Author: C. McKenzie

New is king. That’s what the never-ending labyrinth of the internet teaches us. That’s what consumerism instills in us. That’s what the market tells us (the U.S. beer market right now is especially fraught with this pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake). As homebrewers, we can experiment with all the new things as much as we want—after all, it’s just a small batch that costs us a minimal amount compared to a brewery dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars to produce a multi-barrel batch. That’s part of the benefit of being a homebrewer, right?

What I’d like to propose is that the barrage of new is one way to be creative—throw a new hop at an old style or toss a different kind of cake into your stout and see what happens; however, there is another aspect of creativity in recipe creation that I think is often overlooked. The purpose of this is not to make a value judgment or to say that one way is wrong and the other is right. Rather, I want to offer an alternative—one that is perhaps less interesting to some and might cause some to question why you would even do this—and suggest that there is another way to create new and interesting beer recipes.

Constraints and Creativity

Allow me to get nerdy for a minute (and not in the usual sciencey-way that brewers usually mean when they say they’re about to get nerdy).

There is nothing new under the sun. At its core, creativity is simply old ideas or pieces of ideas recombined in a new way. It is impossible to create something new without first having the building blocks for that idea already existing in your mind. In any discipline, we use what we know or what we have in front of us in order to create novel things (even when we’re just testing out an idea to see if it will work).

Take, for instance, the universal linguistic truth that language is both inherently restrictive and infinitely creative. Each of us has a limited vocabulary, but new sentences, phrases, and conversations that have never been spoken before in that particular combination come into existence daily. Within the limits of what you know (and sometimes with the spurring on of others in the case of conversations), you daily create something new. You could always further this creativity by using a thesaurus or dictionary or even going so far as to create new words by using the alphabet you already know. Creativity, therefore, can and does exist within a set of limitations.

So, we have natural limitations that we can expand by learning things that are new to us but already exist—all of this to create something new; but we can also further limit ourselves to spur on creativity. What do I mean? Let me give another illustration.

(I promise I’m getting back to how this relates to brewing. Hang tight.)

There’s a method of writing music that you’re probably familiar with, whether or not you know the term for it: theme and variation. In this, the composer writes a song (the theme), then instead of writing a completely different song, they take the main musical melody and maybe some other odds and ends of what they wrote the first time and transform it into something different. It’s still somewhat recognizable as the first song, but it could also stand on its own as a song. Then they’ll do this again. Same theme, new treatment. In this way, the composer takes one idea (theme) and explores the different ways (variation) that it can exist. In essence, they’ve limited themselves to a particular musical melody or set of notes and used it in multiple different ways.

Another example in the world of music is almost the entire genre of jazz. If you’ve ever listened to jazz, you know that you can hear the same song by the same musician on two different recordings and hear two very different songs. This is because most jazz music is written with just the main melody and the names of the underlying chords (if you’re unfamiliar with music, this is an especially sparse way of writing music—very little is provided to the performer). With the constraints put on the musician by providing little information, there is incredible freedom to improvise and create. That said, it’s not a free-for-all—there are still a set of musical “rules” that are in place and dictate what sounds pleasing to our ear (though they can be used, bent, or broken and still produce quality music if the musician knows what they’re doing). In this way, limitations almost force a certain level of creativity.

Ok. Back to brewing.

Recipe Creation

With the current state of homebrewing and the relative ease of access we have to ingredients with the internet (and frankly, improved standards at a good number of local homebrew shops), most homebrewers have very few constraints (if any) in what and how they brew. While this has undoubtedly been a positive progression for homebrewers, it’s possible that we’re missing something that has driven creativity in years past: lack.

One oft-repeated piece of trivia about brewing that I think illustrates this particularly well is how the water in a particular location shaped the beer styles that arose from that area. The peculiar mineral composition and acidity/alkalinity of the water available to brewers determined if they used lots of roasted grains or very pale malt only; the hop character of the beer; etc. Brewers once worked within these constraints (though perhaps without knowing the chemistry behind the water and its impact on mash pH and perceived hop bitterness), whereas the ability to adjust water chemistry allows homebrewers to precisely dial in every aspect of how water impacts a beer’s flavor.

At the intersection of constraints in ingredients and process is the decoction mash. Due to the undermodified malt available at the time (amongst other things), brewers managed to create a process that worked with those undermodified malts to produce a quality end product, creating a process that some claim has a noticeable impact on the final flavor of the beer (I will not touch that subject today).

Ultimately, I wonder what kind of recipes would be produced and what kind of creative beers could be brewed if every now and then we forced some limitations upon ourselves—artificial or not. Instead of adding adjuncts to an existing style, throwing the newest hops at an old style, or simply adding an absurd amount of hops, I wonder what aspects of the beer would gain our attention. Would artificially limiting our hop choice to a set weight or set group of hops (perhaps only those available at your LHBS, paltry as the selection may be) end up pushing our creativity of how we use hops in a different direction than the current trends? Would forcing ourselves to use a given malt in our next five brews teach us the merits of that malt and show us how to deftly choose flavor pairings in our ingredients? What if you knew your water profile and instead of adjusting the water, you adjusted your recipe to fit your water? What kinds of beers would you brew if you limited yourself to three malts and two hops for the recipe? Or what if you limited yourself to the same three malts and two hops across several recipes (a kind of brewing theme and variation)?

I ask these questions only because I don’t have answers. It’s too big of a question and too individual for me to even pretend to answer. I’m not saying that limiting yourself in choices is a magic bullet that’s going to help you create interesting recipes—maybe, though, doing so might be a step towards thinking differently about ingredients, learning the brewing process better, or changing your brewing process in a unique way. It might just be the path to changing your mindset about those things that you always do that one set way.

In ending these thoughts, it almost seems necessary to me to leave this open-ended. There are no firm scientific facts to draw a conclusion from. There is no definite answer of how self-imposing limitations on your brewing will impact your recipes or how you use ingredients. There is only the challenge to try it and see what comes of it—the challenge to embrace it more than once and see what happens.

Limitations Series

After originally writing this and ending my thoughts just above, I began considering my own challenge. Ideas began to take shape, and what was originally going to be a standalone post became this: the introduction of a new series I’m calling “Limitations.”

I brought this idea to the rest of the guys who brewed with me in the Stout series, and it was a quick consensus that this idea was worth pursuing. So here’s the plan. We chose three malts and two hops that have to be used in each recipe. We then chose two yeast strains that we could choose from. These selected ingredients are the only ingredients that can be used to brew these beers, and each ingredient (except for one of the two yeast strains) must be used. Also, each ingredient must be used in such a way that it isn’t there just to nominally satisfy the requirement of being used—in other words, no using just an ounce or two of a malt just to say that it’s in there.

The six of us will be brewing several beers each, so we can try to really push ourselves to see what can be done within the confines of these ingredients. We’re also going to try not to brew beers that are too similar to a beer someone else is brewing, which adds another layer of constraints for us. The limitations will actually increase as we continue.

The ingredients we have chosen are as follows:

Maris Otter

Light Munich

White Wheat (malted)

Nugget

Amarillo

WLP810 San Francisco Lager

WLP090 San Diego Super Yeast

It should be noted that we chose these ingredients without regard to how they would work together, and did so in a mostly-blind vote. This helped to avoid building the ingredient list around a particular style or with a recipe in mind.

Those are the limitations we’ve set for ourselves, all in an effort to push creativity in our recipe creation and see what we can do with a list of set ingredients.

So. Here we go. �