Like most homebrewers, I made my jump into the hobby with a typical extract kit – an Irish Red Ale that came with a starter kit from Northern Brewer.

In fact, I received that kit from a generous Reddit user when I participated in the Reddit Secret Santa Gift Exchange back in 2015. I’m forever grateful for that gift, as it spurred my love for homebrewing and lead me to where I’m at today!

Note: I technically started with a Mr. Beer kit many years back; however, the Irish Red Ale was my first true beer kit that kicked off my homebrewing hobby 3 years ago.

Surprisingly, the kit beer turned out pretty good for my first batch. It wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t terrible. I was just happy that I actually made a legitimate, drinkable beer!

My Transition into Beer Recipe Design

While the beer that I made was decent enough, the process felt more like baking a cake from a box of cake mix.

I wanted to be more involved by making something I could really call my own. Even if it turned out terrible, at least it was something I could own from the very beginning.

I decided to take the risk and go for it. Immediately after that first kit, I dove straight into beer recipe design.

Looking back, I don’t recommend doing this as quickly as I did. I made A LOT of mistakes and was overly confident. I didn’t have my process down well enough to know what I was doing right and wrong.

The good thing, however, is that making the leap drove my hunger to learn. Those major mistakes pushed me to do more research and start picking things apart.

If I was going to make my own beer, I was going to do everything I could to get it right. Every shitty batch was a reminder that I needed to take a step back and reevaluate my process and recipe.

One thing to note: Please don’t take this as a dig at brewing from a beer kit, because it’s not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Some brewers just want to make a beer without diving into the details, and that’s just fine.

Since you’re reading this though, my assumption is you want to design your own recipes. If so, you’re in the right place.

Things I Learned From Mistakes I Made

At the time of this writing, I’ve been brewing for 3 years. Not as long as some brewing veterans out there, but long enough to know better about a few things.

Currently, I brew once a week (sometimes more, especially when a string of competitions is on the horizon). That frequency has lent me a lot of experience in a short amount of time, all of which I have developed, tweaked, and refined my own recipes.

Let me be clear: I am far from perfect and still make mistakes. We all do and it happens. As a result, I’ve learned quite a few things about beer recipe design along the way.

Below, you’ll find a series of tips that have helped me develop award-winning beers consistently. They are not the end all, be all, but they are great principles of beer recipe design as a whole.

1) Start with the end in mind and work backwards

If you don’t know what kind of product you want to end up with, you won’t know the best way to approach the design.

Before you even think of just throwing something together, ask yourself some of the following questions:

What kind of style are you aiming for?

What kind of aroma, hop flavor, and malt complexity are you looking to be present in your final beer? Hoppy and bitter or balanced and malty?

Should it have any type of esters or be clean and neutral?

What kind of mouthfeel do you desire?

By working backwards, you can help drill down the type of beer you want to end up with. You’ll be more equipped to get things dialed in from the get-go, getting your recipe as close to what you had imagined.

When I’m working on a beer recipe design, I always try to visualize what my final beer will look, taste, and smell like. It makes it easier for me to come up with the ingredients and process rather than to just “wing it” and hope for the best.

Let’s say I want to brew an IPA that is slightly dry with a clean bitterness, moderate ABV, smooth mouthfeel, and a big aroma with citrus, resinous, and piney flavors.

Now that I have the end product in mind, I can assemble the ingredients needed in my recipe accordingly. Here is a very rough example:

Utilize a base of 2-Row along with a little White Wheat (for mouthfeel and head retention), some Vienna malt (to add complexity and support the hops), and a touch of Caramel 40 (for color).

Keep mash temp a bit lower for more fermentable sugar extraction (i.e. 149°F).

Bittering addition of a high AA% hop (roughly 20-25 IBU’s) at 60 minutes, followed by a heavy dose of late kettle additions at 10 minutes, 5 minutes, and flame out to add in big flavor and meet my target IBU’s.

Use a combination of hops that will get me that citrus and piney, resinous aroma/flavor: Cascade, Citra, Amarillo, Centennial, Columbus, and Chinook.

Go with a neutral yeast like WLP001, WY1056, or US-05 so the malt stays in the background and the hops can shine.

Hit it with a large dry hop after fermentation is complete.

Remember, this is just a rough example of one of the ways I figure out my ingredients needed. There are plenty of other things to consider, specifically batch size, water volume, mash technique, boil length, final volume, and so on.

Every beer you approach may differ, but the concept still applies. Figure out where you want to end up, then you can determine the best way to get there.

2) Use proven recipes and BJCP guidelines for inspiration to build upon

When you start getting your feet wet in beer recipe design, a good idea is to research already proven recipes.

In hindsight, you could start tossing a few things together, but the results will be unpredictable. Would you rather have a good base to go from or be disappointed in your approach right from the jump?

When I want to brew a style that I’ve never attempted before, I always do the following before building a recipe:

Search the BJCP guidelines on the exact style.

Look for a recipe that has already been proven (won previous awards or cosigned by several people who have brewed it).

The BJCP guidelines are an excellent way to understand the overall profile of a particular style. They give you a high-level breakdown in the following areas:

Aroma

Appearance

Flavor

Mouthfeel

Overall profile

To help you drill down further, the guidelines provide commercial examples that are most representative of the style. Picking these up are a great way to get an idea of how a particular style fits all of the guidelines set for it.

Use these guidelines as what they are – a guide. They will help you figure out what elements you’ll need to piece together to design your recipe.

If you want some more depth on overall BJCP guidelines, I have found this resource over at Kegerator.com to be very useful.

Of course, guidelines are only part of the puzzle. The other half is researching proven recipes.

Utilizing recipes that are already worth their salt will do the following:

Give you a good base to start from, allowing you to tweak a recipe to fit your personal preferences.

Helps you get a feel for the process involved (such as if it is a beer that comes out better with step-mashing or requires multiple changes in fermentation temperature).

Allows you to identify common ingredients so that you know what should traditionally stay in a recipe (and what shouldn’t).

Personally, I often check out the recipes posted on the American Homebrewers Association website. Their recipe database includes a big chunk of award-winning recipes (including all previous winners of the National Homebrew Competition).

If you really want to dive into more established recipes, I would recommend checking out the book Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zaniasheff and John Palmer. From two of the most highly-respected guys in the homebrewing world, it’s full of great information and comes equipped with 80 recipes covering every beer style out there, all of which have won awards. Recipes are given as extract, but all-grain substitutions are included.

It is an older book, but the recipes and advice are still valid. Many experienced homebrewers have utilized this book to create their own award-winning beers. It’s a book that all homebrewers must have in their personal library!

3) Consider any limitations

It sucks, but it’s the truth – everyone’s process and setup has its own set of limitations. What one person can do with ease might require more creativity or elbow grease from another.

When designing your own beer recipe, you need to consider what limitations you will run into.

As an example, many homebrewers utilize a method to control their fermentation temperature. This can be anything from using a temperature controlled chest freezer or refrigerator, all the way up to a full glycol setup.

If you don’t have a method in place to control fermentation temperature, it can be tough to make a quality ale. Off-flavors and other problems can arise when fermentation temps run wild.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t do something, but it’s a limitation to consider. Some of your options might include:

Filling plastic bottles with water and freezing them. You can place your fermenter in a bucket of cool water with the frozen bottles and swap them out frequently. You’ll still have temp fluctuations, but it’s better than nothing.

Utilizing a Kveik yeast strain (such as Omega HotHead), as they can withstand high temperatures (as high as 98°F) without producing any off-flavors or aromas.

Remember – using a shortcut or substitution doesn’t always guarantee a favorable outcome. If you don’t plan your recipe around your limitations, the final beer may come out quite a bit different than you intended.

4) Use a recipe calculator

One of the most helpful things you can do for your beer recipe design is to use a recipe calculator.

A recipe calculator will help you figure out all of the most important parts of your recipe, such as:

Starting and final gravity

SRM (color)

ABV

Amount of IBUs

BU:GU ratio

pH (some calcs, but not all)

How well it falls into the style guidelines of the targeted style

All you have to do is plug in things like:

Batch size

Grain bill

Mash temp

Hops and addition times

Yeast used

The style you’re targeting

All the calculations are done for you based on your input. You can also see how a small tweak or two will impact the things I mentioned above.

If you are really ambitious, all of this can be done by hand, but a beer recipe calculator is much more convenient.

Besides convenience, you have the benefit of being able to store your recipes. Every tweak to your recipe can be recorded until it’s dialed in exactly how you want it. It’s not an excuse to for not taking notes, but it’s great to have recipes stored for quick and easy access from any device.

The most popular beer recipe calculator out there is BeerSmith. It’s the most widely used platform by both homebrewers and professional brewers alike. Although many people gripe about the UI (it could definitely benefit from some more modernization), it’s a fairly sound solution.

While I have used BeerSmith in the past, I regularly utilize a free solution online called Brewgr. They could stand to update their targeted guidelines (since they are based on the 2008 BJCP guidelines), but it has been a great resource otherwise. Easy and simple to use, and I find that my recipes are pretty damn close to the estimates I am provided.

Another good solution is the recipe calculator at Brewer’s Friend. I haven’t used this in particular (although I use a lot of their other provided calculators), but many homebrewers out there really like this one a lot. If anything, take advantage of the numerous calculators they have available for free, as there is a good chance you’ll need them.

Eventually, I am planning to gravitate towards either BeerSmith or Brewer’s Friend, but until then, Brewgr is working out great for me.

Regardless of what you choose to use, taking advantage of any one of these recipe calculators will be a HUGE help in your beer recipe design process.

5) Understand BU:GU

In my opinion, one of the more important aspects of beer recipe design lies in the BU:GU ratio.

BU:GU stands for “Bittering Units to Gravity Units”, and every style out there has a specific range.

For example, an IPA has an average BU:GU of 1.0 (1:1 ratio). That means the beer contains 1 IBU for every gravity point. If you made an IPA with an SG measured at 1.060, the beer should contain 60 IBUs. Once you have established the BU:GU of your recipe, choosing your hops and creating a hop dosing schedule becomes a bit easier.

For me, understanding this had a dramatic impact on improving my recipes as a whole.

When I first started competing in homebrew competitions in November 2017, there was always a common theme in my feedback: my beers were out of balance and always seemed “sweet” or “favored the malt”.

It was really starting to drive me nuts, especially when I would calculate my recipes with (what I thought were) the proper amount of IBUs. Once I got my scoresheets, I would read through them while sampling the same batch of beer (which I highly recommend if you ever compete).

I realized the judges were right – my hoppy ales really did seem to lean more towards the malt!

At that point, I started researching the hell out of BU:GU for a variety of styles to find out what the “standard” was. After that, I looked at some of my recipes and their BU:GU ratios.

Wouldn’t you know it, I was under by quite a bit on nearly ALL of them!

For example, the suggested BU:GU ratio for a Pale Ale is 0.71. I entered one into a competition in early 2018 that had a ratio of 0.62. No wonder it leaned on the maltier side.

After figuring this out and making tweaks to my recipes, I have been able to really dial things in. I started winning more awards and increasing my scores significantly.

Any recipe calculator out there will calculate BU:GU as you input your recipe, which is helpful. You can also calculate this by hand by taking the total calculated IBUs and dividing it by your starting gravity:

IBU ÷ SG = BU:GU

When calculating for OG, only include the last two numbers (or three if it is a big beer over 1.100). We’ll use the IPA example from above, which had 60 IBUs and 1.060 starting gravity:

60 ÷ 60 = 1

To get a better idea of what BU:GU ratios are best for each style, check out this link. It is a PDF that contains average BU:GU ratios for every style, which I have found extremely handy. I can’t tell you how many times I refer to it when designing a recipe for a style I haven’t brewed before.

Another great BU:GU resource is the book Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. It contains a breakdown of the various beer styles along with their respective BU:GU ranges. It’s an older book, but still an excellent resource that I think every homebrewer should own.

6) Consider your water source

Creating a good beer recipe requires a lot of things to work in unison. Unfortunately, one of the most important elements is often the most forgotten: water.

When you’re so caught up in the other things that make a beer great, it’s easy to overlook water. When I first started brewing, much like most new homebrewers, I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Messing with water chemistry just wasn’t something I was interested in. It seemed like it was just another thing to try to wrap my head around, and I was barely comfortable with my process. I figured using drinking water from the store or carbon-filtered water from the tap was good enough.

Although my beer was decent, I eventually began to realize the importance of treating my water to achieve better results.

Once I finally got confident enough to learn about water treatments and various profiles that work for each style, I was disappointed…

…disappointed that I didn’t start figuring it out sooner!

Adjusting my water really helped me dial in a few recipes that were missing that extra “pop”. My hoppy beers were perceived as slightly more bitter, while my maltier beers felt smoother on the palate. I was honestly shocked at how much of an impact it had.

When it comes to beer recipe design, adjusting your water can help you achieve the flavor and texture that you’re aiming for.

How you adjust your water, however, will depend on your water source:

Distilled or Reverse Osmosis (RO) water

Tap (or well) water

Starting with distilled or reverse osmosis (RO) water will give you a “blank slate” to go from. Adding water salts to this type of water is incredibly simple, since there are no other minerals you have to account for.

Tap water will present a slight challenge, as a variety of minerals will be present. You’ll also have to deal with chlorine, which can cause off-flavors in your beer if not eliminated prior to using it. You can eliminate this by running water through a carbon filter or treating it with campden tablets.

If you plan to use tap water, most water utilities provide a water report to some degree. If they don’t provide it, consider getting a water testing kit from Ward Labs. At the very least, you’ll know what your water contains so you’re not adding things blindly.

What if you don’t know how to read a water report? Fortunately, I’ve always found this link from John Palmer’s How to Brew book very beneficial. It gives you a basic breakdown of how to read a water report. He also provides formulas to figure out other elements that might not be on your report. Excellent stuff!

Once you figure out what kind of water you’re going to use, I recommend using the water calculator at Brewer’s Friend. It’s easy to use and makes calculating water a cinch (and it’s free)!

No matter what you do, just remember to keep water treatment in mind. It can literally be the difference between a decent beer and a great one.

Quick tip: When you’re just getting started with water adjustments, I would recommend using distilled or RO water. You won’t have to worry about removing chlorine, nor will you have to account for current mineral levels. Water salt additions will be more precise and entirely in your control.

7) Don’t make it complicated

I don’t know that I need to dive into this as deeply as the other tips I listed, but it needs said.

You should never go into a recipe thinking that the more complex you make it, the better your beer will be. You need to understand how one ingredient will work with the other. Throwing a bunch of crap together will most likely, well, result in crap.

Some of the best tasting beers often have the least complex recipes.

For example, the recipe for a Hefeweizen is nearly the same across the board: a 50/50 blend of Pilsner and Wheat malt, maybe an adjunct for some color (such as CaraMunich), and a very small bittering addition with a noble German hop (i.e. Tettnanger, Perle, or Hallertau Mittlefrüh). It’s not the recipe, but the fermentation schedule, that make this beer what it is.

If you’re just getting your feet wet in beer recipe design, don’t dive directly into a barrel-aged bourbon vanilla stout. That’s not to say you couldn’t knock it out of the park, but the chances for things to go wrong are much higher. Start smaller and work your way up to those more complex recipes.

Enjoy Making Your Own Creations

I hope what I talked about here will help you in your quest to make the best beer possible. In the long run, just remember to have fun and celebrate both your successes and failures. Take good notes and dedicate yourself to developing a recipe you can call your own. The work might seem hard at times, but I think you can agree with me when I say that the effort will be worth it!