Modern Homebrew Recipes (9 page)

My recipe formulation process starts with writing down ideas and adding notes, particularly if I’m doing online research or am considering multiple options. I start with a general idea of what I want to brew, such as the beer style, a similar commercial example, a set of general parameters, or a target flavor profile.

This is where experience comes into play. You are driven by intuition when you start building a recipe. Given enough experience, you will understand things that have or have not worked for you in the past, but also what has worked for other brewers. Understanding recipes created by other brewers pays off when you do start building your own.

When working with fermentables, it is helpful to develop the skill to think in percentages rather than weights. You may develop a feel for flavor contributions from different weights of grain if you have a standard batch size, but it’s beneficial (to your overall brewing skill) to learn how different
percentages
of grain impact flavor since that knowledge is batch size-independent. The equivalent skill for hops involves learning how to think of bittering additions as bittering units, knowing that the specifics will be determined by the available hops.

The mental model I have for recipes is similar to the charts and tables in Ray Daniels’
Designing Great Beers
. For each style of beer you brew, you have a set of ingredients you might use. This isn’t the full universe of ingredients; it’s a constrained set of choices based on what you believe
tastes good in that beer style. For each ingredient, you have a bounded range of percentages that you may use in your recipe (base malt may be 50–100% of the grist, while dark malts may be under 10%, for instance). This model isn’t something someone tells you; it’s what you build as you gain experience, updating as you learn.

When you create a recipe, you are making decisions using that model. You select individual ingredients from that constrained list, and you set their percentages of the recipe as a value within the range you’ve previously determined. You still have to learn to predict the flavor profile of the combination of ingredients you select, but at least you have substantially pruned the problem down to a manageable size.

Don’t worry about precisely identifying a value for each ingredient in your recipe initially; you can start by including a range. This makes it easier to adjust later since you have some built-in flexibility. I start by specifying the ingredients that have the largest flavor impact on the beer, which isn’t necessarily the ingredient with the highest weight or percentage. As you select specific ingredients, decide if you want to describe them generically (e.g., pale ale malt) or be more specific (e.g., Crisp Maris Otter). You have to make these detailed decisions immediately; you may wait until after the entire recipe is sketched out.

Once I have drafted an initial concept, I put it into a recipe program such as
Beer Alchemy
to validate the numbers and check the ingredient percentages. The review and revision process can be quite iterative, so it’s useful to have recipe software make sure the ingredients add up and to see the target parameters of the beer. When a recipe built using percentages is expressed in weights, I often perform a final rounding step so that the weights are easier to work with on brew day.

Balancing flavors for a style
– While recipe formulation involves quite a bit of math, there is also an artistic element to designing a beer that must not be ignored. Unfortunately, this side of brewing is hard to explain and teach – how does someone learn to be creative? Many people want how-to instructions, but that’s not how humans learn creativity. To formulate unique, special recipes, you need to understand the ingredients, their flavor profiles, and how they change during the brewing process. You also need to understand what each contributes as part of a larger recipe. Finally, you need to understand how altering the balance of these components affects the overall impression of the finished product.

Learning ingredient profiles
– I recommend tasting your ingredients at every stage in the brewing process to see how they change. Tastings steeped grains and hops can help you develop basic flavor and aroma familiarity, but there is no substitute for brewing, as the finished beer is much different than the basic ingredients. Brewing beers that feature single ingredients (such as single malt and single hop beers) allow you to vary and evaluate additional ingredients (such as specialty malts and yeast), which can be a very instructive exercise. Small batch brewing or homebrew club experiments can also help you gain an understanding of these flavors (with less work for yourself).

When thinking about the contributions from each ingredient, understand they can provide both flavor and aroma, but can also have other side effects such as changing the body, fermentability, appearance, and mouthfeel (like roasted grains adding tannins). Keep in mind that you must make tradeoffs when putting together a recipe; not every ingredient brings only positive contributions, and some may require additional work to compensate for their unwanted side effects.

Ingredient intensity
– There is much to learn about how ingredients affect the final beer profile when used in different concentrations. There’s a big difference between using 2% crystal malt and 10% crystal malt, or using crystal 40 versus crystal 120, or between 10% crystal malt and 10% Munich malt. When experimenting, try to brew beers with different concentrations so you can understand the difference between a background flavor and a primary flavor. If someone offers you their homebrewed beer, quiz them about the recipe so you can use their experience as a learning opportunity as well.

As with cooking, I think it’s important to understand which ingredients have a strong flavor and will dominate the final profile if used too heavily. Biscuit malt, black malt, or the oft-abused peat-smoked malt for instance, can take over a beer as easily as pungent herbs like ginger, rosemary, or saffron can take over a food recipe.

Contributors to balance
– I like to look beyond the numerical specifications for a beer, as I don’t think IBUs or gravity readings tell a full story. Yes, the ration of bitterness to the beer’s original gravity can tell you something about the balance, if the beers are generally of the same alcohol level and final gravity. But 50 IBUs will taste different in a 6% beer with a final gravity of 1.006 than in a 6% beer with a final
gravity of 1.024. Even in a beer with similar numerical specifications, other flavors can affect the bitterness perception—think about 30 IBUs in a beer made with two-row versus a one made with Munich malt. The increased maltiness can
swallow
the bitterness, making it seem less bitter in comparison (even if the amount of malt is the same, numerically).

Just as some people confuse sweetness (the flavor of sugar) with maltiness (the flavor of malt), I also see people confusing sweetness with body. A beer can have body without being sweet (the dextrins mostly responsible for body in beer are not sweet). Sweet sugars can add body, but are not the primary source as they are normally fermented. You can have a beer that has a malty flavor and moderate body, but is not sweet (in that it has little residual sugar). However the presence of IBUs can affect the palate impression of sweetness; an absence of bitterness often makes you think a beer is sweet, even if it is relatively dry. It takes a trained palate or significant tasting experience to easily differentiate these characteristics in beer.

It isn’t always easy to trace specific flavors in a beer back to a source ingredient. Fruity esters can come from yeast, but also from malts and hops. When looking at the overall flavor balance in beer, remember that you might be deriving similar flavors from different ingredients, and that those flavors may be supportive, may clash, or may become too intense.

Creating balance
– Taking the various flavor components in beer and balancing them to suit a particular style or palate takes some work. At the most basic level, balancing the maltiness and sweetness in beer with bitterness (or roast, acidity, alcohol level, or harshness) is what makes beer taste good. Balance is always relative to the style of beer. A balanced IPA is quite different than a balanced
lambic,
for instance. Matching the flavor contributions from ingredients to the overall profile of a given style requires a deep understanding of what flavors come from what sources.

Even when you think you understand this process, there is still an experimental side to it, particularly if you have a complex recipe. You might not be able to accurately predict the flavors, and things you think might work together well might actually crash-and-burn when put into practice. Remember to test your creations and be willing to adjust them if they don’t work as expected.

ADAPTING RECIPES

There are many situations where you need to adapt a recipe to work on your system. Sometimes you get a recipe from someone who brews on different equipment, with different efficiency, different processes, or different batch sizes. You might even need to adapt your own recipes if you have recently made significant changes to your brewing system or processes.

I’m assuming that you’re working from a complete recipe at this point. If not, refer to the section on
Interpreting Recipes
for tips on how to fill in missing information. Some of the techniques described there are also used when adapting recipes. The main goal is to finalize the brewing decisions that control the outcome of your beer. Recipe software is useful for many of these techniques.

I’m also assuming that you understand your current system, and know how it responds to changing variables when you brew. If you are still learning your system, you can make educated guesses when you adapt the recipe, and gather data on how your system actually responds when you brew.

Batch scaling
– This is probably the easiest adaptation. On the homebrew scale, batch scaling is linear. Simply change the quantity of ingredients by percentage difference. If you want to make a 10-gallon batch from a 5-gallon recipe, double all the ingredients. If you use the manual approach, you can double-check the result by entering the recipe in brewing software and checking the final parameters (original gravity, bitterness, and color, primarily). If scaling a recipe results in any unusual quantities, round the results to make them easier to measure while brewing.

Mash efficiency
– Changing mash efficiency will change the amount of grain in the grist. While keeping the grist percentages constant, you can change the quantity of grain to determine the number of gravity points of the new mash efficiency. The number of gravity points extracted from grain is obtained by multiplying the weight of the grain, the potential extract of the grain, and the mash efficiency. Greater mash efficiency will use less grain, and vice versa. If I change the efficiency in a recipe using recipe software, I normally adjust the grain weights slightly to have round numbers.

Hop utilization
– Changing the hop schedule or brewing on a differently sized system will affect hop utilization. Due to fluctuations in utilization, the hop schedule may need to be adjusted so that the recipe still hits
the target bitterness level. Not all recipe software will model all hop additions correctly (such as first wort hops and whirlpool hops), so you may need to perform those calculations manually or enter them in the software in a way that will give you an equivalent value. For more detail in how the numbers are estimated, (see
Appendix A: Basic Beer Math
).

Boil rate and length
– If a recipe specifies a starting kettle volume, ending kettle volume, and boil length, you should be able to check if those measurements work the on your system. Change the procedure to collect the necessary volume of wort required for the final volume given the boil length you are using. Double-check that the gravity in the kettle at the start of the boil will produce the desired target gravity at the end of the boil at the given boil length. If it is different, you will need to scale your recipe to hit that target gravity.

Waste and loss
– Depending on your equipment, you may lose a fixed amount of wort during transfers, or may decide to select only the best fraction of the wort during transfers. Either way, the volume of beer you need at the end of the process reflects not only that loss, but all losses during the process (except boil losses, which are accounted for in the recipe). I like to make sure that I always have a full keg (or more), so I tend to brew larger batches (6.5 gallons, 25 L) even though I only need 5 gallons (19 L) at the end. If you find that you have less total yield when you are packaging, you may need to adjust your batch size. Use the batch scaling procedure to change your batch size so that it reflects your volume requirement (including loss). You may be constrained by equipment (like fermenter size), so check the volume you need at each step to make sure you can accommodate it.

Equipment availability and process substitution
– Some recipes will specify methods that require equipment you don’t have. For example, if you mash in a picnic cooler, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to directly heat your mash tun to step mash. Read through the recipe to ensure that you can actually execute all the steps on your system. If you can’t step mash by direct heating, then you can either convert to a single-step mash, or perform the mash steps through infusing boiling water or by decocting. If the recipe specifies that you use a hopback, you can add the hops to the kettle after the boil, before you start to run off. You may also have to restructure the steps in the recipe if you don’t have the necessary equipment.

INGREDIENT SUBSTITUTION

This is an advanced topic: those rare times where you need to change a recipe based on ingredient availability or substitute an ingredient you don’t like out for one for one you do like. Everyone has their least favorite ingredients, whether it is peat-smoked malt, Summit hops, Ringwood yeast, or bourbon barrels. If you really don’t like a specific flavor, ask yourself if it can be deleted without destroying the character of the recipe. If the ingredient
is
necessary, replace it with something you prefer. It may not taste exactly the same, but will at least be drinkable. In some cases, you’ll be able to make a reasonable change without altering the character of the recipe; in other cases, you’ll be hard pressed to brew the recipe without the missing ingredient. Keep in mind that not all ingredient substitutions are the same; some will work better than others. Process substitution (see
Adapting Recipes
) can also be used in conjunction with ingredient substitution or on its own as a way to compensate for missing ingredients.