kombat
Well-Known Member
ask someone who has no experience with a specific beer type to brew a beer of that style. With no information whatsoever that won't come anywhere close to that style without a recipe to get them in the ballpark no matter how awesome their process. They still need to know a general information about what the style entails! If someone has no idea what a Stout is and has never tried one how are they going to make anything anywhere near a stout just based on their system and processes? They won't.
The problem I have with this is that, as an admittedly relatively new brewer, there really doesn't seem to be much variation in ingredients in a given style, and thus I feel you're putting far too much of an emphasis on the recipe.
For example, say you took someone who'd never brewed a Pilsner Lager before and asked them to brew one. You're likely right, in that they'd have no idea where to start.
However, with even just a tiny bit of research, they'd find out that a Pilsner Lager is just Pilsner Malt and Saaz hops. They could also learn the style's target S.G. and IBU ranges, and it wouldn't take a genius to deduce that a "Pilsner Lager" uses a lager yeast, and is fermented at lager temperatures.
With just that Post-it note's worth of information, they could brew a beer that would definitely land in the style ballpark of a "Pilsner Lager."
Heck, even just deducing their own recipe from the above information, there's an excellent chance they'd devise a recipe that would end up being an exact duplicate of *somebody* else's recipe. So does that mean they can't call that beer their own? Do they lose any bragging rights because they ended up creating a recipe that matched one of the thousands of existing Pilsner Lager recipes, each of which only differ by a few ounces of the same grains or hops anyway?
Yes, I know tweaking the water and the yeast and whatever else can change the resulting beer. But it'd still be in the "Pilsner Lager" BJCP style. I guess I just don't see what the big deal is with putting the recipes on a pedestal, when they're all so close to each other anyway. We're only working with 4 ingredients here, guys.
It's about the execution, in my opinion.