designing Great Beers helpful, but I think it needs to be treated with some caution. It has so much detail, and such a focus on brewing to style, it would be easy to end up paralyzed by every little thing that you aren't doing exactly the way competition winners have in the past!

I got Radical Brewing at the same time as Designing Great Beers, and think they make a great pair. Radical Brewing also has a lot of detail and great suggestions, but encourages a much more freeform/experimental/creative approach. I liked reading these back to back, as I think I'm somewhere in between the two extremes.

I use the Beer recipator for all my calculations.

Anyone else use this or have a reason why it shouldn't be used?

The Beer Recipator - Home

JacobInIndy said:

I use the Beer recipator for all my calculations.

Anyone else use this or have a reason why it shouldn't be used?

The Beer Recipator - Home

Click to expand...

That works too. It doesn't have all the bells, whistles and other features of Beersmith, Promash, or BeerTools but it's still a great spreadsheet.