Creating a Brew Recipe

[The_Bearded_Tracy]

I was wondering if you guys could walk me through the process of creating a recipe since I am fairly new to this wonderful hobby. I found a couple recipes and kinda just put them together to make a oatmeal coffee stout. I was wondering how to go about creating my own actual recipe.

 

[Aristotelian]

Take an established recipe. Put it into a recipe calculator like Brewsmith or Brewersfriend. Then scale it for your efficiency and volume. Then tweak it however you want but not too much. Change one variable at a time so you can isolate the flavors created by your tweaks. Don't go crazy with the crystal malts. That's about all there is to it.

 

[C-Rider]

I use BeerSmith and read the descriptions of what I plan to brew. It lists BJCP 2008 guidelines. Then I look and the same in the book Designing Great Beers and get more descriptions of the style. The I start plugging in ingredients. Never made a bad beer that way.

 

[Sailingeric]

I use Brewers Friend but Beersmith is just as good. I decide on what beer I want, then I research on here what grains are good, which yeast is best, and what hops I should use. I think play around with the amounts to get the AVB, IBU, and SRM I want and go from there. All my beers have come out pretty good, some better than others but still nothing I would pour down the drain.

 

[daksin]

Writing recipes for beer is a lot like writing recipes for food. You need to have a solid understanding of all the ingredients and processes you're working with. You don't start out learning to cook by making lasagna from scratch with no cookbook- you find a recipe for lasagna written by an authority, and try to emulate that until you have it down.

For now, use other people's recipes, preferably ones where you can confirm the original brewer knew what they were doing. For example: recipes from well-regarded posters to HBT, recipes from the kits on northernbrewer.com (every kit they sell has a downloadable info sheet that has the whole recipe), and clone recipes from publications like Brew Your Own (BYO). Once you've been brewing enough, you'll know where you can make small tweaks to existing recipes to make them more to your liking. Once you've done that enough, then you'll have an idea how different ingredients in different quantities come together to make a beer, and should be able to reasonably imagine how a beer will turn out before you brew it.

 

[Redlantern]

Think of it like learning to cook. Start with a grilled cheese instead of a seven-course meal. Do the simple recipes that everyone has done a million times. Get good at that first.

 

[Aristotelian]

Think of it like learning to cook. Start with a grilled cheese instead of a seven-course meal. Do the simple recipes that everyone has done a million times. Get good at that first.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with adding a pickle or a little mustard to your grilled cheese. Just don't overdo it, and keep it to one small change at a time.

In my opinion, the other valid reason for tweaking recipes (even when you are getting started) is to brew with ingredients that you already have on hand. Recipe calls for Centennial but you already have Cascade? Recipe calls for only two row but you have a couple pounds of wheat malt to get rid of? It's not going to kill your grilled cheese to substitute English Cheddar for Wisconsin Cheddar. Just make sure you are still making a grilled cheese and don't change it too much.

 

[charliehorse]

Creating your own recipes is fairly straight forward...
Step one: get a few all-grain batches with established recipes under your belt.
Step two: Take detailed notes about what you like and don't like about each recipe.
Step three: Research what gives each beer the characteristic that you like and don't like. Part of this is to taste each great so that you know what they taste like raw. This is when you find out which hops taste the way that you want.
Step four: Get a book (I'd recommend Designing Great Beers) and read it and understand what it takes to make each style.
Step five: experiment and share with other brewers to talk seriously about the characteristics of each beer. This would be when you start looking into the flavor profiles of yeasts.

See, it's easy. Five simple steps. :-D

 

[rpolzin25]

Honestly I think just look up several different recipes for oatmeal coffee stouts. Look whats similar among them to get an idea for what ingredients are used and then use a recipe calculator such as brewers friend or Beer Smith. That is basically what I did w/ the first recipe I made on my own creation. It was an extract recipe for a dunkelweizen. I wanted to give it honey flavor so I figured out what a dunkel needed to be a dunkel by searching multiple recipes and then I added some honey malt to the recipe. Its fun to experiment and take risks. Good luck.

 

[kombat]

The best answer is to get the Bible[/ur] and read it. It's a great book, it will greatly expand your understanding of recipe design.