Making recipes

[Srceenplay]

Wondering what all is involved to do this. Trial and error? Research? Experience? I have not even got my first batch bottled yet but I'm eager to get started on another soon. Some of my favs are New Belgium Fat Tire and Ranger. And dead guy. How would you go about making a recipe for one of them? Is it foolish of me to even want to try that since in not doing AG. Do I just stick with extract kits for some time and eventually it will just come to me.

How long and what did it take for you to start making your good originals?

 

[NigeltheBold]

It helped me to look at other recipes and make my own based on research. What I like to do is look at clone recipes online for my favorite beers, and develop my own recipes based on what I can find. I try not to copy recipes exactly, but I take certain things from certain recipes and combine them with things I see from other recipes. There is a website called Hopville.com that allows you to create your own recipes and see how they'll turn out according to the website's calculations. You can also select the style you want to make, and hopville will tell you if your recipe fits the style. I started making my own recipes after three or four brews, but it just depends on how much you learn about creating good recipes. You learn more as you go along, and you learn a lot from trial and error. Checking out recipes online and in books definitely helps though.

 

[djfriesen]

If you want to make Dead Guy and Fat Tire, there are recipes all over the place. I haven't seen one for Ranger, specifically, but it might be out there. There might even be clone extract kits for FT and DG, but I am not very familiar with extract brewing.

 

[Revvy]

When someone posts a "what's my next step" thread, I usually post about my progression, not that I think it's the "right way" but it kind of overlaps both technique and knowledge.

If anything it will give you an overview of different methodolgies in brewing.

My favorite part of brewing is coming up with recipes. I do a lot of experimental brewing. And I've won a few awards for some of my recipes, so this is how I got there.

The next step many make for cooper's style kits is to using an extract with steeping grains kit/ They are better quality and the steeping grains give the beer bigger depth of flavor than a straight extract beer.

After I did some of those, I started playing around with non kit recipes from this site, and I also started playing around with recipe formulations....I started using free online recipe calculators like this one, Beer Calculus . homebrew recipe calculator which helped me understand how the different ingredients affect each other. FIrst I started typing in these recipes and playinig with them to see what a pound of such and such grain did to the SG of the beer, or how this hop made the beer more or less bitter.

At the same time I started reading more and more about the different ingredients I was using....I found that googling the names helped get me a lot of info on them, plus reading articles and catalogs and books about it.

The BJCP style guide was a big help too, learning the numbers, OG, FG, IBU, SRM's ranges for different styles. BJCP Style Guidelines

Next I formulated a couple of my own recipes and played around with that, making them better or different.

My next step after that was transfering some of my recipes from extract to partial mashes, where I would get the largest amount of my fermentables from mashing my own grains, and then adding some extract.

Around this time I also played with harvest my own yeast, both washing and bottle harvesting.

After that I made a cooler and started doing 2.5 gallon All grain brews, converting those Partial Mashes to All grain, and brewing them on my stove top...

After that I got a turkey fryer and wort chiller so I can do full volume boils and started brewing all grain, brewing some of the recipes on here, and creating my own...

I also still do some extract with grain recipes, Partial Mashes, and 2.5 gallon stove top brewing, depending on my mood.

This winter I tried my hand at brewing lagers instead of ales, since I discovered a few that I like and was able to have some form of temp control....

I also tried my hand at brewing some strong ales, and playing with different yeasts, then my usually clean ones, trying yeast that added their own character to the beers.

A good thing to do is to try brewing Single Malt and Hop Beers where you brew very simple beers to get an idea of how different hops work with them, or different yeasts...it's a really good way to again get an idea how, like cooking, diffeent ingredients play off of each other.

As you can see, I didn't just jump from one technique like extract to all grain, I also tried to learn as much as I could about ingredients and recipe creations as well.....An I also tried to perfect my processes, like bottling, yeast harvesting, things like that...

I still have a long way to go, there's a ton of stuff to learn, different ways to brew to explore, and new styles to try and brew as well...

There's a huge amount of things you can do in this hobby.

The biggest thing that helped me was like I said using software and tyoing established recipes even the ones of the kits I brewed into Beer calculus. Also introduction in the byo 150 clone recipe special edition helped me understand immensely. Also books like radical brewing and Designing great beers help as well.

I hope this helps

 

[Revvy]

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.

Working on your process is good way of doing this, as is reading.

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.

You'll get there....a LOT sooner, if you focus on the fundamentals, and get your processes in order...rather than just playing around.

 

[Dunerunner]

If you don't want to do a bunch of calculations, get a copy of Promash. Then get a copy of "Designing Great Beers", by Ray Daniels and "Brewing Classic Styles", by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. You may consider joining AHA and getting a copy of Zymergy magazine to look over every couple of months.

 

[moorerm04]

The second batch I did I made up a recipe... A Honey Ale. I did do some research on what others had done and what my OG and FG should be. I ended up with an awesome tasting brew... Around 6% ABV

 

[Srceenplay]

So keep reading and keep brewing simple and one day it will just click!? Does that mean stay with the premade kits or it would be ok to follow proven recipes?

 

[gr8shandini]

Take a look around the recipe section here on HBT. There are plenty of good and often award-winning recipes there and it's usually where I get my start.

However, I'm a bit of a minimalist, so I often try to throw out two or three ingredients to get a "baseline beer" that I can build back up in complexity if need be. The KISS principle really pays off - especially in the beginning. One of the best beers I've ever brewed was just a SMaSH with pilsner malt and Saaz.

Edit:

Just saw your post above. My recommendation is to start with a kit / recipe (they're pretty much the same thing, the only difference being how you order the ingredients), brew it well, and then immediately start tweaking it to your liking on the next batch. Repeat until you get the beer you want. As Revvy mentioned, it's exactly like cooking. If you stick with your grandma's cookbook, you'll undoubtedly make some great meals, but if you want to make something your own, you have to start branching out a bit.

That said, only change one thing at a time. Once you change more than one variable, you've gone from an experiment to a guess. If something goes bad, or even if it turns out great, you'll have no idea which element was responsible.

 

[Srceenplay]

Thanks for the advice.
I have been looking ant the recipes on here. So many I want to try. Saw one that someone made and called it FatSam. Sounds interesting. Just scared I'll screw it up. my first batch is still in the carboy so I haven't had the satisfaction of trying my own beer yet. Getting impatienent and want took brew again. Might have to go to the LHBS this week and by some ingredients and another carboy.

 

[Revvy]

Start with a couple kits, but also imput the recipes into brewing softwre and play around with them. Like the free one I talked about beercalculus.

Change the amount of extract and see how the ibus change, and the color might change and the balance (as shown by the carboy on the slider to the right of the data fields.)

For example make a mental note of the og and the ibus of a recipe you typed in, then increase the amount of extract to raise the abv of the beer, so then try to figure out how much you'd have to increase the hops to achieve the same ibus from the original gravities. A lot of folks just doing the willy nilly thing will add a # of sugar to up the abv, but not realize or care that it affects the balance of the recipe, which will affect the flavor of the finished product.

Or shift the times on the hop schedules, and you'll start to learn how the timing of the additions affect the bitterness of the beer.

That to me is how you start to learn about how what you do affects the recipe as much as what you add.

Do stuff like that, also look at those favorite recipes you like (like the kits) and start googling or looking in books about the ingredients in that recipe, the different types of malts and hops, look at other recipes of a similar style to figure out what overlaps and what doesn't.

Often you can find the grainbills of commercial microbrews online, either clones recipes or direct from the brewer, do a taste test of a couple of the beers, for example 2 different ipas, or brown ales, then look at the recipes or grainbills, to see what is similar and what's different, then you can start to figure out for your own recipes what goes into them. Lets say the grain bills are identical in an ipa, but the hops are totally different, or simply different quantities.

Or 2 brown ales might have the same exact grain bill in the same amount but two different yeasts, and have completely different flavors. Or everything is identical but one of them use a percentage more crystal malt to it, and it is sweeter.

Stuff like that to me is how you learn more to help you with recipe creation.

 

[unionrdr]

I did a lot of reading & research as well. Hundreds of hours at this point. I also have a knack from cooking,baking,bbqing,etc for some 48 years. They started teaching me young. All that,& hunting,fishing,& model cars too. My point being,learning that there's a method to anything,particularly cooking. Since brewing wort is,essentially,cooking a sort of barley soup. Hops are your herbs. Different malt extracts are your "soup base". And bottling is a lot like canning.
So you learn what malts give what kind of flavor,& what hops accent that to the style desired. How much priming sugar effects the final flavors of the brew. More carbonation makes it crisper,leaning toward hop flavors. Less carbonation leans toward the malty side.
I learned through study,research,& experience. Some learn faster than others. But,as was said in the I Ching,it isn't the speed with which something is learned,but that it is learned at all that matters.

 

[jonmohno]

I pretty much followed what Revvy said,on my own. I also researched and found this website and followed it for months before i even deciding what i intended to purchase and go about it, im glad i did because it would have been a mess trying to build a boat with just some boards and nails.
Hops are still the hardest part to figure out for me, i recommend sticking to the style guidelines, my mistakes are subbing hops like american for german or american for english.It seems my biggest fault.But still good beer,just making better beer is the challenge. Sometimes you get lucky and find a good combo by accident but its mostly understanding the fundamentals as Revvy has said.
If you want to make recipes, follow recipes as guidelines-looking at more than a few to see how much of what is a good amount for its style.Once you start learning what it is you like about your beer- you go from there.

 

[beergolf]

Thanks for the advice.
I have been looking ant the recipes on here. So many I want to try. Saw one that someone made and called it FatSam. Sounds interesting. Just scared I'll screw it up. my first batch is still in the carboy so I haven't had the satisfaction of trying my own beer yet. Getting impatienent and want took brew again. Might have to go to the LHBS this week and by some ingredients and another carboy.

Relax, don't worry.....

I did four brews before I tasted my first. Operated on trust...

Now 30 something brews later ... I figured out it is hard to screw up a beer,

Brew on...

 

[nilo]

Record as much data as possible for a given recipe, so you can build a baseline from where to compare any further changes to. Change one variable at a time, perhaps repeat that same change more than once, so you nail how that affects the final beer. That is why learning these things takes a long time, so many variables. Get a brewing software to play with. The only think that will make you successful is perseverance.

 

[iskuse]

I started in July, I didn't really know much about beer except for the common names. I do a lot of cooking and baking so I wanted to try beer. I had no idea how involved it was. I started with kits and did three of those first. it was fun, but I am more about expirementing so I wanted to make my own recipe. My first question was where to I start? all these acronyms and such, it was very confusing, so I bought a bunch of books, can't remember the names off hand, and some seemed very informative and others were way above my level. with a little time and understanding, those books now make more sense to me.

The first step in one of the books was calculating the grain bill.
1. Starting gravity. now I've seen this before but had no idea how to determine where I get that number from. Come to realize I need to study beer styles, That is where most of your "Starting Numbers" come from. Understanding what beer style you want to create and having those numbers help A LOT. It also helps determine what types of grains to use.

I also have a recipe book that is broken down by styles. it's the 200 clone beers recipe book. It is a good reference to see starting gravitys and grain bills and IBU and so forth and compare them.

I am new to this, but getting some basic how to books and a recipe book helped a lot, also studying the different types of beer styles and drinking them helped a ton in understanding the different flavors and how they work well together. Also try the ingredients so you can get their flavors by themselves. chewing on Hops is probably the worst for me because I don't like bitter stuff. but it is interesting.

 

[gr8shandini]

. . . Also try the ingredients so you can get their flavors by themselves. chewing on Hops is probably the worst for me because I don't like bitter stuff. but it is interesting.

Chew grains, but make tea out of the hops. You'll get a much better idea of what it'll taste like in the finished product and won't make yourself sick.

Also, the "starting numbers" you mentioned are readily available from the BJCP:

http://www.bjcp.org/stylecenter.php

Once you have some experience, you can make a pretty decent beer just by reading a style description and using some brewing software (you don't have to use the software, but I'm an engineer and still don't want to do all the math by hand).

 

[huge1s]

In regards to wanting to make a NB Ranger clone.... email them from their website. I did this just a few days ago about their trippel

Me:

I am not sure if you share recipes with homebrewers.... but if you do, I would LOVE to try and get close on your Trippel. What I would like to know is the ratio of grains (pale, munich, victory) that you have listed on your website if that is possible. I can experiment with the hop schedule and corriander and yeast. Of course, I will take any advice you are willing to offer about the other ingredients, yeast and process.

Them:

We normally don’t give out specific recipe information, but I can narrow down some of the guesswork.

We use pale, munich, and victory in that order. Pale is over 90% of the malt bill. During wort boil, we also augment the gravity with common white sugar – this is an important consideration since the key to a great Trippel is a very dry finish. 19.1˚P Original density.

Good luck and happy homebrewing!

Cheers,

I am still pretty new to brewing and have decided that I would like to try and clone (or get close) on beers that I already know that I like. I downloaded brewtarget and just started messing around with the recipe until it "looks right". I still need to figure out a couple things like how much gravity plain sugar adds, so that I can get my original gravity right. I also need to figure out if "original density" is the same as "original gravity" and why the website for the trippel says 17.6 for OG and they said 19.1 (if in fact... OG is the same as OD).

 

[iskuse]

Chew grains, but make tea out of the hops. You'll get a much better idea of what it'll taste like in the finished product and won't make yourself sick.

Thanks, I never thought of that, I have thought of making ice cream using hops!