If you're keen on brewing big beers, I would strongly suggest looking at the literature available on, and the brewing philosophy employed in the making of, Belgian beers. Sure, they make great big beers, but they do it with an eye toward making "digestible" beers. We might call that drinkable, swillable, guzzle-able, etc beers. They're beers that compel you to have another glass. The Belgians don't just make big beers for the sake of making big beers, they first focus on making an
enjoyable beer. Their often formidable size flows naturally from their brewing philosophy.
We've all been new brewers and we've all been seduced by the idea of making the biggest possible beer imaginable. People will love it and they'll respect me, right?
It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. First, you need to make something that people are willing to guzzle.
Bluntly, any monkey with a mashtun, a 55lb sack of base malt, and a smack pack can make a big beer.
The tricky bit is making a beer that you actually want to drink.
I'll argue that there are three hallmarks to a good big beer:
1) Restraint. A big beer, by definition, is going to blast a tremendous amount of flavor into your gullet. The trick is making that beer something that you want to enjoy by the glass. Huge flavors are great fun, but they can quickly become overwhelming, often tiresome. If you intend to brew big, you must consequently (and somewhat contrarily) think small. It's been years since I brewed above 1.060, but when I used to do that, I constantly thought about how to make the beer drinkable--how to make it taste big, but drink small. Does that make sense?
2) Adjuncts are not a dirty word, they're a useful ingredient. Rice, corn, and sugar make a well-constructed beer much lighter on the tongue. Cork sniffers like to sneer at adjuncts, but a savvy brewer uses them to make the impossible possible. Spend some time learning about the various sugars, better yet, learn how to make invert. It's really easy! Also, don't be afraid to use corn and rice. They're brilliant, if maligned, ingredients.
3) Know how to make beer. Newer brewers tend to get a pale ale or two under their belt, then immediately charge after a 1.139 coconut, marshmallow, rum, raspberry, bourbon aged, imperial hefeweizen. None of that makes any sense. There's a reason why people don't make that. It's not a good beer. Honestly, my big beers were kinda boring until I learned how to really make excellent 1.035-1.040 beers. Small beers expose all of your process errors and they force you to make shrewd, well-designed grists. If your passion is big beers, I'd strongly suggest that you first focus on tiny beers.
If nothing else, you'll learn a lot faster because you can keep your fermenter turning over much, much faster.
Anyway, that's some of what I know about big beers. I hope you found it useful.