I recommend new brewers do for their first couple kits, as is, so you can concentrate on the process of brewing, and not recipe creation..
Also kits are 'fool proof' meaning they have been vetted in terms of being good recipes (afterall a company's reputation is at stake) and therefore as long as you follow directions then your beer will turn out and so you can relax and concentrate on learning the process of brewing, AND if you make a mistake, and have a set kit, then it is easier to troubleshoot, because again you know then kit was already "perfect" to begin with.
If you want a strong beer, don't choose a normal gravity beer and decide that since you read about boosting gravity by adding more sugars to just add more sugar, choose a beet of the grav you want, just like if you wand a peach beer, don't choose a non fruit beer recipe and try to "figure out" how to add the fruit...get a kit or recipe that has everything you need in the right quantities you need. Recipes are about a BALANCE between flavors, bitterness, aromas, what have you, and until you get a few batches under your belt, and learn the fundamentals, stick with the already proven and balanced recipes. That way you don't have the extra step of trying to figure out what went wrong if the beer doesn't taste good.....if the recipe or kit already tastes good (and they would have gone through tastes tests and ALREADY before you got to them- you know they are already good, if not award winning beers, if you went with a kit or book recipe, they have been vetted) if there is something not right, you will have an easier time trying to figure out what went wrong in terms of your brewing PROCESS, not because you went off the ranch and on top of trying to actually learn to brew, you also through a bunch of crap into the equation.
Beer recipes are a balance...and if you add to one variable, that will affect other parts of it...For example if you decide to raise the gravity of a balanced beer...a beer where the hops balance out the sweetness...and you raise the maltniness of it without alaso balancing the hops, then your beer may end up being way too cloyingly sweet. Or if you just add sugar willy nilly it could become overly dry, or cidery.
At this stage you don't know enough yet, and you won't learn just by jacking a recipe o your first time out of the box. Don't start altering recipes on your first batch, or else you're gonna be posting a thread titled, "Why does my beer taste like I licked Satan's Anus after he ate a dozen coneys?" And we're not going to be able to answer you, because you've screwed with the recipe as well as maybe made a few noob brewer mistakes that typically get made, and neither you, nor us, are going to be able to figure out what went wrong. Because there's too many variables.
Just brew a couple batches and learn from them, and read books about recipe creation before you start messing around. It's not about tossing stuff into a fermenter and seeing how it turns out.
