Would like to get away from kit brewing snd do my own recipes

What suggestions do anyone have on brewing from scratch and not using a kit I would really like to make my own personal beers any suggestions would be helpful

Check out this blog post on cloning recipes:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/10/how-to-make-beer-recipie-clone.html

There's a couple of ways to go about it, I'm sure. If you're not particular to any style it's just a matter of choosing your fermentables, hops, yeast and other flavoring ingredients (spices, wood chips, etc) and get to brewing. If you're interested in a particular style you can find a recipe for a beer and deviate away from it in certain ways to leave your personal signature on it, so to speak. Also, if you're interested in specific styles knowing what defines the style is, naturally, useful as well as knowing how ingredients add flavor to a beer. That means knowing the difference between the malts, hops, etc. Generally speaking you'll have more options with AG brewing compared to extract brewing.

I like using a clone recipe as a base and thinking of ways I'd like to manipulate the flavor and adjust the recipe to how I think to get to my desired flavor. This way you can learn what different grains, yeast, and hops do to a flavor profile. Then when you build your very own you'll know what to adjust to get a specific outcome.

I really prefer ipas so knowing which malts and grains work best for those would help

When I do my own recipes I start by looking at a couple of recipes that are the style I intend to do. Northern Brewer is one place I look because they list the ingredients in their kits. Then I look at my grain inventory (all grain BTW) and decide what I have and what I will need to get to make my beer.

I then use a calculator to formulate the recipe. I started by using Beer Calculus on hopville.com because it was free. It allows you to see what changing ingredients or the amounts will do. I have since bought Beersmith 2. I think it gives more information with a bit more accuracy.

If you don't stray too far from a known recipe you will make a good beer and sometimes just brewing with what you have on hand you might come up with something great. I did, with a brown ale.

Read Designing Great Beers for a strong background in what makes different beers different. He analyzes award winning recipes.

Beersmith is a good start. Download the software (free 21 days) and start downloading some recipes to get an idea of what goes into your favorite style. Beersmith let's you edit the recipes and will show the change in bitterness and gravity depending on what you change. It will also tell you what is "proper" for each style. For example if you want to make a Scottish ale but decided to load it up with hops the levels on the bottom would be in red indicating that your beer will be too bitter for the style. Beersmith also let's you know what each grain brings to the party (taste, color, and fermentability).
There are also a few books I highly recommend. Radical Brewing by Randy Moser (sp?) and Designing Great Beers. Both have helped me out tremendously.
I'm assuming your going to switch to all grain? If not you can design some great stuff via extract and steeping grains. Beersmith can convert recipes from all grain into extract as well for you.

joey0214 said:

I really prefer ipas so knowing which malts and grains work best for those would help

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Those are the simplest, really. Just light base grain (or extract), a pound of specialty malts (like crystal malt, victory malt, even amber malt for interest), and hops. Hops are usually added at 60 minutes for bittering, 15 minutes for flavor, and at 5-0 minutes for aroma. IPAs are usually dryhopped as well.

Our recipe database has lots of recipes, so that you can get an idea of what hops work in an American IPA, and which would be more likely to be found in an English IPA. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f69/

There are two books that really helped me create recipes. One is Ray Daniels' "Designing Great Beers", and the other was Jamil Zainasheff's "Brewing Classic Styles".

The Brewing Classic Styles book has guidelines on each recognized beer style, with tips on how to get them. It helps you become familiar with what grain will give you "biscuity" flavors, as an example. Even now, I'll look at Jamil's porter, to see how close I am to his example. So you won't outgrow that book even if it seems fairly simple.

Pick up a copy of Designing Great Beers. The author breaks down winning recipes in various styles and presents everything in a very easy to read format. Great book. The first recipe I designed using the book as my main reference was a California Common that picked up 1st in it's category last year.

dbrewski said:

Read Designing Great Beers for a strong background in what makes different beers different. He analyzes award winning recipes.

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I second this and I would do this before beersmith. Don't get me wrong beersmith is a great tool but you have to have the basic knowledge to use the tool. This also teaches you how to create a beer using brain power heaven forbid your computer dies someday.

These are two that I've used and had good success with.

THIS ONE (BREWING CLASSIC STYLES). It's got 80 recipes that actually won awards. Not a bad place to start.

Also have used THIS ONE (CLONE BREWS) which has 200 clone recipes.

If I had to pick one, I would go with the Brewing Classic Styles - linked above.

+1 on using brewing software to help you understand how all the variables work together in creating the final product. I use BeerSmith, but there are several others out there as well.

Beersmith is the handiest of tools. Once I purchased it, I started making my own recipes in no time. Once you know the general ingredients that go into a typical style of beer, you can go from there and experiment with different malts.

I tend to "shop around" and look at a bunch of recipes for a style I'm interested in brewing. From that, I can get a basic feel for a style and build my own recipe to suit my taste and brewing style. Often I find a recipe that's fairly close to what I'm after and make minor tweaks. things like base malt, yeast, and hops often are influenced by what I have on hand and what I'm familiar working with.

also, I have a bunch of friends who homebrew. whenever I see an ingredient or technique that I'm not familiar with in one of their recipes I ask them what it is and how it affects the beer. often I'll get to taste the finished beer, so this really helps me connect ingredients and process to flavor.

don't expect to hi a home run with every recipe. part of the fun of homebrew is experimenting a bit and tweaking recipes through multiple batches.

Clone Brews is a good book. Also, check out the recipes here to learn what types of malts go into different styles. If you're just getting into grain instead of extracts, I might suggest doing some simple SMaSH brews so you can learn about what hops fit your taste buds, and how the varying additions adjust the taste of the final product.

I did 2 extract batches before I decided "I totally got this" and created my own IIPA recipe. Looking back at it, it was pretty much rubbish. I mean, it was eventually drinkable 5-6 months down the road, but I got too clever before it was my time. Took it back a step, cloned a few recipes, learned how the various malts and hops like to play with each other.

Brewing Classic Styles is also a great, must have book. When I'm curious about brewing a new style, I'll brew the style from the recipe from BCS. They have always turned out well, and score well in competition.

An IPA was my first on my own beer.
Like Yooper said, they are fairly simple beers with hops to taste.

Are you all grain or extract brewing?

A few things I have done. They aren't complete create-myself recipes but I feel they are a good step in that direction.

1) Modify a kit. Get an extract kit as it sounds like you have been doing already and try updating/adding/subtracting things to it. I recently bought the MoreBeer Thanksgiving (Pumpkin Spice Ale) and decided to throw in some real pumpkin (not called for in the recipe) and add in a bit more malt to increase the residual sweetness.

2) Look up user-made recipes here on HBT and merge some of them together to get a feel for 1) what it is like to buy raw materials for brewing (instead of a pre-packaged kit) and 2) what the ingredients list might look like for beers of that style. My third brew was a Belgian-Apricot Pale Ale. I took someone's Belgian-Pale Ale recipe that I found here on HBT and merged it with someone's Magic Hat #9 (Apricot Pale Ale) clone recipe that I found. It turned out pretty great.

For now extract but eventually I'd like to go all grain when I get better understanding of all of the ingredients and the process