Making Recipes Your Own

[BarefootFriar]

It seems that most of the recipes I find online are "open source" -- i.e., free to anyone to make. We have tons of recipes here, and I'm sure a quick search would turn up hundreds more.

Sometimes a recipe just really works for you and you want to be able to call it your own. Being the honest homebrewers that we are, we of course don't want to just outright steal it from the real creator.

How much has to change in order to be able to legitimately call it "mine"? Is it as simple as changing the grain bill slightly, or maybe switching from Fuggles to East Golding hops? Maybe it's doing something to the malt, the hops, and the yeast?

What if I want to later sell that brew as mine? Maybe open a nano- or micro-brewery. Is it better to make your own recipe from scratch, or tweak an existing one enough to be able to call it your own?

I'm just asking because I'm curious, not because I actually have any real reason to call any recipes "mine".

 

[user 108580]

Interesting question, but I would be shocked if every single commercial beer on the market had a completely different recipe from one another. You can't really patent a recipe otherwise I'd patent the recipe for cake and now nobody else can combine the ingredients to make a cake.

Most breweries "create" a house strain of yeast and that seems to be what makes it there own. Also labels, marketing, flare. All makes it personal.

 

[caioz1jp]

I found that even if I make my own recipe off the top of my head some one has either done it or something very very close. The thing is most styles tend to follow a typical recipe formula. For example I use 50% two row, 40% wheat, and 10% oats for any wheat beer i make. I believe that came from the Blue Moon clone thread. But i like to make a lemon style with Sorrachi Ace and an orange style with Cascade hops. I consider those my beers becuase of how i brew and the yeast i use. The hardest part is not psyching yourself out and thinking making a recipe is too hard. Read up on styles and find out what grains are typically used. start plugging away until you get the color, ABV, and IBUs you desire. Brew the beer then adjust to your liking. I recommend using www.hopville.com or beersmith since both will allow you to select a BJCP guidline for a style and help you hit your target numbers.

To sum up I dont think there is anything wrong with copying a general grain bill from a recipe for the style of beer you want to make. What makes it yours is trying to do something different with the hops, yeast, mash, boil, or adjuncts.

I recomend reading the Nilo's blue moon clone recipes. IT shows how he started with one recipe and brewed it like 8 or 9 times now and changed it each time trying to get his desired result. That recipe is truely his own. Yes he is trying to clone the profile of blue moon but the recipe is all his becuase he put to work into finding out what pleased him.

 

[inhousebrew]

On a homebrew scale I would think you could take any recipe and call it your own in a sense because your system is different, fermentation temps, yeast health, water, process, sanitation, maybe the AA% of your hops, the freshness of ingredients available. You brewing it makes it yours. I think this came up in another thread a week or so ago and someone said that someone who won a prominent competition brewed one of the recipes from Jamil's book which has been brewed a billion times but they just did it better.

On the nano-brewery scale, I would like to think that brewer's come up with their own stuff. We as brewer's like to take pride in what we do so I can't imagine someone who has the initiative to start a nano-brewery or brewpub doesn't have the drive to make their own recipe.

 

[Denny]

Most breweries "create" a house strain of yeast and that seems to be what makes it there own.

I'd say it's more a like "a few" than "most".

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

On a homebrew scale I would think you could take any recipe and call it your own in a sense because your system is different, fermentation temps, yeast health, water, process, sanitation, maybe the AA% of your hops, the freshness of ingredients available. You brewing it makes it yours. I think this came up in another thread a week or so ago and someone said that someone who won a prominent competition brewed one of the recipes from Jamil's book which has been brewed a billion times but they just did it better.

Exactly. I did an experiment with another brewer where we brewed a bit DIPA on my system, I ran off about 9 gallons into my fermenter and about 5 gallons into his. Both same recipe, same cooling processes, and exact same yeast. Up until pitching time, the beers were treated the exact same. The only difference is that I have fermentation temp control and he doesn't.

We did a side-by-side tasting at a homebrew club meeting, and the two beers were completely different. And we scored them by BJCP standards, the temp-controlled versions scored 6-11 points higher than the non-controlled.

So feel free to use recipes -- it will still be *your* beer.

(That said, I've always been a "make my own recipe" guy, so only about 1 in 15 batches I brew is directly taken from someone else's recipe -- and that usually only when I'm working with a style with which I'm unfamiliar.)