Learning curve from recipe kits to more advanced

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primerib

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Hi all,

I want you all to know that I really appreciate all the advice that has been offered in my first few months on this forum. I had done a tiny bit of homebrewing about a decade ago but forgot all that I had learned. After having an epiphany and picking way too many apples last fall and being walked through the babysteps of my first cider, it's really been a lot of fun and learning.

On the beer side of things, my first batch of beer in 10 years is in the fermenter - it's from a Northern Brewer extract recipe kit (Sierra Madre pale ale, if anybody is curious). I don't know if it's the DIY spirit of it all or what, but I am interested in experimenting with all-grain, maybe with a BIAB for my next batch and after that maybe look at getting some more specialized equipment together.

What I'm wondering about - there seems to be huge learning curve between following the directions on a recipe kit that someone has assembled for you and doing what all the really experienced brewers on here seem to be doing - calculating efficiency, IBUs, entering things into BeerSmith, etc. Heck, knowing how much/what kind of grain to use, what certain hops are good for, what should or shouldn't go into certain beers, etc. Looking at what seems to be an abstract recipe and making sense of it. In all my lurking on these forums, I haven't found much middle ground. It seems that the people posting are either very new to the hobby, like myself, or possess a very advanced fund of knowledge.

So my question is, how did you learn when you were getting started, how did you bridge that knowledge gap? At the moment I'm in grad school and have a hard enough time finding a spare Saturday where I have time to commit to bottling a batch, but I am committed to learning this stuff at my own pace. As always I appreciate any insight!
 
Well speaking personally, I've made use of a few different resources.
Books, great way to learn some basics and some more advanced stuff too. However if course they cant cover everything. If they tried "how to brew" would be an encyclopedia set.
YouTube, actually a handy resource as there are hundreds of how to's or informational videos. Also, sometime I find it makes more sense to watch how to do something then it is to read it.
Forums, so helpful as there's topics and answers and discussions on everything you can think of.
Local home brewing supplier can be great. I have asked some questions that in hindsight seem ridiculous of the staff there, but they've always been helpful and explain things.
And good old trial and error. As good as reading and watching etc is, nothing really beats getting your hands dirty and trying stuff. You'll make mistakes but you learn so much from screwing up... although you may end up with some wort on the floor or a batch that was supposed to be blonde ale that tastes like blonde old sock instead.

FWIW I'd consider myself a novice in that I've created a few recipes or can take an existing one and know some substitutions to suit my own taste in beer. But in no way do I consider myself an expert.
 
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I've found that taking a recipe from the database here on HomeBrewTalk and brewing it (many of these have comments on how the beer turned out and suggestions on modifications) then making slight changes to see how they impact the beer gets me a basic understanding. Then I can take the recipe and make more modifications until it suits my tastes.

As long as I don't make major changes I always get good beer to drink. I also make smaller batches (2 1/2 gallons) so I get to make more recipes for practice. I currently have about 10 varieties of beer in bottles in various stages of maturing and am thinking of making another small batch this week.
 
Some of the answer to your question is based on what's important or interesting to you as a brewer, because that's what will motivate you to learn about various things. Brewing is a multi-faceted subject with many areas of learning and experience to cultivate. That's why it's so cool!

Now, some people here seem most interested in drinking beer! Of course I assume we all are. :drunk: But some have consumption (usually quickly and/or cheaply) as a primary motivator. There's less interest in the science and the "why" among some of those folks.

Others are trying to recreate something they really enjoy, like English ales, or German lagers, and they'll spend the majority of their brewing time learning how.

Many others think the process itself is captivating, and invest a lot of time and/or money on equipment. But they also spend lots of time analyzing their brewhouse processes, acquiring or building tools to improve things. It doesn't have to be about money, since DIY is such a big part of brewing for these types.

My point is that these motivations will lead someone down a particular primary path in terms of learning. You still have to spread yourself fairly thin and learn the ingredients, the mechanics of brewing, how to keep things sanitary, etc. etc. - there are so many domains.

But basically, there are no shortcuts, which is why brewing is a long term hobby for those who are even remotely curious. And you will, you absolutely will, brew some real dreck along the way. Screwing up will always be among the best avenues for learning, unfortunately!
 
I understand your concern given you’re still in grad school. Better to play it safe. Most of us waited until we at least had our Masters before going to BIAB.

Patience my young padawan. :)

It’s just beer....watch 2 youtube’s before you try and you likely are better prepared than most that have gone before you.
 
So my question is, how did you learn when you were getting started, how did you bridge that knowledge gap?

I started with packaged kits, stumbled into a small number of good resources (local homebrew club, a book or two), read about beer styles, noted the differences in ingredients in the various beer styles. And, along the way, I brewed - since that's the fun part.

Given what I know now, there may be a more direct path.

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/category/tutorials/ is a good source of video tutorials. Hopefully others will add their favorite youtube videos.

Just one book starting out. Book Recommendations will give you a good one paragraph review of a number of books. FWIW, I'd pick 4th edition of How To Brew as my first book.

I'll repeat @RM-MN's suggestion for using HomeBrewTalk recipe threads. I find that AHA has recipes that are good, although some (many?) require AHA membership to access.

Homebrew clubs and local homebrew stores are also a good source of knowledge.

Once you have a solid core of knowledge, then it's easier to sort through the flood of knowledge from books, forums, additional videos to bridge the knowledge gap.
 
Get used to the idea that there is always going to be some place or subject where someone knows more than you do. It's such a deep subject that you may be feeling like you have to know "all those things" to brew good/great beer. You don't.

@McKnuckle nailed it--what is it you want? Just beer? Great beer? Enjoying the process of learning? Plunging deep into the abyss? Automating the process? There are lots of ways to enjoy this hobby.

When I started about 3 1/2 years ago, I was very concerned with numbers--IBUs, ABV, things like that. I bought Beersmith. Turns out, I don't use it any more, though I may again.

Probably that stuff was important for my development as a brewer, but if you asked me right now what the IBUs are for each of the six beers I have on tap, I couldn't tell you. Honestly.

There are four things that characterize my development.

1. Continuous Quality Improvement

I'm a huge believer in this. Every time I brew, I try to do at least one thing better than before. There's a mythical "perfect brew" out there, impossible (probably) to achieve. But I can get close. Every time I brew I try to move closer.

It works. Many are too impatient to employ this approach--they want it all, and right now. But IME, slow and steady wins the race. Does it ever.

2. It's the beer, not the numbers.

This is a continuation of the above. It's hard to articulate; I am precise as I can be when I brew, everything from measuring water additions to measuring pH of the mash to...well, a lot of stuff.

But I've moved away from a sort of mechanical approach to brewing to being a little more intuitive. This is very weird. I'm a scientist by training, and that seems counter to doing things intuitively.

When it comes to making up new recipes, I've tended to follow my intuition. My dark lager was that--a completely new recipe because I'd never had a dark lager I liked, so I made one. Only later did I learn there is actually a style for this, called Schwarzbier. I just thought about what I wanted such a beer to taste like, then added some of this, a bit of that, until I had a grain and hop bill I thought I might like.

I'm a strong believer in intuition, despite how nonscientific that sounds. I'm a believer in how the subconscious can see things the conscious mind cannot, and I've had enough success in various areas of life to support that. It doesn't always work, but it's rather Zen-like, and works for me. The key is to listen to that intuition, see what it might tell me.

In the end, for me, it's about the beer, not so much the numbers. How does it taste?

3. Best Practices

This is also a bit hard to articulate. Most off-flavors and other mistakes in brewing are a result of not doing what could be called "best practices." Yeah, there's some disagreement as to what these are, but mostly not. There's a reason great brewers do certain things. Things like fermentation temp control. Eliminating oxygen exposure after fermentation. Focusing on water. Ensuring ingredients are fresh. Getting chlorine out of the equation. Getting timing down. And a bunch more.

For instance, DMS (dimethyl sulfide) is a compound in beer that tastes/smells like creamed corn. Its precursor is SMM (S-methylmethionine) and it converts to DMS when heated at high temps. This boils off during the boil, but SMM is then creating more. The answer to this problem--which manifests in lighter beers like lighter lagers--is once the boil is done, chill down as quickly as you can to below about 165 degrees, where this process stops. If you're whirlpooling hops, get that temp down to about 165, then go. At that point, you're no longer producing DMS.

You don't necessarily have to know all this to do the process correctly. Same with most best practices. You don't have to know why fermenting most ale yeasts in the mid-60s is better than at, say, 80 degrees. Just do it. The reason, btw, is that at too-high ferm temps the yeast will likely produce off-flavors. Further, there are yeast strains for some styles that need higher fermentation temps--yeast for Saison, for instance--so this is not a universal rule with ale yeasts.

So, I try as much as possible to bring best practices into my brewing. You can brew great beer using great processes without knowing why it works. Then add understanding as you will. But I use those practices unless I have a darned good reason not to do them.

4. How do I--and others--evaluate the beer, not the numbers.

So how do you tell if your beer is any good? You may like it--IMO, that should be the first criterion for success, brew what you like to drink--but is there a more objective way to tell this?

I get feedback from a lot of friends and acquaintances about the beer. I often look to see if they'll have another. Yeah, everyone will be nice when they taste your beer, even if they hate it. Then they dump it when you're not looking and ask for something else. But nobody has a second one if they don't like it.

I have a friend with a tremendous palate. He gets beer from me, I get unfettered feedback. He knows I want him to give me honest evaluation, and he does. When I try something new I ask him to evaluate, to look for off-flavors. I don't usually have those--because I'm trying to follow best practices :)--and so the conversation is often about how to push the recipe in one direction or another. Would it be better with a drier finish, or with this aspect of the flavor profile increased? Like that.

You can put your beer in competitions, but I've come to be suspect of that as a way to judge my beer. Had an amber in a local competition, it was the only beer of 8 that I tasted that didn't appear to have off-flavors. And mine didn't win. The winner had "extract twang" that was, IMO, offputting. A brew buddy felt the same way. But apparently the judges thought that was something that should be in the beer. I've read of people who have entered the same beer in judged competitions under different registrations; one set of bottles is scored very highly; the other--same, identical beer--is seen as having major flaws. So I'm a little suspect of that as a way to judge my beer.

Instead, I'm asking this simple question: do people want more? IMO, that's the only good way to know if people like it. (And this sets aside issues of style; I can judge, I think, a Belgian. I can tell you if it fits the style, off flavors or not---and I'd never have a second. I don't like the flavor :)) If you don't like a style, it's not a problem in the beer.

I had my dark lager at a beerfest in October; one woman who came up said she didn't like dark beers. I encouraged her to try a bit, asking that she taste it with her nose and tongue, not her eyes. She ended up having four refills of that beer. That kind of thing is a sign.

I have friends who want to buy it, who would pay commercial prices for a sixpack of my beer. ("What if you gave me a sixpack of your beer and you turned around and found a $10 bill on the ground; wouldn't you pick it up?") I have a local bar owner who wants me to brew my beer to be sold at that bar. Can't do that without a license (thinking on that). That's feedback I really trust.

*********

So, what do you want from all this? Cheap buzz? Excellent flavor? Terrific learning experience? You have to decide, then point toward that. There's no wrong answer to that question.

Good luck, and enjoy!
 
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Relax, don't worry, have a home brew, (Charley Papazin, Joy of Home Brewing book, if you have the time it is a must read) and give it a shot. Most likely you will make beer. You will way over think most things the first time though.

By the way, there is this really good forum on the inner webs where you can always ask questions, if I remember it I will lost it. ;)
 
For me it was getting into recipe making that got me hooked. Many yrs ago I got a beginner's equipment set and made maybe 8-9 kit batches but it didn't really capture my attention very long and I gave it up for a few yrs. Then after doing a brew on premises at a local brewery I got interested again but started back with partial mash and dabbled right away with the recipe part. It's very like cooking really. If you have something in mind you want to make go look up 3 or 4 recipes for that style, see what's similar and different, and go from there. Or pick one that looks best and tweak it as someone else mentioned. These days a lot of companies post the recipes for their kits online, and there is the database here and at the AHA as others have noted. Two books that helped me a lot, though are a bit dated now, were Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels and Jamil and Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles.

One other thing which some may not advise is I started almost right away using Beersmith to track brews. This was back when it was still the original version I think. There is a bit of a learning curve but it did help me understand how to set up a recipe and tweak to my own equipment, which is important if you're interested in reproducibility or hitting a particular recipe's intended numbers. There are lots of other options out there, some just basic recipe building free online that you can play with and plug in recipes.
 
Get used to the idea that there is always going to be some place or subject where someone knows more than you do. It's such a deep subject that you may be feeling like you have to know "all those things" to brew good/great beer. You don't.

@McKnuckle nailed it--what is it you want? Just beer? Great beer? Enjoying the process of learning? Plunging deep into the abyss? Automating the process? There are lots of ways to enjoy this hobby.

When I started about 3 1/2 years ago, I was very concerned with numbers--IBUs, ABV, things like that. I bought Beersmith. Turns out, I don't use it any more, though I may again.

Probably that stuff was important for my development as a brewer, but if you asked me right now what the IBUs are for each of the six beers I have on tap, I couldn't tell you. Honestly.

There are four things that characterize my development.

1. Continuous Quality Improvement

I'm a huge believer in this. Every time I brew, I try to do at least one thing better than before. There's a mythical "perfect brew" out there, impossible (probably) to achieve. But I can get close. Every time I brew I try to move closer.

It works. Many are too impatient to employ this approach--they want it all, and right now. But IME, slow and steady wins the race. Does it ever.

2. It's the beer, not the numbers.

This is a continuation of the above. It's hard to articulate; I am precise as I can be when I brew, everything from measuring water additions to measuring pH of the mash to...well, a lot of stuff.

But I've moved away from a sort of mechanical approach to brewing to being a little more intuitive. This is very weird. I'm a scientist by training, and that seems counter to doing things intuitively.

When it comes to making up new recipes, I've tended to follow my intuition. My dark lager was that--a completely new recipe because I'd never had a dark lager I liked, so I made one. Only later did I learn there is actually a style for this, called Schwarzbier. I just thought about what I wanted such a beer to taste like, then added some of this, a bit of that, until I had a grain and hop bill I thought I might like.

I'm a strong believer in intuition, despite how nonscientific that sounds. I'm a believer in how the subconscious can see things the conscious mind cannot, and I've had enough success in various areas of life to support that. It doesn't always work, but it's rather Zen-like, and works for me. The key is to listen to that intuition, see what it might tell me.

In the end, for me, it's about the beer, not so much the numbers. How does it taste?

3. Best Practices

This is also a bit hard to articulate. Most off-flavors and other mistakes in brewing are a result of not doing what could be called "best practices." Yeah, there's some disagreement as to what these are, but mostly not. There's a reason great brewers do certain things. Things like fermentation temp control. Eliminating oxygen exposure after fermentation. Focusing on water. Ensuring ingredients are fresh. Getting chlorine out of the equation. Getting timing down. And a bunch more.

For instance, DMS (dimethyl sulfide) is a compound in beer that tastes/smells like creamed corn. Its precursor is SMM (S-methylmethionine) and it converts to DMS when heated at high temps. This boils off during the boil, but SMM is then creating more. The answer to this problem--which manifests in lighter beers like lighter lagers--is once the boil is done, chill down as quickly as you can to below about 165 degrees, where this process stops. If you're whirlpooling hops, get that temp down to about 165, then go. At that point, you're no longer producing DMS.

You don't necessarily have to know all this to do the process correctly. Same with most best practices. You don't have to know why fermenting most ale yeasts in the mid-60s is better than at, say, 80 degrees. Just do it. (The reason, btw, is that at too-high ferm temps the yeast will likely produce off-flavors).

You can brew great beer using great processes without knowing why it works. Then add understanding as you will. But I use those practices unless I have a darned good reason not to do them.

4. How do I--and others--evaluate the beer, not the numbers.

So how do you tell if your beer is any good? You may like it--IMO, that should be the first criterion for success, brew what you like to drink--but is there a more objective way to tell this?

I get feedback from a lot of friends and acquaintances about the beer. I often look to see if they'll have another. Yeah, everyone will be nice when they taste your beer, even if they hate it. Then they dump it when you're not looking and ask for something else. But nobody has a second one if they don't like it.

I have a friend with a tremendous palate. He gets beer from me, I get unfettered feedback. He knows I want him to give me honest evaluation, and he does. When I try something new I ask him to evaluate, to look for off-flavors. I don't usually have those--because I'm trying to follow best practices :)--and so the conversation is often about how to push the recipe in one direction or another. Would it be better with a drier finish, or with this aspect of the flavor profile increased? Like that.

You can put your beer in competitions, but I've come to be suspect of that as a way to judge my beer. Had an amber in a local competition, it was the only beer of 8 that I tasted that didn't appear to have off-flavors. And mine didn't win. The winner had "extract twang" that was, IMO, offputting. A brew buddy felt the same way. But apparently the judges thought that was something that should be in the beer. I've read of people who have entered the same beer in judged competitions under different registrations; one set of bottles is scored very highly; the other--same, identical beer--is seen as having major flaws. So I'm a little suspect of that as a way to judge my beer.

Instead, I'm asking this simple question: do people want more? IMO, that's the only good way to know if people like it. (And this sets aside issues of style; I can judge, I think, a Belgian. I can tell you if it fits the style, off flavors or not---and I'd never have a second. I don't like the flavor :)) If you don't like a style, it's not a problem in the beer.

I had my dark lager at a beerfest in October; one woman who came up said she didn't like dark beers. I encouraged her to try a bit, asking that she taste it with her nose and tongue, not her eyes. She ended up having four refills of that beer. That kind of thing is a sign.

I have friends who want to buy it, who would pay commercial prices for a sixpack of my beer. ("What if you gave me a sixpack of your beer and you turned around and found a $10 bill on the ground; wouldn't you pick it up?") I have a local bar owner who wants me to brew my beer to be sold at that bar. Can't do that without a license (thinking on that). That's feedback I really trust.

*********

So, what do you want from all this? Cheap buzz? Excellent flavor? Terrific learning experience? You have to decide, then point toward that. There's no wrong answer to that question.

Good luck, and enjoy!

I was sober when i started reading this post...now I’m naked staring at an empty bag of Cheetos, and thinking my hands look pretty in orange.

Thank you!
 
What I'm wondering about - there seems to be huge learning curve between following the directions on a recipe kit that someone has assembled for you and doing what all the really experienced brewers on here seem to be doing - calculating efficiency, IBUs, entering things into BeerSmith, etc. Heck, knowing how much/what kind of grain to use, what certain hops are good for, what should or shouldn't go into certain beers, etc. Looking at what seems to be an abstract recipe and making sense of it. In all my lurking on these forums, I haven't found much middle ground. It seems that the people posting are either very new to the hobby, like myself, or possess a very advanced fund of knowledge.

As far as recipes go and learning to create your own all-grain recipes...creating your own "from scratch" recipe is not a requirement to be a homebrewer. There are a LOT of excellent kits from vendors like MoreBeer (I have an IPA in the fermenter that is a MoreBeer kit). You could brew for many years, just ordering kits, and never repeat the same beer twice. Most of the beers I brew started off as a kit recipe or as a published recipe.

I also recently picked up a copy of Zainasheff/Palmer's "Brewing Classic Styles". That would be an excellent place to start. I was thinking it would be interesting to brew every recipe in that book...but that would be over 6 years if you brewed one of the 80 recipes each month! Thinking about that kind of nailed home the scope of learning to brew to me...that it would take over 3 years of brewing every 2 weeks just to brew one basic example of the major styles once.

I would advocate picking a small set of about 5 styles that you enjoy and focus on them. Start with a kit or a published recipe and brew following the recipe. Focus on that small set of styles and each batch try to fix prior issues, change/improve your process, test out tweaks to the recipe (different yeast, tweaked grain bill, different hopping schedule, etc.).
 
Really good suggestions, everybody! Thank you. Sometimes all the information seems overwhelming when you want to understand the hows and whys but don’t have a complete handle on the basics.

I suppose nobody learns everything in a day or even in a decade, so I will just keep getting my hands dirty with brewing, reading as I can, asking questions and learning as I go!
 
Another thing that really helped me early on was my annoyance with the major brewing software (BeerSmith and Brewer's Friend primarily). They each did things, or didn't do things, that were unintuitive or even inexplicable to me.

Also, when I would use the software and repeatedly miss volumes or gravities, I would scratch my head, adjust something, then miss a different target the next time. it drove me nuts.

My dissatisfaction with this forced me to learn and apply the various formulas myself, and to program them into my own brewing spreadsheet. I've revised it in major and minor ways for several years now, and it's really dialed in to my way of brewing.

By doing this, I learned the mysterious world of efficiency, how bitterness is affected by wort gravity, how to weigh everything (including water!), how to predict real world color based on SRM, etc. etc. - a hundred small things. The sum of it all is a much better understanding of brewing science and process. It sure didn't happen overnight!

This may not resonate with the type of person that you are, but I guarantee you will find something that does. Just dig in.
 
It doesn't have to be too intimidating. Just move at your own pace. You can go BIAB and not fuss too much over the more complicated stuff(yet). As you crank out more batches you'll naturally want to get more involved. The beer softwares are fun. Tinkering obsessively with recipes on brewersfriend is half the fun for me. Checking out recipes here in the recipe section is also a good suggestion. There's a lot of good stuff there.

BTW calculating efficiency isn't hard once you start using recipe software. The recipe softwares have you put in an efficiency % and it drives the numbers(gravity). After you do your batch and measure your gravity just adjust the efficiency in the software so their estimated gravity matches what your actual was. There's your efficiency. Maybe there are better ways but this is how I keep track of it
 
Lots of good suggestions here. I would just say there is a a "learning" curve but not necessarily a "doing" curve...meaning you can still brew lots of great tasting beer without learning the intricacies of hops utilization and yeast propogation, etc.
There is ALWAYS something new to learn if you want to. There's lot of people who just brew extract kits and love it. The nice thing about brewing is you can make it as easy or as complicated as you want it to be, but don't be intimidated by the expansiveness of the info. Figure out what you're brewing goals are and find a niche that works for you.
 
For me it was getting into recipe making that got me hooked.

Ditto for me. I brewed for a couple years with extract and grain, got frustrated with less than stellar results and put it on a shelf for a few years. When I finally got re-interested, I jumped into all-grain, assuming this was why my previous brews didn't meet expectations (infamous "extract twang").
With this came the need to understand recipe formulation, etc. and this hooked me.
I initially made do with stovetop mashes in a paint strainer bag, but took off from there with immediately better results than my old extract batches. Haven't looked back!

Good luck on your journey, primerib.
 
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