Designing a beer

[dlhutson]

I am pretty new to brewing and up to this point I have only used kits and recipes made by Brooklyn Brew Shop. I have loved what I have made but am wanting to start designing my own beers now.

I would love general advice on how to do this. Specifically when is the best time to add special ingredients ( lemon, coffee etc.)?

 

[Glynn]

I would start by looking at recipes in our recipe section

 

[Dolomieu]

"Radical Brewing" is a good resource.

 

[LovesIPA]

Try Ray Daniels' book "Designing Great Beers". I know that a lot of pro brewers use this book as a reference.

 

[Captain Damage]

Buy Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. It gets into the principles of how the ingredients work together for different styles. It is my bible. With respect to Dolomieu, Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher is a good source for ideas and a good reference for the technical aspects (fermentability, etc.) of some more unusual ingredients, but I wouldn't recommend it for someone just learning how to formulate recipes. Learn to make a solid pale ale before you try making a bacon-raisin-quinoa-juniper lager.

Also, use some form of brewing software to make your calculations easy. I like Beer Smith, but there are many others, including free web-based ones and phone/tablet apps.

 

[ElJefeBrews]

I just ordered Beer craft: a simple guide to making great beer. Is that a book you can all agree with too?

 

[Evan_L]

I've only been at this for a year, but have made a few of my own recipes that came out pretty darn good. Since I don't have enough experience yet to know what grains or hops will yield what flavors I need to do research. I'll pick my style and identify certain qualities I want. Say in an IPA i want fruity/citrusy rather than herbal/dank/piney, an ABV range, etc. Then search other recipes. Look for commonalities, the range of percentages for grains for example. In a rye IPA you may find people using 5% to 30% and then read the comments to get a general idea of what each produces. Once you have an idea of what certain things will do, just go for it. Hops I find to be easier as reading flavor descriptions seems to translate into final taste easier than grain. Again, get an idea of what your ballparks are, IBU etc. By combining recipes or using others as a guide is a great way to build your own. Once you've tasted it you can play from there and learn the ingredients through the changes you make.

As far as the special ingredients, again, read the comments on other recipes, you can usually extract a range of what will work. I would go low to mid range for strong flavors and build up from there. Trial and error is the only way to be sure, but others' posts are a great starting point, especially considering it is very subjective as far as what amount or when to add it provides the best taste (and the application of some ingredients seems to spur debate on par with the classics; plastic vs glass, primary vs secondary).

I found Ray Daniels's book to be a let down...I guess I was looking for a step by step how-to at the time but I guess now I see that isn't possible. His approach is pretty much what I just said, look for commonalities in existing (good and proven) recipes as a guide...I guess I just didn't find it to be what I was looking for. It is a great read though and does have a ton of good knowledge in it.

 

[Setesh]

+1 for Ray Daniel's book Designing Great Beers. Great book. I would advise you to try some of the really popular recipes on the forum and play with them to see the changes. Brew one batch according to the accepted recipe. Then brew another batch with one change. See how that change effects the outcome. Keep all other things in your process and all other ingredients the same. Otherwise it really impacts what you can learn. One change at a time and document the results of side by side tastings. This is what I have done and it really teaches you what a specific grain/hop/yeast/process/etc does to the finished product. Yeasts are pretty easy as you just split your batch into two different fermentors and add different yeasts. Same with hops. Just split your wort (Make sure you mash out!). Boil half with one hop and half with another. This makes the most difference with late additions but is still relevant. Recipe changes you can make back to back and keep all your process and temps the same and you will get relevant results. I think it's pretty fun and it's amazing how you can end up with two completely different beers sometimes. This is especially true with yeasts. I also recommend chewing malt and making malt tea. No, it doesn't taste the same as the end result would but it can give you a general idea of the character that malt has has to offer.

 

[tooldudetool]

I would recommend getting some brewing software. I use Brewtarget, its free!! What's nice is when you pick the beer style you want to brew it shows you the BJCP parameters for that style of beer (IBU's, gravity, ABV, etc), and lets you know whether your recipe is within the specs. Then you can try things like moving the hop additions to different times or amounts and see what that does to the IBU's, it's great! I also recommend Jamil's book "Brewing Classic Styles", which has a recipe for all 80 of the recognized styles and substyles, so it gives you a great starting point for all the different styles. I agree that the Ray Daniels book was a let down, it just wasn't very user friendly in my opinion.

 

[Captain Damage]

Addressing those who were disappointed by Designing Great Beers, it is definitely not a step-by-step. In fact there are no recipes in it at all. It's a guide to how to think about designing your own recipes. He looks at the recipes of BJCP award winning beers and talks about the common features (so he's not just saying "brew it this way because that's how I like it"). He differs from the BJCP guidelines by talking about IBUs not as an abstract number, but as a ratio compared to the original gravity - which sounds like comparing apples to oranges, but is actually a very good way to understand the balance of your beer.

He does not talk about every recognized BJCP style/substyle. He looks at what I'd call a double handful. But again, it's not a how-to-do, it's a how-to-think.

 

[dlhutson]

Thanks so much for the advice. I definitely need get some of these books.

 

[GrogNerd]

I am pretty new to brewing and up to this point I have only used kits and recipes made by Brooklyn Brew Shop. I have loved what I have made but am wanting to start designing my own beers now.

I would love general advice on how to do this. Specifically when is the best time to add special ingredients ( lemon, coffee etc.)?

think the best way to determine the time to add special ingredients is to check out other recipes, see what other people are trying to get out of that ingredient and why they add it when they do.

but generally, the later in the process the more pronounced the flavor would be. sometimes that's good, sometimes bad

 

[Evan_L]

Addressing those who were disappointed by Designing Great Beers, it is definitely not a step-by-step. In fact there are no recipes in it at all. It's a guide to how to think about designing your own recipes. He looks at the recipes of BJCP award winning beers and talks about the common features (so he's not just saying "brew it this way because that's how I like it"). He differs from the BJCP guidelines by talking about IBUs not as an abstract number, but as a ratio compared to the original gravity - which sounds like comparing apples to oranges, but is actually a very good way to understand the balance of your beer.

He does not talk about every recognized BJCP style/substyle. He looks at what I'd call a double handful. But again, it's not a how-to-do, it's a how-to-think.

It was good info, but I feel like he stopped short of what I needed to be helpful and practically applicable. He gave common hops types of each addition and number of additions, but didn't keep going and look at the weight of each addition or when in the boil specifically which is what I wanted to learn about.

 

[Loftearmen]

Start off with a really basic recipe, brew it twice to make sure you can reproduce it exactly, then continue brewing that same recipe but change 1 variable each time you brew it. I'm in this process right now trying to develop a pale ale I can call my own, here's how I started.

8.5lbs pale lme
1lb crystal 60L
1.5lbs sugar
1.5oz cascade (60 min)
.5 oz cascade (5 min)
Nottingham Ale Yeast

It doesn't get much simpler than that but it's a blank canvas on which to paint. The next batch I tried adding an extra .5oz Amarillo at 5 min and .5oz at flame out which wound up being a good decision so I kept it that way with the next batch but instead of crystal 60L I used crystal 20L which wound up being a bad decision so the next batch I tried crystal 40L which seemed to fit the bill about perfectly so I kept it, etc... etc...

I'm sure it will take a lot of batches before i get "my perfect" pale ale but there's plenty of descent beer to drink in the interim

 

[beerrata]

I just posted about this book in another thread. here is a link:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/ibu-apparent-bitterness-too-high-440610/#post5716481

 

[gr8shandini]

All the suggestions so far have been good, but I'll add a couple more.

I like to brew to a style, so the first place I go is the BJCP guidelines ( http://www.bjcp.org/stylecenter.php ). Not because I'm gunning for a competition, but because it gives just enough information to give you a sense of the style without giving you any specific directions. Then try a few of the commercial examples and see what kinds of notes are present in your favorites that you'd like to incorporate into your beer.

When you get to developing the recipe, remember this simple ratio: 80-100% of your grain bill should be base malts or malt extract with no more than 20% specialty malts. If you want to use adjuncts, replace some of the base malt, but keep it under 30%.

Also, keep it simple. Everyone wants to make a mind-blowing brew, but in the beginning, you're really just learning about what the ingredients taste like and how they play together. A SMaSH can teach you a lot even though it's a simple as you can get. A big lesson I learned is that a lot of the "complexity" in beer comes from the yeast, not the hops or malt. Look as Saison duPont as an example.

And finally, I'd stay away from the weirder ingredients for a little while, and when you're ready, use them judiciously. New folks tend to go nuts in this regard and really end up overdoing it. To use a musical metaphor familiar to the older folks here: the Beatles made some very interesting rock songs featuring the sitar. But that's because they had been making solid rock songs for 20 years and knew a lot about music theory. Whereas new guy might likely end up with an all-sitar Buddy Holly cover band. Could it turn out good? It's possible. But not likely.

 

[Trox]

I also agree with getting a good Brewing software (I personally enjoy Beersmith), and then looking into the other recipes here and elsewhere and just playing with them to see what works for you and doesn't. If you do buy Designing Great beers be sure to get the actual book and not on an e-reader; it just doesn't read well that way and when you want to look up specific items it can be a bit difficult.