This series by Tom Ayres, explores recipe design. Brewing creativity and the factors that makes each beer style worthy of celebration. All segments in this series can be read here.

When it comes to designing your own beer recipes, there’s a lot of great information out there. From books on the subject to website articles, there’s a lot of great detailed information and approaches to designing beer recipes from scratch. That said, it’s pretty complicated stuff. After reviewing some of my favorite sources on this subject, I thought it might be helpful to see if I could sift the best parts in hopes of providing brewers with a simplified approach to beer recipe designing.

There seems to be a need for this

Talking with professional brewers, they quickly confirmed great interest in this topic. It seems most brewers exit their brewing education programs with a terrific understanding of the brewing process itself, but little knowledge of recipe design. Even after a few years working in a brewery, few get the opportunity to design their own beers from scratch. For homebrewers, there are many more opportunities to experiment on small-scale systems. But the topic is no less daunting, requiring a lot of trial and error or homework reading books and articles on the topic. Maybe I can help demystify the process?

This is a big topic; so let’s tackle this in bite-sized parts

We’re going to tackle beer recipe design in parts. You can embrace the whole series or take an “a la cart” approach if you already understand specific aspects. Here are the areas we will focus on, the four major components of beer; malt, hops, yeast and water.

Simplified Beer Recipe Design Part 1: Malts

General Beer Color Approach

At a very high level, a brewer could approach designing their beer, classifying it by general color, including Light, Amber, Red/Brown, or Black. This is a strategy Randy Mosher advocates in his book, Mastering Homebrew: The Complete Guide to Brewing Delicious Beer. A grain-bill for each of these colored beers would look like this:

Which grains to choose? Randy suggests these:

A brewer could run with this approach to develop a recipe grain bill for general beer types based on color. It provides you with general ingredient “guardrails” to develop your beer recipes. To further refine your specific malt choices, you should consider your desired beer flavors. Randy’s book provides a great reference guide to make your flavor choices:

A BJCP/Classic Styles design approach

Like many of you, one of my “bibles” for brewing is Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer’s book, Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew. The book provides guidance and recipes for brewing classic beer styles organized by the 2008 BJCP Categories. Looking at those categories, here are some grain-bill design insights:

Jamil and John use these malts in their BJCP category organized recipes:

This approach includes more detail than the earlier one. Using this approach, fine tuning recipe designs can be done by mixing and matching the suggested malts and/or changing the percentages of each suggested grain while still keeping an eye on flavor changes (see Randy Mosher’s flavor guide above). It’s very important to keep in mind that if you were seeking to make a specific style, you would need to drill-down to the specific information and recipes in Jamil and John’s book. This approach is simply providing broad recipe starting points, based on BJCP category style guardrails.

How about an example?

Say we want to design a black beer, maybe Porter. I’m envisioning something that features chocolate, coffee and graham cracker flavors. Following the General Beer Color Approach we would start our recipe grain-bill design with base malts accounting for 80-100% of the total malts. Of the suggested base grains, we’ll choose Pale Ale Malt, more specifically Maris Otter, since I’ve had good results with it and I like its full, rich flavor. In addition to that, we’ll add Munich 10°L for some of the graham cracker flavor we are looking for. To further enhance that desired flavor, we’ll add some Dark Crystal Malt (from the Caramel Malt list), which should add some roasted sugar flavors. To get the bold chocolate aroma and flavor we desire, we’ll include a good amount of Chocolate Malt, from the list of Roasted Malts. Finally let’s add some Black Malt. According to the Randy Moser’s flavor guidance, when combine with Chocolate Malt it should give us some of the coffee flavors we want. Oh, and for that good beer head retention let’s add some CaraPils. Here’s our proposed grain-bill:

So what does this beer look like so far?

In the interest of simplicity, I’ll plug this grain-bill into my brewing software and see what it shows. According to BeerSmith, here’s what our Black Beer looks like:

OG: 1.068

ABV: 6.5%

SRM: 30

If we use the BJCP/Classic Styles approach instead, our recipe is a bit short on base malts (6.4%) for the Porter Category. This difference is likely due to the blend of sub-category styles within the category. What we created so far seems like a Robust Porter, though the OG is a bit high for the style. We’ve got some grain-bill tweaks to make if we want to be more true to the Porter Category. What to do…?

Hold on, we’re just getting started!

Now that we have a structure for our beer, we need to develop this recipe further to include the equally important ingredients of hops, yeast and water. Stay tuned for the next recipe design episode where we’ll explore designing hop additions. Good brewing!

DISCLAIMER: This is not a comprehensive document on the subject; rather it’s more a “quick start” guide. If your interest is peaked after reading this series and you want to “dive in the deep end of the pool”, then I encourage you to read the books I’ve referenced and footnoted throughout the series. These folks are the experts who inspire me. This series is designed to glean the best parts from their excellent works on the topic.

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