Recipe Formulation - How Do You Do It?

[themonkeysback]

Hi guys,

As one of the truly great lurkers on this forum - I have been member for over a year with minimal posts but tend to read shit on this forum for an hour a day, I thought perhaps I should get a bit more involved!

I am an all grain brewer but am currently on holidays in Europe for 6 months - no beer brewing but plenty of beer drinking! Given this situation I have had a lot of time to sit around thinking (read dreaming) about beer and brewing.

There are frequent discussions on AHB regarding AG brewing techniques and the odd post of "what do you think of this recipe", but what I am really interested to know is how different people go about coming up with the recipes they brew.

In particular I would be very interested to hear from those people that either brew beers that are very popular on AHB or have had success in competitions - Dr Smurto, Tony etc, but I am also interested to know abour how the average punter on AHB goes about designing his beers.

Personally I am not really someone that likes to follow recipes designed by others. I have spent a lot of time in Marks Home Brew in Newcastle pestering Mark regarding all things brewing and one thing he seems very keen on is starting basic (SMASH beers essentially) and gradually building up once you have a particular beer down pat and understand what difference adding different ingredients will make. Personally I like this approach, but I also have a bit of beer brewing ADHD, so up to this point have generally worked on creating some very simple recipes as well as the odd complicated cloneish recipe or butchering of someone elses recipe - with variable results, some really good, some really shit and a lot in between. If I had a lot more patience I would probably start with a base APA, IPA and pilsener (as these are what I drink most) and would gradually tweak them to make the best possible beer - hopefully I will work on doing this when I return home and get back to brewing. I have a house full of different brewing books, and I think in particular Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels offers some good insight into recipe formulation but I definitely think there is a bit of an art to it as well.

So how do you create your beers:

Do you use other peoples recipes?

Do you start simple and gradually build up with trial and error?

Do you just throw any shit in your beers and hope it works out?

Are you some sort of freak with an awesome sense of smell, taste and foresight and every beer you create turns to gold?

Do you do something else?

Cheers.

Adam.

 

[newguy]

Do you use other peoples recipes?

Almost never anymore but I heavily relied on recipes when I first started brewing.

Do you start simple and gradually build up with trial and error?

With beers that I brew over & over, yes. Other than that, it's usually a one time thing.

Do you just throw any shit in your beers and hope it works out?

Rarely, but the few times that I have have been good. A few years ago, on a whim, I made a coconut curry brown ale, mainly to suit the name, HeatSikher, that popped into my head. That year I ended up winning the brewer of the year honours in my club and my prize was that one of my beers would be made commercially for a local liquor store. Heatseeker (I hate the name change but understand why it was necessary) was thus born. The first brewing sold out quickly and it is actually being rebrewed commercially right now. It was a lucky combination/recipe but its success hasn't lured me into "shooting from the hip" more often.

Are you some sort of freak with an awesome sense of smell,

Yes.

taste

Yes.

and foresight

No.

and every beer you create turns to gold?

No.

I brew some gems, but I also brew some dogs. However, the older I get, the more gems I produce and the fewer dogs. It all boils down to experience. The more brews under your belt, the more ingredients you try, the more unique beers/styles you attempt, the better your overall brewing/approach.

My technique is based on the recipe formulation method put forth in Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers. Basically, it starts off with choosing x% of this malt, y% of that, choosing a target OG, target IBU level, etc and going from there. I like the numbers/% approach, probably because I'm an engineer and I like to quantise things.

 

[blackbock]

Hi

I will share what has worked for me as an average punter

Firstly, if I have never brewed a beer of a particular style that I want, I will have a look at some of the "famous" recipes, whether that be particular brews by a well known AGer or just clone-style recipes from the net. Sometimes the ingredients are unavailable, but you can make small substitutions which shouldn't change the overall effect. You have to be careful here though, as sometimes there is just no substitute!

I can usually weed out recipes which seem a bit unbalanced, eg Do you really want to make that Oktoberfest recipe which calls for a 20% use of caramalt?? This approach will get you within the paramaters of a given style, but can also lead to spectacularly bland beers.


The other approach I have sometimes tried is the : I only have X amount of this ingredient, lets use Beersmith etc to create a beer of some sort, possibly based around an unusual ingredient. This is what I have done if I got bored with normal beers, and it probably works about half of the time.
At least I know what that led to!

 

[Lord Raja Goomba I]

Yeah, experience.

With my APA/AAA beers (which are a fair lot of what I brew), I'm down to a pretty decent formulation:

5kg Base Malt
.2-.3kg Spec Malt

30m and 10m to 30IBU.

With a lager, most IBU at 60m and a tad at 20m to bring it up.

With other (esp darker) beers, I start with my base malt, and then spec up in brew mate until I'm satisfied with the result. Having said that, I know the difference between, say pale choc and choc chit - so I know the end result.

SMaSH brews got me there - got a good feel for base malts, good feel for each hop, and what 60,30,20,10, dry hop does.

Goomba

 

[MHB]

My process is the reverse, in fact is to reverse-engineer a beer, start by defining what you want in the glass. By define I mean write down exactly what you want, the FG, Alcohol content, Colour, Aromas, Flavours, Hop notes......

If you know your system from there the amount of malt you need is a given, the makeup of the malt determines the colour and some of the flavour, the mash regime and the type of yeast really fill in the blanks.
With more experience with both your system and knowledge of what the various malts bring to the table it gets easier and easier to hit your target first time, or at least be dam close.
Recipe design is nowadays my favourite part of brewing.
MHB

 

[manticle]

Research, experience and guesswork/experimentation (which leads to experience). Like cooking, you get an understanding of the kinds of ingredients and amounts used in various recipes by reading about them and their history and by tasting commercial examples if available. Brew with some malt and hops and get an idea of what they do and what qualities you want in your beer.

The fact that some of my recipes turn out shit is testament to the fact that not every beer turns to gold - figuring out the mistakes and not repeating them makes this part of the process worthwhile.

 

[Bribie G]

Style-Nazi Mode for competitions etc

I decide which style I want to brew. Then I go to the BJCP guidelines for that style and look up the characteristics, colour, bitterness etc etc - maybe look up a couple of recipes for that style (Irish Red, German Pils etc).

From this I work out what base malt, spec malts, adjuncts, hops and yeast are required and feed them into BrewMate which is a highly recommended free program. I play around with the quantities till I'm in the ballpark for that style.

Also I'll have a "read around" the style on the web to see if I can get further information about water treatment, fermentation temperatures etc etc.

Then I brew it.

Free Spirit Mode

When I've been making a style for a while sometimes I'll deliberately tweak it and tweak it and end up with a somewhat different beer. Example like many others I was on a Timothy Taylor homage for ages, cranked out a few Landlords, then changed the hops to basically Challenger plus Aurora, left out the colouring malts, added maize to the mash ........ and my "Yorkshire Gold" was born :icon_cheers: and it's my most common house beer nowadays.

However like any other skill such as carpentry you have to learn how to do the dovetail joints and use the router and build a couple of wardrobes first before you can tackle the 4-door Colonial Armoire with the sliding drawers.

Edit: the OP is approaching this in a sensible way - as I've posted in the past you often get a new poster, full of enthusiasm and bursting with brewing testosterone who is going to do their first AG and have decided on a quadruple decocted Hefepoodle Imperial Porterwaffle with 17 hops and wild yeast, to be matured in a butter churn and bottle krausened - and it's often the last you hear of them on the forum, maybe died of botulism :wacko:

 

[argon]

I'll give a big plus 1 to whats Bribie has said... that's almost identical to how i come up with my recipes... but i am partial to a good Hefepoodle Imperial Porterwaffle :icon_drool2:

Edit: I know it's not cool to say you brew to style or to enter comps. But i reckon you get the best progression in understanding your recipe design and technique by presenting the finished product to other experienced brewers and judges and get their honest feedback. From there go and tweak anything you want, but with the a keen grasp of consequence of what you're doing.

 

[ashley_leask]

I'm still very much in the learning stage on this, been brewing since last Christmas. I've picked 4 styles I like (APA, American Amber, Hefeweizen, Oktoberfest) and I'm brewing those exclusively right now until I feel like I understand the ingredients and what each contributes to the beer and can brew a good version of each every time.

How I've come up with, and am refining these recipes is based on:

1. Research - net examples and books such as Brewing Classic Styles. Clone recipes of commercial beers I've tasted have helped me as well, if they come from a source you know is reliable.
2. What am I targeting? Like someone said earlier, what do you want in the glass? Malt profile, hop character etc. I have an expectation of what each ingredient will contribute (often wrong, but that's what I'm trying to develop), and when I'm tasting I'm also trying to understand if I need to increase/decrease or substitute anything in the recipe.
3. Refining - Not expecting I'll walk into the right recipe first time, so brewing again with changes based on tasting the last batch is helping me learn much more than if I brewed something different every time.

Cheers,

Ash

 

[themonkeysback]

I know it's not cool to say you brew to style or to enter comps. But i reckon you get the best progression in understanding your recipe design and technique by presenting the finished product to other experienced brewers and judges and get their honest feedback. From there go and tweak anything you want, but with the a keen grasp of consequence of what you're doing.

I have never entered a comp with my beers, and possibly never will, but I definitely agree that having your beer assessed by experienced brewers and judges would be a good way to improve your brewing.

 

[sim]

You could have a look at "designing great beers" by Ray Daniels. it has a good approach.


sim

 

[chalky]

I use the same technique as MHB. Decide what you want in your glass at the end then work backwards. To work out what I want at the end, I typically choose a style then read the BJCP guidelines and what is in beersmith.

Experience with ingredients over time will tell you how a particular malt will taste or how a yeast will perform. I also find that tasting the dry malt also helps me figure out the taste contribution of that malt.

Oh, and I have spent more than I care to mention at bookdepository.co.uk purchasing almost every book on brewing I can get my hands on.

Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels was a good push in the right direction when I started looking at recipe formulation.

 

[jasonharley]

I have basically relied on some of the recipes in the recipe database on this website. I then have tried each recipe and then tweaked one of two ingredients of the recipe from there. At the same time, I have starting reading books, product specs, biochem textbooks and websites on brewing and "calibrated" some of my brewing processes as well as the main elements of my recipes.

One things is for certain.... there is no way I will be turning my back on AG brewing ever! .... it is a pastime that is intellectually consuming while fun ...... hard to find that combo .... and i just keep learning new stuff all the time ..... i wouldn't call myself a master brew by any stretch of the imagination but I just hope like hell I can avoid the temptation of turning this into a career !!!!!

5 eyes

 

[bowie in space]

.... it is a pastime that is intellectually consuming while fun ......5 eyes

...and the end result is.......BEER :beerbang:

 

[Hawko777]

Well I'm like a couple of the others in that I tend to reverse engineer a beer.

I like to start with the hop characteristics I want (using a hop wheel helps)so I assemble hops first to get my flavours, smells etc
Then depending if I want the hop notes more prominent or the bitterness, I will adjust the PH levels.
Next I decide on the malt to use to enhance my flavours and this determines the style I brew.
I like to use Promash to get everything right.

Some may turn their nose up at this method, but determining your flavours and characteristics first makes me happy with my outcome.
I learnt this from a pro brewer and it makes sense.

I just brewed my version of an American Pale Ale and I started with my hops, Simcoe, Cascade and Amarillo. These hops together give a really nice fruity hop character with the Simcoe used for bittering.(37 IBU)
Pilsener malt and Crystal malt 55L and a tiny bit of Acidulated malt to lower ph to 5.2
Brewed at 67 Deg C to round off the bitterness with a bit of maltiness.
I couldn't get a APA Wyeast so I settled for Safale US 05 which has a good attenuation and adds a nice flavour.

Good luck with your brewing whatever method you use.

John Palmer has a few good Vids on you tube that explain water, malts, yeasts etc.

So all in all I start with Hops then Malt then Yeast