Creating recipe's...Where to start

[jimw86]

I'm really keen to start coming up with my own recipe's but im no where near experienced enough to know what proportions to put in, especially when it comes to hops and what varieties go together. Can anyone give me an idea of what to look for. Im forever wasting away the hours on Beer Engine.

One I came up with is....

23ltrs
Mash temp 66'c
Mash liquor 12ltrs

Grain; 4440g MO
150g Torrified Wheat
200g Caramalt

Hops; 20g Chinook 90min
10g Boadecia 20min
11g Chinook 10min

EBC 9
EBU 35
Style is a Bitter

Cheers for any input

Jim

[colonial]

For what it's worth, I have been doing the same thing. IMO, it depends on how well you know your ingredients and what they do for your beer.

I started off with a base malt only, used a single hop (EKG) and a very basic yeast (Wyeast 1098). It was a very boring ale, but now I know what the malt, the hop and the yeast do for the beer. Went on to add some medium crystal and used a more estery yeast in the next batch. Better, but still a bit blah. Have version 3.0 in secondary right now: MO, medium crystal, plus 1/2 lb of biscuit malt. Same yeast and hop schedule

That's what I've been doing. Time consuming, but I'm learning a lot.

Good Luck.

[trucker5774]

Colonial has it spot on. It is very time consuming though. You could start with a basic but trusted regular recipe so you know you will get a decent beer, then do as Colonial and change one ingredient or quantity each brew.Read up on what each malt will give you and what flavour the hops provide. Once you have a target adjust things to reach it. Some of my best beers have been accidents. Record everything and when you have an "accident" you can repeat it (or not)

[dave-o]

Looks fine, but i might consider moving those late hops to 15 and 5 minutes. You may find you get more of a distinction between flavour and aroma.

[jimw86]

Cheers all. I think I will have a bash at this brew and see what it come's out like.

I need to seriously step my brewing up.....theres just not enough day's in the year.

[lancsSteve]

I got stuck straight into brew recipe forumlations as I didn't have the specified ingredients - first AG brew was not so hot and best ones have been brews to Graham Wheeler recipes exactly.

If you (or a friend) have an iPod or iPhone the best 59p you can spend is on 'BrewPal' which is a brilliant recipe formulation app - like the beer engine but with a lovely interface and a great feature of matching your recipe with a BJCP style guide to see what is close/out in terms of colour/bitterness/gravity etc and instant easy alterations to all settings.

(The BJCP style guides are useful for recipe formulation too: http://www.bjcp.org/styles04/ to see what's expected for a style.)

I just had a shot at recipe formulation from the off - accept the misses with the hits, if you're trying to save money and picking up substitute ingredients e.g. cheap hops on eBay etc. then you're already into recipe formulation as soon as you start substituting...

Probably the most important figure I've found is the 'balance' one for bitterness : gravity and getting that in style - a wheat beer that's too bitter tastes weird, a bitter that isn't is weirder!

'Designing great beers' is well worth a read as well IMHO - not flawless but gives you lots of useful styles info.

And from beginner's experience (luck?) it's not as hard as it seems from some threads here - depends what your aim is: copying a pub favourite / well known brand / making your classic style (hard) or trying out something new and having a variety on hand (mush easier)...

Good luck!

[TheMumbler]

I've been starting to play around with recipe formulation, so I probably don't know anymore than you. That said

qbrew is free and has style guides incorporated if you don't have an iphone. I tend to use it to cross reference with Beer Engine. It lists 35 as the high end of bitterness for ordinary bitters

Am I right in thinking that balance is the ration of EBU to gravity where 0.5 is considered balanced? So in your recipe 35/46 = 0.76 which is toward the bitter end of things as it should be for a bitter . I'm not sure what the suggested range is in figures but I found this chart the other day which might be of help

What is the assumed hop utilisation in BrewPal Steve?

Graham Wheeler's Beer Engine assumes 39.75% utilisation, while in Home Brewing he suggests assuming a 20% utilisation for home brewers...This is causing me some consternation at the moment as I'm brewing tomorrow and I'm not sure whether my bitter is going to end up around 29 or 15 EBU...

Of course if your hop rate was half what it should have been the overly bitter dunkel is even more mystifying...

[escapizm]

[quote="lancsSteve"]

If you (or a friend) have an iPod or iPhone the best 59p you can spend is on 'BrewPal' which is a brilliant recipe formulation app [quote]

Oooh just downloaded, looks great. i was using brewmath wich was "OK!" but this looks great.

[lancsSteve]

Oooh just downloaded, looks great. i was using brewmath wich was "OK!" but this looks great.

It's BRILLAINT! BrewMath is also useful to convert your EBC colours to SRM/Lovibond as used in BrewPal and is faster to get at things like gravity corrections etc. - the supporrt for BrewPal is amazing as well, he replies to emails super fast. I totally rely on it for my brewday now - and for saving/exporting recipes etc.

Steve

[haz66]

I started with the recipe on here for Fiddlers Elbow, but found it nothing like the original so over
the course of 5 brews i tweeked it until it was just how i liked it.

I`m still experimenting 59 brews in,but for my base i use MO Pale, Crystal and Wheat
then just keep experimenting with differant hop varieties, always keeping the BU:GU Ratio below 1
(Thats the bittering units to Grain Ratio), as it will get bitter if you go above 1

But some hops dont go well with Crystal like Cascade, Centennial Etc, they are too citrusy for the
caramel flavour that Crystal gives the beer.

But a good way is to look at tried and tested recipes and then look at the ratio`s of the different malts
to give you an idea of how much of different types of malt to add to your own recipe.

But no matter how you go about it,it is actually quite hard to brew an undrinkable beer ,
some you may not like as much as others but they are still better than most commercialy served
mass produced pap.

[jimw86]

Oh im not sure its that hard. I made a mild up and brewed it at the weekend, used Nottingham and it never started. So I added US-05. Now it smells like TCP and tastes the same as my first AG beer did before it was deposited in Thames waters finest sewer. Im sure its infected. It just smells so rancid even only after 4 days.

[Dr. Dextrin]

My tips:

Start with a recipe from someone else you know will be OK. Then if it's rubbish you know your brewing is at fault, not the recipe.

Get your brewing technique sorted out, if necessary. Only then think about making your own recipes.

To start with, only change one thing at a time.

Record everything you do.

Buy a bottled commercial ale that's as close as possible to your brew and taste the two together. Make detailed notes on how yours differs. The commercial ale is a reference benchmark. Its taste will remain pretty constant and it makes it far easier to spot small flavour changes when you come back with another brew in a few weeks time. It will also help you spot flaws in your own brew.

After a bit you'll learn exactly what effect each recipe change has. Then you're ready to start changing a few things at once. From there, it's a short hop to making up recipes by modifying existing ones. I think that's what most people actually do.

[haz66]

Oh im not sure its that hard. I made a mild up and brewed it at the weekend, used Nottingham and it never started. So I added US-05. Now it smells like TCP and tastes the same as my first AG beer did before it was deposited in Thames waters finest sewer. Im sure its infected. It just smells so rancid even only after 4 days.

Are you adding Campden tablets to your water, as this will remove any chlorine in your water, which produces TCP flavour in beer,
just use half a tab in your mash and half a tab in your sparge water, this will help your beer no end, as long as you steralise properly
it will not be infection it will be the chlorine in your water at a guess, this happened to me on two brews i did before i started adding
the Campden, never had a TCP beer since.

[OldSpeckledBadger]

For a mild I'd use either S-04 or Windsor. I agree with Haz that there was probably something wrong with your water treatment or possibly you're not rinsing properly after sanitisation.

[jimw86]

Thats the annoying thing, I do treat with campden. After the first experience I started doing it. Just seems a coinsidence that I have only ever used Nottingham twice and its only ever happened when I have.

See how it goes I suppose.