Designing Your First Homebrew Recipe
Once you feel comfortable homebrewing with pre-written recipes, it’s only natural to wonder how to formulate an original recipe of your own. With a little up-front planning and research, you can successfully start coming up with your own original beer.
Decide your objective
The first step toward putting together a recipe idea is to decide exactly what it is you would like to brew. Do you want to brew something to a specific style, such as an IPA? Or would you like to brew something that tastes like a favorite commercial beer, which is known as a clone recipe? Perhaps you want to brew something entirely original — that’s fine too! Each objective has a bit of a different approach, however they all involve researching what other brewers have done first.
If you would like to brew something to style, the first step is, of course, to research that style and find out how it is most successfully brewed. There is a wealth of information out there about brewing to style, including the Classic Beer Styles series of books, which covers several classic beer styles in individual titles. BYO’s Jamil Zainasheff has also covered the basics of many beer styles during his tenure as the author of “Style Profile,” and you can check out his special issue 30 Great Beer Styles or check out BYO recipes. The important part of the research is to read several recipes to see what proportions are commonly used and the brewing processes involved.
Similarly, if you want to brew something to taste like a commercial beer you will again need to research the background of the beer. Many, many commercial beers have already been recreated successfully by homebrewers, several of them in the pages of BYO, and many thousands more on the Web in homebrew forums. If you can’t find it there, however, often times you can contact the brewery who may have a homebrew-friendly brewer on staff who can point you in the right direction.
If you want to brew something not to style and not to replicate an existing beer, you will be attempting a more advanced kind of recipe formulation. You can of course brew anything you want any time you want, but to be able to create an original beer based only on an idea requires practicing brewing existing styles and beers to be the most successful. Try formulating some simple recipes to styles or clones first until you start to master the skill of recipe development.
Try a consensus recipe
Once you have decided on what to brew, the easiest way to put together a simple recipe is by consensus — that is selecting the most common ingredients found in similar recipes and going with an average amount of each. Do the same with the brewing procedure — adopt the most common techniques (boil times, hop schedule, fermentation temps, etc.). From that jumping off point you can brew the recipe over and over, tweaking ingredients and techniques to suit your taste, resulting in your own individual recipe. You can use brewing software to calculate your efficiencies and keep track of your recipes as they evolve.
