How Do You Design Beer Recipes (Poll)?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

What primary tool do you use to formulate your beer recipes?

  • BeerSmith

  • Brewers Friend

  • ProMash

  • BeerAlchemy

  • BeerTools

  • Brewtarget

  • Custom spreadsheet

  • Other


Results are only viewable after voting.

kcbeersnob

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 1, 2012
Messages
165
Reaction score
31
Location
Kansas City
What primary tool do you use to formulate your beer recipes? Apologies in advance if I've missed one that is widely used.

This will be helpful as I work on a project for my homebrew club. Thanks for responding.
 
i used brewers friend, then migrated away from it to brew.gr because it had a much more extensive ingredient database. They updated brewers friend since then, but I just got used to using the other one.
 
Beersmith, latest version. So much can be added on to it & adjusted, it's the best I think, when I'm designing my own recipes.
 
I usually just taste grains and smell hops until I get an idea of what I want to do with them, brainstorm a recipe, then crunch the numbers in Beersmith
 
Jamil and Palmers book for a baseline recipe, brewers friend to tweak expand or to go big...
 
I use the older Beersmith. I've made enough brews to know what I want in a beer, so most recipes I make myself. I've made a lot of good ones over the years from here as well. I do love the challenge however, of reading a brewery's website, and trying to clone their beers. Makes things interesting sometimes.
 
I've been researching rare or extinct beers folks on here mention, then use BS2 to make a recipe. I got the German Dampfbier real close.
 
I research various recipes for beer styles I'm interested in brewing, including clone recipes of beers I like. I take that info and make any adjustments I see fit and pop it into the mobile version of Brewer's Friend to get the gist for OG, FG, SRM, and IBUs. Seems to work OK for me!
 
Research between here, various books, and BJCP guidelines, then putting everything together on Brewtoad.
 
I'm thinking of getting a dartboard and a small roulette wheel. The dart board will determine the wort's ingredients and the wheel the hops and amounts.
 
it would be nice if there was a poll here.

I use Beersmith (the latest version) I usually start from a proven recipe and make changes based on what I want to achieve....
 
Pick a style, read a few recipes and distill the highlights from them, research the style's boundaries with bjcp guidelines, use beersmith to bend those boundaries and use things that have worked for other people, then spend hours thinking of clever names
 
I use various sources to get a start on a style I havnt brewed before, and then tweak it to my likings. Take notes and improve on the beta version. Beer Alchemy is my software of choice.
 
Find a few clone recipes of commercial beers I think are close to what I'm aiming for, kinda average them together, then fudge grain, mash temps, hops, etc. from there. I've got my own spreadsheet for playing with gravity and mash efficiency/volumes, I'll use Brewer's Friend to estimate IBUs an SRM, but rarely end up making decisions there. For me, it's more of an empirical process over several iterations of the same recipe, more of a "well, this needs to be a bit lighter, and could use a substantially larger bittering charge, better make a note for next time I brew it" kinda thing. It's not a very good process for getting excellent beer on the first try, but screwing around with recipes with the goal of gradually evolving something that's both great and 100% mine is a good chunk of the fun.
 
Sorry all, had to step away after posting the thread and before the poll was added. Didn't realize the thread would be created before the poll had been added. Anyway, the poll has now been added.

Thanks for your responses so far.
 
I think your poll is a bit simplistic and flawed. Beersmith is how I get weights and volumes, but that's unrelated to design.
 
I didn't fill out the poll since I'm still using partial mash kits from AHS.

But am interested in what everyone uses for the day I move to designing my own recipes.
 
I still think it's really handy for recipe design when all the add-ons are installed. Or adding the ones I in particular use. Including Munton's DME's, various sugars & fruits, different hops, etc.
 
I develop the recipes on my own based on research of other recipes that sound similar to what I want, and I tweak them as I see fit to make them my own.

I enter all my recipes into StrangeBrew. I have something like 500 recipes in there.
 
1) Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels is a good start if you want to make a beer from scratch
2) Recipe database here on HBT is a good place to get ideas.

I would second "Designing Great Beers" I reference the information for the style I am interested in creating and then use Beersmith to actually build out the recipe on my system.
 
1. Decide the style --
2. Research the style, BA and BJCP Style Guidelines, books and online -- taste
beers in the style at brew pubs or other commercial or from members of brew
club.
3. Research style ingredients (see #2)
4. Formulate a recipe in my head
5. Enter the recipe into my custom spreadsheet.
6. Repeat 2 thru 5 until satisfied I have a firm idea
7. Brew - test - document
8. Tweak and repeat.
 
I'm surprised how many people refer to BJCP while concocting brews. I guess I do to some degree because it's built into beersmith but I don't let it influence what I'm after...ie color, ABV, etc.
 
I use an Excel spreadsheet I created to calculate everything I would need on and before brew day that is adjusted for my system. But other than the mathematical formula I use my book collection coupled with input from the internet than adding my own little tweaks.
 
I'm surprised how many people refer to BJCP while concocting brews. I guess I do to some degree because it's built into beersmith but I don't let it influence what I'm after...ie color, ABV, etc.

Both BJCP and BA style guidelines are good places to start to provide insight and guidelines into what is considered "normal" for a particular style. They are just that guidelines and I use them to see what is "considered" to be normal. The ranges for OG/FG SRM and IBU are guides for volume of grain and water and hops based on my system. There are other sources that provide much greater detail, including my own eyes, nose and taste buds that give me more inspiration than guidelines or books ever will!
 
I mostly see arch several recipes of a style and look for general ingredients and ratios. Then I piece together something as close as possible given my stores (either on hand or needed to be purchased) and plug it into Fermentation Log software to tweak it how I'd like it.
 
1) Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels is a good start if you want to make a beer from scratch
2) Recipe database here on HBT is a good place to get ideas.

Designing Great Beers....+1

I use brewmate (it doesn't need a registry entry, it'll run from the cloud on any PC I use, work or home. Or frona thumb drive as well) and spreadsheets for equipment related stuff.
 
I'm surprised how many people refer to BJCP while concocting brews. I guess I do to some degree because it's built into beersmith but I don't let it influence what I'm after...ie color, ABV, etc.

Only the rough guidelines. I'm not going to freak out if my OG is a few points high/low, or if I use US-sourced grains in a Belgian-style ale.
 
Back
Top