How to come up with my own recipes?

Normally I just buy kits that include a recipe and all the ingredients such as brewers best but lately i'm really wanting to make my own(right now I have a brewers best cream ale fermenting for the wife). All they do is throw some ingredients in a box and ship it to me. I can do that.

I brew all extract. I haven't done any steeping as I see alot of people doing but I assume I just throw some grains in a bag and go for it. Sounds easy enough.

But what i'm really wanting to figure out is how to come up with my own recipes. Are there some kind of "rules" on what yeast to use with what hops, or what malt to use with what hops and so on? I'm trying to find a good starting point. Trying to figure out what to use and what kind of results to expect from various malts and such.

I imagine most of it is just trial and error. But any advice you can give would be appreciated.

I am now kegging all my homebrew.

We have one homebrew store nearby but their selection isn't that great. The other ones are a ways away and I would have to drag the kids with me so I generally just order my stuff online somewhere as it's easier. Can you recommend any good stores?

There is no better place to start than this book in my opinion:

Amazon.com: Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles: Ray Daniels: Books

Looking at existing recipes that get good reviews is also a great way to see what works well and in what proportions. The recipe section on this site is an invaluable resource.

I think there's a thread somewhere with a list of online suppliers, but to get you started the big 4 are:
Austin Homebrew
Midwest
Northern Brewer
MoreBeer

Lemme tell you, the more I learn about creating recipes the harder I realize it is. I can recommend Amazon.com: Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew: Jamil Zainasheff, John Palmer: Books

I used the recipe guidelines in Papazian's book (Complete Joy of Homebrewing, Vol 3), and the recipe calculator at TastyBrew.com. I just plugged stuff in and started manipulating the recipe until it met the style guidelines.

When I started making "my own" recipies I took a pre-fab recipe that I liked and tweaked it to do something specific, ie., more hop aroma, more malt flavor, higher ABV, etc.

It really comes from a combination of experience and education (listening to podcasts, reading books, etc).
After brewing mini-mash beers for a while and tasting the results, you get a feeling for how your process and various ingredients translate into the final flavor of the beer. At that point, you can start tweaking your process and/or ingredients to get a superior end result. Brewing extract-only without even steeping grains probably does not give you that experience, plus it gives you very limited options for recipe formulations because there are only a handful of different extracts available, as opposed to dozens of types of malt/extract combinations you can play with in a mini-mash.

Brewing 1-gallon batches side by side while changing only one variable between the batches is also a great way to fine-tune your recipes. For instance, you could brew four gallons of beer using the same wort, but ferment using four different yeasts. Or use the same malts and yeasts, but use four different hopping schedules. Those kind of experiments are great for figuring out how to manipulate kits and to do your own recipes from scratch.

Hey there,

My thoughts on this are a bit goofy I admit, but I do think it has some merit. If you are any good at making bread, a good easy (and fast) way to "test" if a beer recipe will taste horrible or not is to first make some bread with those grain addins. My base bread recipe is easy:

3 cups flour
2 T powdered milk
3 T sugar
1 t salt
1.5 T butter
9 oz water

To make a different flavored bread, I add 1/4 cup of whatever out of the cubbard (oatmeal, bran, grain, blah blah blah).

I think to be true one could use DME instead of sugar (maybe 4T or so), just for fun. You aren't going for fermentation in bread (no time, not anaerobic), but the flavor is there none the less.

Takes about 3 hours to make from start to finish, much quicker than 6 weeks in my mind.

My favorite addin is oatmeal, and my favorite beer that I have made thus far is one where I added oatmeal to the grain bill. I don't know that I did it the same way others do it, but there is a distinct oatmeal flavor in my beer that I like.

One other thing you can do without becoming a beer guru is, after buying several different kits of beers over the year(s), try to remember what it was that you liked/disliked about each one, and simply compare the recipes to see if you can figure out what you might omit/add. Base beer recipes are easy (1 lb crystal 60, 6 lb malt extract, 4 hops at various times, and you have a sierra nevada clone that my wife claims she would actually buy). Tinker with them a bit, small addins at a time.

Good luck with this. It's fun I think.

Let god and yeast decide what is right for you.