Making the leap! But not sure where to start.

[masterjw]

OK, so I've done about 2-3 dozen brews now. All pre-packaged extract kits, but a few hiccups aside, everything has gone very well and I'm comfortable with the brewing process. So it's time to make the leap. I want to start putting together some of my own creations.

Problem is, I really don't know where to start. I've got a few ideas on style. Maybe a simple pale ale or an Irish red to start with. Nothing too fancy or complicated. But beyond that I'm a little lost. Or perhaps just a little unsure of myself is the more correct way to put it.

Anyhow, I though it might be a good idea to get some insight from the masses. So what was your first original brew? How did you go about coming up with your recipe? What pitfalls did you encounter along the way? All insight is welcome, successes and horror stories alike. I'm just fishing for ideas before I make the committment and start brewing.

 

[JR_Brewer]

If you want to go with the training wheels version of recipe creation, start with a recipe you've brewed before and start to change 1 or 2 factors. This could be switching out one grain/extract for another, changing your hopping schedule, or changing the hop varieties.

However, if you're looking to jump in with both feet, you can truly create your own original recipe. Start by figuring out a style. Then check out other proven recipes in that same style (magazines, here on HBT, other brewing sites, or you can check out the kits on NorthernBrewer (they post their ingredient/instruction sheet online)). Check out as many as possible. You'll start to notice common ingredients, amounts of grain, common hops and hopping schedules, etc. You'll also find some recipes that have something unique that you may want to incorporate or avoid. Build a basic recipe that will be your starting point.

Enter that into one of the many recipe calculators (beersmith, tastybrew, etc), personally I use TastyBrew, but I don't think there's a big difference. When you enter your style and recipe, the recipe calculator will tell you how your gravities, ABV, color, bitterness, etc. stack up against your style. For you first recipe, I recommend staying within your style guidelines. Toy around with this, and you should start to see how changing your variables impact your numbers.

It sounds like you're doing extract brewing, so you won't worry about mash temperature, grain/water ratios, and a few other factors; but down the road you'll need to figure those out.

Finally, have someone check your recipe. Get a friend or someone in your homebrew club check it, or you can post it here to get some feedback.

Clear as mud? Hope this helps. Cheers!

 

[Ridire]

I've made a couple decent "original" recipes and I am still a novice brewer in my mind. I bought a book of recipes and looked at recipes on this site and did a little research about what the various ingredients do to the taste. I then made a hybrid of the recipes I found, trying to tweak the grain bill/hop schedule to suit my tastes. I'm sure I will get better at tweaking the process but I learned a lot by doing it that way.

 

[IvanTheTerribrew]

Congrats on wanting to advance! I would recommend getting a brew book such as Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers. Or Stephen Snyders' Brewmasters Bible. They both helped me because they will give you history and details about the styles and also give you ideas as to what ingredients you can pick from. Instead of just giving you a recipe and no alterations you can read up about the style of beer and see what ingredients you can pick from.

My first put together recipe was a pumpkin beer which honestly I kinda just but whatever together and just put some low alpha hops so that it wouldn't affect the pumpkin flavor. I made it an extract kit and just used amber LME and Light DME.

 

[LovesIPA]

All-grain brewing (either BIAB with your existing equipment or with a traditional mash tun) gives you far greater flexibility when it comes to brewing your own creations.

I would first look into what you would have to do to move to all-grain.

Then buy Ray Daniels' book "Designing Great Beer". There is a ton of useful information in that book not only on designing beers but also brewing in general. If you miss your OG, there is a section that explains how to figure out the correct amount of DME to correct it.

It's really just about learning what ingredients contribute what characteristics to a beer. For example, you don't want to use too much roasted barley in a stout recipe. You don't want to use a floral, low-AA hop like Fuggles for bittering. You don't want to use a high-AA hop like Warrior for aroma or flavor.

There are some tried and true techniques that work great for any recipe and there are some areas where you have a lot more room for expression.

 

[LandoLincoln]

Short version: get the book Designing Great Beers, read up on what other people do for a given style and how that works out for them, experiment, keep tweaking a recipe until you get it right. Keep good notes so you know what you might want to change.

Longer version: I wanted a brown ale with honey flavoring, so I consulted the book Designing Great Beers and read the section on brown ales to give me an idea of what generally goes into a brown ale (2-row as the base, some chocolate malt, some amber malt, some special B malt.) So I went on here to the recipe section and read up on other people's brown ale recipes and what they liked about it and what they didn't. So I took all of that info and created a recipe, brewed it up and found that it was really roasty tasting with no honey taste at all. So I reduced the chocolate and amber malt a bit and upped the honey malt. Better, but still a bit too roasty flavor with no honey flavor. Third time around, kept the chocolate malt the same, reduced the amber malt a bit more and upped the honey malt again. Third time was the charm. Good balance of roasty and sweet. I might want to keep upping the honey until it gets too prevalent and then might back down, but I'm pretty happy with the way it is now.

 

[masterjw]

Thanks for the input! Sounds like I definitely need to get a copy of 'Designing Great Beers' to add to my collection. I have tinkered with a couple of the kits that I've done so far (added extra spices to pumpkin ales, added honey to boost ABV in an Irish red, etc.), but I have yet to tinker with different varieties of grains, hops, or yeast strains than what was called for. I'd like to stick to extract for now, but going all grain will probably be the next jump. I just need to find the extra time. How long does a typical all grain brew take, start to finish, on brew day?

 

[LovesIPA]

From weighing out the grains to putting the last piece of equipment away, usually about 5 hours. If I start heating the wort up while the tun is still draining I can cut about 30 minutes off that.

 

[stpug]

Thanks for the input! Sounds like I definitely need to get a copy of 'Designing Great Beers' to add to my collection. I have tinkered with a couple of the kits that I've done so far (added extra spices to pumpkin ales, added honey to boost ABV in an Irish red, etc.), but I have yet to tinker with different varieties of grains, hops, or yeast strains than what was called for. I'd like to stick to extract for now, but going all grain will probably be the next jump. I just need to find the extra time. How long does a typical all grain brew take, start to finish, on brew day?

Designing Great Beers is a good read, particularly Part 2 (the section on styles). It gives some good insight on the history of the beer; what commercial brewers are doing; and what some homebrewers were doing back in ca. 2003-2004. Good book and worth having.

If I were you and I was looking for my next progression in the hobby, I would recommend getting your feet wet with a partial mash beer. Pick your favorite kit you've brewed; buy the partial mash version; and perform the small mash on your stovetop using your oven as an insulated/heated environment. I think the first time I did a partial mash where I was actually mashing some base malt with my specialty grains was the last time I did one. I "saw the light" and immediately went into all grain brewing because the process of mashing/lautering was no longer a mystery (PLUS it was super simple). Once I was into all grain brewing, the natural progression was developing my own recipes from grain - I no longer was forced to work with what came in my extract. With the desire to create from scratch came the desire to know more and more and more about the hobby I was fascinated with, so plenty of reading ensued (and continues..... ). You can do a partial mash on your stove with a regular-sized stock pot and a 5 gallon paint strainer. This is just my opinion of course.