Maybe a beginner

[Rkuhns]

So I posted in this thread because I'm unsure as what's considered a beginner lol. I have 7 or 8 homebrews under my belt it's alittle fuzzy from drinking homebrew as I brew lol. My question is how do I go about making my own recipes instead of brewing kits? I mean do I just make ****ty beer until I get one I like? Just wondering what everyone else's opinion might be.

 

[beernutz]

There are plenty of tried and true recipes posted on HBT or you could try to brew recipes from a well-respected book like Brewing Classic Styles.

Labels are irrelevant imo. I have brewed for 26 years and in comparison to some brewers who have brewed a lot less than me I am still a beginner. I still sleep at night.

 

[mizer67]

I'm kind of in the same spot. I've been looking at the recipes posted here to start and copying them straight off. There's a listing of the top-100 recipes from Homebrewtalk I found in a search to try to narrow down the most popular examples, but sorting based on posts or views would work well too. I picked three so far of the top 25 I liked that met the style I wanted to try where I know I like some commercial examples. I've just recently started substituting grains and hops or adding something like Carapils or aciduated malt now that I know what it does to the beer, but I'm not sure it's necessary.

 

[seatazzz]

After I did a few kits, I started researching clone recipes. Most of the more popular beers available commercially will have at least 2 clone recipes posted somewhere on the internet. Google is your friend here.

 

[catdaddy66]

Read! Read all about ingredients that make beer in the styles you like. Read recipes to learn how to use base malts and adjuncts and hop schedules. Not just what, but why, how and when as well. Took me a couple of years actually to put the knowledge to good use. A lot of rough drafts and mistakes lead to me having 8-10 personally crafted recipes that I and others like.

Then you have to brew your buns off! Every chance you get make a batch as much for the knowledge and experience as for the final product.

It is a very fun process though!

 

[mongoose33]

You can start by taking a kit recipe and tweaking it in a direction that makes sense to you. As you brew more, you'll be able to determine what you want to brew.

I might be unusual in that I'm not big on trying to brew clones. I'd rather brew something I want to drink than simply trying to copy a commercial beer. Oh, there are some which are excellent, but it struck me that if I'm trying to brew clones, why don't I just buy 'em in the store?

Oh, I know--they're not available everywhere. But there's something inside me that says if I simply copy what others have already done, am I really craft or home brewing? Or simply home copying?

This is not a slam on those who want to do that. It's just not for me. And having said that, I got into homebrewing because a local craft brewer changed the recipe on my favorite beer of all time, and I decided I was going to clone it.

I've been close, very close, but as I've brewed more and more, and had different types/styles of beer turn out, I am not so concerned about cloning it any more.

*****************

What you might try is doing a few SMASHes. Smash means Single Malt and Single Hop, a style designed to feature just one malt and one hop. They're simple to brew, and it may give you an idea as to what you would like to try.

My favorite hop is Styrian Celeia. My favorite malt is Maris Otter. You can guess what I did with those preferences--brewed a SMASH with them. And guess what? I just brewed it again today for the...let me check....fourth time. People just really like it, it's crisp and refreshing and it's one of my house beers.

Now, suppose you find something like that. What might you do to improve it, to experiment a bit? Different hop? Dry hop with something different? Add something like Munich malt to add a bit of depth?

A lot of kits online have the recipes; so if you have a particular kit you like, you can see what's in it and what you might like to change.

 

[Lefou]

Thirty years from now I'm still gonna be a damned amateur at this. For me, it's a distracting hobby of an almost spiritual nature.
Lefou's First Commandment is "thou shalt not take brew or bacon."
I take that seriously. Trust me.


Learn about malts and how they're made. Read Chris White's book on yeast. Brew a few - or a lot - of simple beers with different hops just for schnitts and giggles. Play around with water, mineral salts, and simple recipe builders.
For me, the Internet is ONE.BIG.LIBRARY. I grew up before there was an Internet for normal people and gravitated to information and electronics early on. The online community has been the single biggest reference source around.

 

[Sammy86]

Read a lot! Then get yourself a book like Designing Great Beers by Daniels.

Once you're there get yourself some software like BeerSmith or Brewers friend and work the magic.

My first few all grain recipes I followed to the T...then after reading Daniels book I slowly started making adjustments to recipes I had copied to make them my own.

Making a beer recipe is very much like making a food recipe...a dash more of this here...a little less of this there...change the hops or addition times and bam you have your own recipe.

 

[CoreyD]

SmaSh is a great way to learn the different malts. I brewed 6 different ones with the same hops, just changed the base malt. It's a nice way to help you determine which ones give what flavors. When you find the taste your looking for, then you can start adding other malts to find the combination your looking for. The trick is to use the same yeast, hops, water, and time schedule.

 

[AZCoolerBrewer]

Homebrewing for me is like art. You take something you have seen from another artist and use it in a new way. Take the White House Honey Ale recipe that the white house published on the web. I took the recipe and tweaked it to be all grain and tried to stay true to the recipe and what I thought the original author was trying to do. My beer turned out a lot stronger than the original recipe because of the honey I used, but it was great trying out the Windsor yeast. That beer wasn't my favorite that I have made, but it was a cool adventure that I went on that was really fun. Most recipes that I make start with looking at the BJCP standard and then I try to create those standards based on what I want. The batch I made before last was a take on Kona Big Wave Golden Ale. I took everything I like about that beer and then tried to add my own ideas of what I was trying to bring to the party. Most Kona recipe clones have a lot of Citra in them. I love Citra, but that hop says southwest to me not tropical. So I looked for a hop that has a pineapple flavor/aroma and found Zythos. What a winner. The Zythos made a golden ale that made me think of my Hawaii honeymoon every sip.

 

[GPP33]

Clones are a great starting point. Find a beer you like and want to brew, search for a clone, brew it, get to know it, then start changing it based on what you like and don't like. Sometimes you go down the wrong road and need to back up, other times you'll find something that works, no matter what though you'll learn something.

Take good notes. I know exactly how many beers I've brewed, what was in em, what temps they saw etc. this really helps when you need to take a step back, it gives you a restore point if something isn't working out. I recently backed up about a year in my house IPA recipe and made a left instead of a right, glad I did.

 

[brick_haus]

IMHO, Process, yeast management/fermentation/pitching temperature/rate and water chemistry is most important. Once you get those down your recipes will tAste as designed.
I have found that the best recipes(clones) come from zymurgy magazine. That is except Yoopers oatmeal stout! Its here in the recipe database, check it out!
Some other decent recipes here in the database too.

 

[Davevjordon]

So I posted in this thread because I'm unsure as what's considered a beginner lol. I have 7 or 8 homebrews under my belt it's alittle fuzzy from drinking homebrew as I brew lol. My question is how do I go about making my own recipes instead of brewing kits? I mean do I just make ****ty beer until I get one I like? Just wondering what everyone else's opinion might be.

I'm right behind you. A little unsure, but I think I have batches 5&6, or 6&7 fermenting right now. I skipped extract and jumped straight into all-grain. My first batch was a kit from local HB store, he just converted the DME to a grain combo for me. My following 4? Batches: I winged it, and they turned out great. Just looked at a lot of recipes to get a general idea of grain bill and hop schedule. However, I really only plan to make IPA's, because I love them. And I guess you could say my "screw up" was a batch that I put some chocolate rye in... Ended up being more like a brown ale. But it was still good.
Give it a shot. I don't think you'll end up with a bucket of trash. I think your worse case is you'll end up with a beer that's just a little different, but still good. And since you've already been doing kits, you may already have a good idea of how much and what variety of grain, hops, etc you want to use. Read up on the descriptions of grains, and also hops so you know what ones you want to use for bittering vs. finishing. My last batch (#4 or 5) was AMAZING!
Give it a shot. Even if your next one isn't exactly what you're shooting for, I highly doubt it'll be trash, and you'll get the satisfaction of knowing that it was your own recipe. And when you "nail it", you may only look to other recipes just for an idea. Good luck!

 

[Davevjordon]

I'm right behind you. A little unsure, but I think I have batches 5&6, or 6&7 fermenting right now. I skipped extract and jumped straight into all-grain. My first batch was a kit from local HB store, he just converted the DME to a grain combo for me. My following 4? Batches: I winged it, and they turned out great. Just looked at a lot of recipes to get a general idea of grain bill and hop schedule. However, I really only plan to make IPA's, because I love them. And I guess you could say my "screw up" was a batch that I put some chocolate rye in... Ended up being more like a brown ale. But it was still good.
Give it a shot. I don't think you'll end up with a bucket of trash. I think your worse case is you'll end up with a beer that's just a little different, but still good. And since you've already been doing kits, you may already have a good idea of how much and what variety of grain, hops, etc you want to use. Read up on the descriptions of grains, and also hops so you know what ones you want to use for bittering vs. finishing. My last batch (#4 or 5) was AMAZING!
Give it a shot. Even if your next one isn't exactly what you're shooting for, I highly doubt it'll be trash, and you'll get the satisfaction of knowing that it was your own recipe. And when you "nail it", you may only look to other recipes just for an idea. Good luck!

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

The first step is trying to understand what specific ingredients taste like...

The best way to understand this quickly is by comparing commercial beers that you like with homebrew clone recipes for those beers. You can pretty easily pick out certain ingredients (like biscuit malt in Fat Tire), specific very unique hops, etc. Other malts are often more difficult to nail down, but looking at styles that really feature specific specialty malts (scotch ales, red ales, amber ales, porters, stouts, etc) and comparing them to clone recipes can help. And of course learning the differences between different yeasts is important, but if you're sticking with basic American/English recipes, starting with a good dry yeast like US-05 or S-04 is a good way to focus on the malts and hops.

From that, you start to get a sense of what ingredients actually do in a recipe. So you imagine "what do I want this beer to taste like", and work backward from that to "what ingredients in what proportions will give me that?"

At this point it's best to start looking at as many homebrew recipes as you can. Let's say you want to make an amber ale. Look at a bunch of amber ale recipes. Get a sense of what the *general* proportions are. Create a general recipe that's an amalgam of those that you spot, and only then do you start looking at what you might want to change about that amalgam recipe.

The truth is that it's not rocket science. Unless you start deciding you want to be Mr. Experimental and go way off the reservation with wild ingredients and don't pay attention to basic brewing tenets, you'll end up with decent enough beer. And as you refine your palate and your knowledge of ingredients, you have the capability of getting really good.

That said... I honestly believe that some people have more natural aptitude for this. I liken it to the "cook vs chef" mentality. There are some people who are amazing cooks. They see a recipe, they can nail that recipe through process and technique, but if the recipe isn't good, they can't always figure out how to change it to make it good. That's the chef skill--the ability to break down the recipe, understand *why* everything works the way it does, and know how to adjust it to get the right result. If you at some point decide that your own recipes aren't for you, and just stick with tried-and-true recipes found in books or online, it doesn't make you less of a brewer. If your beer tastes good, no matter where you got the recipe, that's the mark of a good brewer.

One more thing -- if you're going down this path, you should ABSOLUTELY stop buying kits that don't tell you what's in them. Personally when I jumped to entirely making my own recipes (about the same number of batches you've done), I just stopped buying kits and starting buying the individual ingredients. But as you develop your palate, you can still use kits, as long as you know the recipe of the kit so you can understand WHY the recipe makes the end product.

 

[bleme]

I started with kits but always tweaked them in some way. Several times, I would split the batch and brew half to recipe and tweak the other half so I could taste the difference.

I read a LOT. I bet that for the first 6 months, I was spending 20-40 hours a week devouring everything I could find here on HBT.

In all that reading, I found a thread about a guy who made an IPA with 100% of the hops added after flameout. I loved the way he described it's bitterness so I used the grain-bill of a kit and then used BeerSmith to create a hop schedule for flameout/whirlpool/dry hop for a Black IPA.

My wife really likes fruity wheat beers and I found a thread about slowing fermentation with a cold crash and adding fresh strawberries to get a fresher fruit flavor (instead of strawberry wine flavor). I found about 4 other strawberry ale recipes here and combined what I liked in each to create the grain bill. Then I used 2oz of Belma at flameout (like I learned with the Black IPA) so the hops would compliment the fruit.

Every brew I learn something new (even if I learn to never do that again!) and build on that for the future.