Is homebrewing that creative?

[dorlow]

So, I'm very new to homebrewing. My wife bought me a Mr. Beer kit about a year back and I brewed it. I don't know what went wrong with that batch. I remember it was extremely carbonated when it got done. It tasted like beer but had the fizziness of soda.

I'm trying brewing again. This time I'm not using a Mr. Beer kit. I went out and bought a $100 kit and then bought a "Brewers Best" kit. When I was at the brewer store, I had to pick which "Brewers Best" kit I wanted to match the kind of beer I wanted.

So the problem I have is it seems like making beer isn't that creative. It's kind of like going to the store and buying a model car. When you put it together, either you made it right and it looks like the car on the box, or you did something wrong and it's not right. I could've bought that model car already assembled in the toy isle, but instead I chose to buy it disassembled and I'm putting it together now.

I look at brewing as a hobby, but just more of something to pass time away. It's not cheaper than buying beer at the store, when you consider $40 or something like that for the kit and $100 for the supplies to make it.

I guess before I ever tried brewing beer, I'd try other people's brews and think "wow... that's amazing they knew how to do it and the beer turned out good." I was kind of thinking to myself they went out and did something real creative to make it. But now I start doing it and see I just go to a store and buy a box that says on the front of it what kind of beer it will be. It comes with everything, even instructions, and now I realize those home brewerys I've tried, they weren't really that creative. They just bought the box and did what the instructions said. So, why is brewing any different than just going to the store and buying a case of beer? I kind of look at it as I bought a pizza that came in a box unassembled. It has everything in it so I can't go wrong. But I didn't pick out the ingredients in the pizza to make it my own invention... it just came with everything.

 

[Kokopuff829]

Well if you just make kits by strict instructions ya it's not that creative but when you experiment with different ingredients and het your own style it can be. All grain brewing is very creative you can add different grains to kits if you want or create your own beer from scratch. There's different spices you can use for beer Ginger, blueberry, chocolate, elderberry, cinnamon, you name it. So sure going and buying a kit isn't that creative but mixing up ingredients and making your own beer is.

 

[dorlow]

Well my brother in law helped me get started with the first few steps of the beer process. He added some bees honey from his bees to this batch to see what it would taste like... so I can see him trying to be a little creative.

 

[1Mainebrew]

Move to all grain if you want to become a creative brewer. That is where you can manipulate every aspect of your beers production to create the exact flavor profile you are looking for.

 

[bdeck02]

Kits are the gateway drug.

 

[Hoodweisen]

when u start all grain every little thing you ignore will come back to you when you taste the finished product. I made two extract kits then i thought the same thing you did jumped into BIAB and screwed up like three batchs that just didnt taste right. I just finally made a ESB that was palatable an now i think i taste too much yeast in it so i need to cold crash it colder so now i cant wait till the next time i brew so i can change that one small step.

 

[Captain Damage]

You don't even need to go to all grain to get creative. You can design your own recipes with extract and specialty grains. Sure, partial mash and all grain will give you even more flexibility and freedom, but you can have a lot of fun with extract too. It all comes down to learning what role each ingredient plays, what they can contribute to your beer.

 

[tekknoschtev]

There was a period that I felt similar. My first few batches were "dump this stuff into a pot of boiling water, chill, add yeast, wait.... Beer!" Some of them included "Make a tea with these grains and then boil that" but it never felt super creative.

But I view it similar to cooking. Following a recipe isn't all that creative necessarily, but when I pull the chicken pasta dish out of the oven, I can sit down with my friends and family and enjoy it. And then next time, I can tweak it.

As I've brewed more, I've become more accustomed with how certain ingredients/processes tweak the final flavor. With this knowledge, I can choose to substitute hops to give me the flavor I want, or to mash at a different temperature (or ferment at a different temperature), or to change the ingredients a bit. My brew closet is full of a bag or two of base grains, and then 30 or so specialty grains. The fridge has a drawer with a hand full of different varieties of hops. At this point, I could pretty much go through and brew anything.

And that's where it becomes fun. I can try a bunch of commercial beers, find something I like, and then give my hand at making something in a similar style. I find it quite enjoyable and creative. As you said, it is also good to relax and pass the time.

 

[Pappers_]

Do you cook or bake? Is that creative to you? Its the same as handmade brewing.

Brewers aren't a bunch of Picasso's, letting our inner-artist shine out - we're making something by hand to consume. If you enjoy handmade crafts, baking or cooking, you'll probably enjoy handmade beer making. If you want to create art, well, maybe not.

 

[jfrank85]

I've only done one kit during my short brewing stint and i dont think i will do another anytime soon. Don't get me wrong, it is a good way to get into brewing, but its just not for me. I like to be hands on and experiment with different grains, hop, and yeast combos. Its good to get inspiration from different beers that you have tasted and incorporate them into your own recipes.

 

[RM-MN]

Kits make an easy way to be sure you have all the ingredients to make decent beer and the instructions to make it easy to get started. They don't have to limit your creativity as you can buy adjunct grains, different types of malt extract, change the yeast, add fruit or spices, whatever you want. You're only limited by your own creativity.

Once you have made a kit or two, or perhaps many kits, you can go the next step into creativity and control by going to mashing you own malts so you can have more choices of grains and different amount of fermentability. If you want even more control, you can buy grain and malt it yourself, grow your own hops or even grow your own grains. Try to capture some wild yeasts and see how that affects your beer.

 

[eelpout]

I think the creativity part of brewing is in the equipment. Always trying to come up with something that will help out or save time.

 

[ThePearsonFam]

I think that the kits are a good starting point because they facilitate learning. If you follow the instructions (more from here than the side of the kits), then you're working on perfecting the process... If you make the kit and it's tasty, then you know what the results should be for the ingredients used. I looked at my kit phase as a good place to start understanding how the ingredients work together to make good beer.

I now own Beer Smith brewing software and have progressed on to making my own beers. I have to say that it's pretty cool to drink a beer I've designed and have it taste good (course I've had a couple losers too). As for the expense, [almost] everyone will tell you that brewing your own beer is the most expensive way to save a couple bucks...it's not cheaper. That's true of most hobbies though. The mega-breweries are in it for the money and target every last penny for savings. They've mastered the process.

 

[tekknoschtev]

I think the creativity part of brewing is in the equipment. Always trying to come up with something that will help out or save time.

That's a good point too. I enjoy the hardware aspect of brewing almost as much as the actual brewing. Now only if my wallet and I could come to some sort of agreement...

 

[h22lude]

Most of us aren't in it for the money. We enjoy making beer and everything that goes with the hobby. You are right, at first you spend more money but if you stick with the kit and just buy ingredients you will save money over time. $30 for 50 craft beers is way cheap than buying cases at the store. Once you move away from the beginners kit and extract ingredient kid, it will be more expensive but like I said we aren't in this to save money. The ingredients will always be cheaper. The equipment is what makes this hobby expensive.

As for creativity, the whole hobby is full of things that you can be creative with. If you stick with the kit and extract kits, it isn't as creative but you can still add your own touches to it like adding spices, fruits, dry hopping with different hops, using different yeast. Once you start looking into different equipment and getting into all grain, then you can start getting real reative with making your own equipment, using all different types of equipment, using different ingredients from a recipe or even create your own recipe. How do you think these breweries make their beer? Yes some are similar but they all are a little different which is why you like one brand over another. We could make the same beer from the same kit and it will come out a little different.

 

[ThePearsonFam]

Oh, and since you mentioned money... There are many cost-effective ways to get into all grain brewing. Not that AG is necessarily the end-all-be-all to hobby brewing, but it can be the most cost-effective way to brew. You can buy bulk grains at a much cheaper rate than buying DME/LME. Another thing you can do to save money is rinse your yeast... You can get up to 10 pitches from one vial if you do it correctly and yeast is one of the most expensive aspects to brewing your own...

 

[dorlow]

Do you cook or bake? Is that creative to you? Its the same as handmade brewing.

Brewers aren't a bunch of Picasso's, letting our inner-artist shine out - we're making something by hand to consume. If you enjoy handmade crafts, baking or cooking, you'll probably enjoy handmade beer making. If you want to create art, well, maybe not.

I can't cook to save my life. Before I met my wife, I lived off of frozen pizzas and cereal.

 

[IrregularPulse]

basically if you want to be creative, stop buying the premade kits and make your own recipes with extract and different steeping grains.

Buying a pizza kit from chef boyardi isn't creative, but making dough from scratch and picking fresh ingredients at the store is. Both get you pizza, one may be a little more what you were looking for and taste better as well.

 

[sendkyleanemail]

Brewing is among the most creative things a person can do! There are near infinite ingredients that can be used in truly infinite combinations / ratios. There are hundreds of methods to brew, if not more. Just look at a yeast catalog. Then a hops catalog. Brewing is as creative and exciting as you are. I'd you are dull and boring, brewing will be. If you are adventurous, creative and willing to learn, the world of brewing await to amaze you!

 

[Revvy]

You're only on your second batch...you don't even understand enough about the basic process to know about getting creative with it/ You need to know the fundamentals about how different grains and hops and yeasts and adjuncts all contribute to the overall flavor of the beer.

If all you're doing is following recipes or brewing with kits, whether it's extract or even all grain, then no it's not all that creative. But if you're into recipe creation, and even exploring different brewing techniques, then it's very creative.

For me, since I love to cook, brewing is one of the most creative hobbies I know. It's not necessarily so on brew day unless I'm doing a double decoction mash or something. It's pretty rote actually- you follow a recipe, a bunch of steps. But if you're interested in exploring different brewing techniques, like historical ones, or regional or cultural ones, then that is creative too.

It's what's leads up to that day that is creative for me, all the research and reading that I do ahead to create a particular recipe, and even crunching the numbers in brewing spftware, and then even brewing mulitple batches of it until I nail the flavors I'm looking for. And the tasting and evaluating. All that's creative.

But you're not there yet. And honestly not everyone in the hobby does- some folks just follow kits all their life in the hobby and are content. I think a lot of folks to whom food and cooking is not something they are passionate about like a lot of folks on here are, they perhaps stay with following rather than creating.

For some folks it's about building the gear (Like in the DIY section, which is a very creative section).

If you really want to get a look at the creative side of this that I'm talking about, that I like, then read Mosher's book.

 

[MrStrangeBrew]

yeah well it isnt too creative when you buy a kit with instructions. but say if you went to a "model car" specialty store and they had kits you can buy like your saying. but what if they also had shelves of different parts for different "cars" not in kits just seperate and you can buy which parts you want and make your own "custom car". so in the end you have your very own car to be proud of. Just because they sell kits at home brew shop doesnt mean you have to buy them. All you need is grains/extract, water(liquor), hops, and yeast. And there are many varieties of each and you can add anything you want to it, spices, fruits, rocks, etc.. whatever you want. you get the picture. so basically the kits are there if you just want something to do and just wana brew a quick batch. or if wana get creative you can mix and mitch your own ingredients. The creativeness is in you not the kits!!!

P.S. keep brewing

 

[davel57]

Some people seem to be fine just brewing kits, but I think most people want to do it from scratch and create their own recipes or make purposeful modification to existing recipes. It takes time though, to learn the ingredients and styles and techniques. You can't really be creative until you learn the basics. I spent three years trying to learn to play guitar, and to some extent, I can play notes and chords that are written down on a page, but I still can't write my own music or improvise to a song. Good news is that making beer isn't near that hard, bad news is that when you throw a bunch of ingredients together it's five weeks or more before you know how they turned out. I started out making a small batch every two weeks so I could try more things, but sometimes I made the same mistake several times since the feedback took so long.

 

[Acoma]

+1 to everything Revvy said

Brewing can be as creative as you want it to be. From creating and changing your recipes, grains, secondary options, building equipment, growing hops, the possibilities and depth of this hobby seem endless.

The kits really are like you said a model car. You buy it and put it together following the instructions and have an end product. You can choose to change a thing here and there and paint it how you like it but all in all the results will be somewhat similar. I brewed my first two kits with the ingredients that came with them and my own instructions I hand created from taking tid bits from this site and books I've read and podcasts I'd listened to. Since then the other kits I've brewed I've played with the ingredients and improved my methods. I am just moving to all grain and have a few AG kits in the mail that I am also altering the ingredients on.

So is brewing a creative process? Yes, most definitely. But it all depends on how far you take it. You can either brew a kit, and it could come out bad and you never brew again. Or you can brew it and love it and make kits forever. Or maybe you will start out making kits to get the basics down then move on to building your own recipes, all grain, decoction, or many other options that can provide more creativity and complexity to your brews. You can think of a kit as a stepping stone to get your feet wet or you can think of it as a simple proven process that gets the job done. Good luck and welcome.

 

[PanzerBanana]

Once you get all the equipment you need it is cheaper. 5 gallons is a lot of beer. You can make an easy 5 gallon batch for about $30 how many 6-packs does that get you of good beer?

 

[Bob]

I think that the kits are a good starting point because they facilitate learning. If you follow the instructions (more from here than the side of the kits), then you're working on perfecting the process... If you make the kit and it's tasty, then you know what the results should be for the ingredients used. I looked at my kit phase as a good place to start understanding how the ingredients work together to make good beer.

+1,000,000

You can't get truly creative until you master the process and get a handle on ingredients - how much of X will have Y effect, and so on. I think of all the people on HBT who post their "creative" recipes and ask for advice. 90% of the time the recipe is seriously flawed because the author doesn't have a strong-enough handle on ingredients and what they do. That's not creativity; that's throwing crap at a wall to see what sticks.

You can pull the caps off tins of paint and splat them on a bedsheet, but that doesn't make you Jackson *******. It makes you a guy who thinks he's a better painter than he really is.

In order to roll your own pizza, you need to know a LOT. Lots more than you need to open the box from DiGiorno and slap it in the oven.

Master the process and get as much information into your head as possible before you go getting "creative". You'll be happier that way, and have a hell of a lot more success in the interim.

Cheers!

Bob

 

[Revvy]

$30 how many 6-packs does that get you of good beer?

Some of the beer I buy? That's 2 sixpacks. I was trying to learn about Bocks this winter with the goal of coming up with my own recipe. So I tried several different commercial versions. Several of the dopplebocks, were 15.00 per a sixer.

 

[Revvy]

+1,000,000

You can't get truly creative until you master the process and get a handle on ingredients - how much of X will have Y effect, and so on. I think of all the people on HBT who post their "creative" recipes and ask for advice. 90% of the time the recipe is seriously flawed because the author doesn't have a strong-enough handle on ingredients and what they do. That's not creativity; that's throwing crap at a wall to see what sticks.

You can pull the caps off tins of paint and splat them on a bedsheet, but that doesn't make you Jackson *******. It makes you a guy who thinks he's a better painter than he really is.

In order to roll your own pizza, you need to know a LOT. Lots more than you need to open the box from DiGiorno and slap it in the oven.

Master the process and get as much information into your head as possible before you go getting "creative". You'll be happier that way, and have a hell of a lot more success in the interim.

Cheers!

Bob

I see your and raise you another million!

My take on this is that there is a difference between true experimentation and throwing things together "willy nilly." I have noticed on here is that a lot of noobs think what they are doing is experimentation, when in reality they are just throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks.

Throwing a bunch of stuff in your fermenter and seeing what you get at the end, and ending up making an "is my beer ruined" thread is not the same thing as experimenting.

To me, in order to experiment truly, you have to have an understanding of the fundamentals. You have to know how the process works somewhat. You have to have an understanding of how different ingredients or processes affect the final product. You may even need to know, or at least understand something about beer styles, and what goes into making one beer a Porter and another a pale ale. And where your concoction will fall on the continuoum.


To me it's like cooking or even Jazz. But going back to the cooking analogy. Coming up with a balanced and tasty recipe takes some understanding of things...just like cooking...dumping a cup of salt will more than likely ruin a recipe...so if you cook, you KNOW not to do that...it's the same with brewing...you get an idea with experience and looking at recipes, brewing and playing with software how things work..what flavors work with each other, etc...

That to me is the essence of creating...I have gotten to a point where I understand what I am doing, I get how ingredients work or don't work with each other, so I am not just throwing a bunch of stuff together to see what I get.

I have an idea of what I want it to taste like, and my challenge then is to get the right combination of ingredients to match what is in my head. That's also pretty much how I come up with new food recipes as well.

 

[troub]

I started with doing a few kits. Yeah, that can be a bit paint-by-numbers, and there's really nothing wrong with that. It was kind of like baking a cake, but the end result is healthier, lasts longer, has better side effects, and so on.

A little over a month ago I had a commercial craft pale ale made with primarily Cascade hops, and decided I really liked that hop and wanted to make my own beer that really showcased it. I went to hopville.com and started plugging in ingredients to get the gravity, IBUs, color that I wanted, then decided to dry-hop to get additional aroma, chose the yeast that I wanted, etc. I brewed it up and this time was much different than the kits, in that I had designed this (albeit simple) beer. It's been in the bottle for two weeks or so now and I had to crack one open a bit early the other night...I just couldn't wait. Imagine my happiness to find that it turned out almost EXACTLY how I designed it to turn out. Color - very light, carbonation and head - very good, amazing Cascade hop flavor and aroma, overall balanced. It's a simple recipe but I'm proud of it. And even though it's good, I'm judging it and noting things I can do to make it better next time -- probably at least doubling the 5 min and/or dry-hops (or adding a flame-out addition); I want to be able to smell it as soon as I open the bottle. Maybe changing the 10L to 20L for just a tad more color. That sort of thing.

So even with this super simple recipe, it was really fun to develop it, wait anxiously to see if it would be as good as I imagined or if it would be crap, think of how to improve it for next time, and then of course drink it. And when I give it to friends I can say it's MINE. Sure, it's probably virtually identical to a thousand other APA recipes out there, but I came up with it myself all the same using the knowledge I had about what I wanted and what ingredients would give me that. That's the fun.

Recipe link.

 

[ThePearsonFam]

Another aspect of being creative is simply taking an established recipe (one of your own/one from here/one from a known kit) and adding something to it to change it. Although you didn't create the whole thing from scratch, you took something you liked and modified it to suit your needs... A good example is taking a cream ale or american wheat and adding fruit to it...

 

[CTownBrewer]

I think it can be extremely creative if you have a passion for craft beer.

I've got 4 very solid extract brews under my belt & none of them were store bought kits. Sure I've used kit recipes as a basis for the 4 I've done just to ensure I was on the right track ingredients-wise, but I always make it my own by adjusting my hop schedule, adding fermentables to get a higher gravity, or playing around with special additions like powdered peanut butter & chocolate.

I'm in the process of getting supplies for a mash tun cooler conversion so I can move into all-grain, mostly because I came up with a couple recipes I'd like to incorporate rye/ chocolate rye into...smoked rye amber & black rye IPA.

The sky is the limit in terms of creativity. Heck, I have a Sierra Nevada Black Barleywine sitting at home waiting for me this weekend!

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