Some say: Brewing is alchemy. But makes beer a beer? It all starts with the ingredients that are needed to actually brew a beer. All required steps should described clearly in the brew recipe.
When you start brewing you need a recipe. In this recipe you’ll find the needed ingredients, the temperatures to use during the mash and the conditions for fermentation.
With the recipe and taken the notes in the logbook you will be able to brew the recipe again. And based on the logs you can change the recipe or guide the conditions during brewday.
Table of contents
Make a brew recipe
When making a recipe you can take inspiration by other recipes. For example recipes from books about brewing or just something you found on the big internet. You can just brew the found recipe or you change some things to see the effect of these changes.
By brewing recipes and doing changes you will gain experience. A good way to learn the best of the different varieties of hop and malt you can brew by using SMaSH recipes. When brewing a SMaSH beer you just use one single hop and one single malt. It is a good way to know more about these two ingredients.
A good brew recipe provide guidance and gives you the possibility to experiment. Good to know: experimenting is nice, but don’t expect to see a wheat beer by using dark malts.
How to start?
One of the most important things is: think about what you want to brew. Stay close to yourself. If you don’t like porter, don’t choose a recipe to brew one.
If you plan to brew a style that you never brewed before, just do some research. Taste a couple of beers in the same style and write down what you see and taste. Is the beer malty or very hoppy? These are details that are useful when making your own recipe.
Also search for some inspiration. Find other recipes and see which ingredients they require. Are they adding sugar? Maybe that is something to consider to do as well. And the same is applicable for herbs and spices. If you don’t like coriander, just leave it away in your recipe. Just brew what you love to drink.
Look what you have already in stock
Sometimes you can brew nice beer with the things you have already at home. Try to take this ingredients in account. For some variation you can order additional malts.
Personally I like beer with rye, this might be an ingredient I might add in my next recipe. You also can think a little bit out of the box by adding a spicy pepper in your beer.
Write everything down
Try to keep a logbook during the brewing proces. This also means that you have to write down which ingredients you have used and what the final result was.
If you have make a mistake or decided to skip the lauterstep, for any reason, just write it down. It might be possible that the made mistake or decision is just gave that nice touch in the final beer.
Go start experimenting
After brewing your first batch of beer, it might be a fun idea to experiment with the recipe that you’ve used. With experimenting I don’t mean to change all ingredients, because the basis of it is important.
I would suggest to slightly change the recipe by just using more hops or use a different kind of hop. Other things you can do are:
- Change the used malts. Just add an addition type of malt or change the amount of the used malts.
- Play around with the mash schedule. This will influence on the body or the final alcoholpercentage.
- Use other hop varieties or just change the amount of hops.
- Use a different kind of yeast for fermentation.
- Start lagering on oak chips or just add something else during fermentation. You might consider splitting your batch to play around with different kind of additions.
My own experience
I made my first recipe by taking one from a book and just give my own twist to it. The reason for this was that I didn’t have all of the required ingredients. The result of my change was a reasonable pilsner.
Keep improving the brew recipe
Brewing is improving. Play around with the ingredients and keep a logbook. This logbook will give you more insights and the possibility to perform improvements. Sometimes you don’t have everything you need and variation might be a good solution.
