|BACKGROUND|

This is not a post for the battle-hardened veterans of this game, so unless you wanted some sort of refresher course or if you want to start flying a little closer to the sun, this might be a slight waste of your time. If we’re also gonna be honest, this might also be a bit of a slog. To help counter that, I’ll see what I can do about slipping in some dank memes (shout out to ol’ DDB, because I’m going to steal some).

Moving away from kits or someone else’s recipes can be a harrowing experience for some less experienced brewers. Some more seasoned brewers might even make smaller mistakes or lack some of the pure knowledge to flush out their ideas. Even then, some just might be too ambitious and end up putting the horse before the cart. Regardless, everyone starts of on shaky ground when it comes to building their own recipes.

I’m going to attempt to include some info about formulating recipes for extract brewing as well as all-grain, but it’s worth noting that, as a homebrewer, I’ve only done two extract batches: one was a kit, the second was a recipe riffing off of Elysian’s Avatar IPA. So, at its core, much of the information can be gleaned and applied to extract, but beyond some general ideas, I’m not particularly qualified to espouse anything on that side.

What I am qualified to talk about is my views and methods. I frequently say this to people who ask how difficult brewing is or what it really is, but to me, brewing is the perfect combination of three of my favorite things: cooking, brewing, and art. Now, yes, I’m generally justifying my sweet art degree (read: Starbucks employee qualifications) by making labels for my beers, but I don’t want to say that artistry is simply limited to that. I think that the part of coming up with more obscure ideas and how to utilize ingredients and execute ideas is included in that as well. But I digress, and digression is bad.

In the most base terms, I’d call the steps that I take in recipe creation in this order:

Conceptualize

Draft

Tinker

Finalize

Brew

Boiling it down to 5 bullet points (really four, since brewing is not part of making a recipe) may slightly be oversimplifying it, but that’s the best way I could think to chunk it up. Now, time to go into detail on the ideas.

|CONCEPTUALIZING|

This is probably the easiest part of the whole process: literally, coming up with the idea.

Sometimes, an idea is a stroke of genius and you automatically know that you want to do. Sometimes, getting an idea to come to fruition is more akin to pulling teeth or trying to figure out what you really want to go to college for. And even then, there’s only hundreds of ways for you to even have a starting point.

For me, some of the most common points for even starting to conceptualize a beer are finding an ingredient and thinking “I want to make a beer with this”, coming up with a general idea of a beer that I want to make, or just thinking up a dumbass name that you’re way too proud of and then working backwards to then make a beer that fits the name (cough cough Count Bockula cough cough). And I’m sure that other people have other methods, such as perhaps starting at BJCP guidelines and building from that. While I might double-check myself against BJCP guidelines for certain things, I’m gonna be honest that 99% of the time I generally don’t give a shit.

Looking a little deeper into the examples I gave that I use, my train of thought generally follows similar lines. If I find something I want to use as an ingredient, my brainstorming generally starts working similar to how a chef’s works: how can I highlight this ingredient and still have it compliment everything else in the dish (beer)? For example, I’m currently working on a recipe for a beer focusing on soursop/graviola/guanabana. I’ve had a beer with it before (Cervejaria Way’s Sour Me Not Graviola) and it was delicious, but it’d also be nice to not jump on someone else’s boxcar and do something aside from a simple sour beer. To me, this is where the cooking part shines, aside from the actual process of making the beer. Knowing what flavors ingredients contribute and how to layer them is critical in formulating a successful recipe. If I had to rank the methods by difficulty, I’d say that this is probably the more difficult of the 3 ways I typically do it, just because it has the most variables and requires the most research out of the them. Not that it’s excruciatingly painful, but just by comparison on how much work I would need to do.

The next method is coming up with a name and then working backwards. With the aforementioned beer, I started with a name and then worked backwards into making a beer that was fitting of the name. Chaiamese Twins would be another idea where the name came first and the beer(s) came behind it. A more recent example would be that I have been on a kick of designing smoothie-style goses, a la The Answer, and I decided that I wanted to make a pink beer, inspired by Filthy Frank’s Pink Guy, and opted to name it after his second mixtape as the character, Pink Season. So, I had a name, I had an idea for “pink”, and then set out about how to flesh the rest out. I ended up with a guava/lychee/hibiscus gose. This is probably the middle of the road of difficulty as far as the approaches go. When you come at recipe making from this angle, you also have some basic ideas attached to the name, whether it be ideas for style or flavors or special ingredients, a name-first approach tends to iron out a few of those details already.

The final approach I typically consider is attacking things from a style-based angle. This is arguably the easiest in comparison, as you already have the majority of the legwork done by deciding what you want to brew off the bat. By choosing that you want to do a stout, you just need to work out the nuances like flavors, abv, and extra ingredients since you already have a skeleton to string the guts in. It’s going to be darker, so you’re going to use roasted malts. If you’re doing an IPA, you’re going to be using a lot of hops, but it depends on which ones, which style of IPA you want to go with, or how bitter do you want it. It’s almost like a top-down design process. You’ve already got most of the legwork out of the way, it’s just polishing the recipe to a T.

|DRAFTING|

So, the next step comes after you’ve figured out what you want to do as a concept. If the previous step is figuring out where you want to go on vacation, then drafting is figuring out how you want to get there.

Ultimately, this step requires a stronger knowledge of your ingredients. While its easy to get carried away with whimsy during designing a beer, there’s a point that reality and reason have to set in about the actual process of making it. Sure, you want to make a Mexican hot chocolate stout, but how are you going to approach that? What peppers do you want to use, where do you want them in the process, how much do you want?

The first step, to me, is figuring out the grist/grain bill. For the majority of beers, this will dictate a lot of the flavors and is truly the foundation of every beer, regardless of style. What’s your base malt – pilsner, 2-row, Maris Otter, Munich, etc. – and what other specialty malts do you need? What temperature do you want/need to mash at to have no/some residual sugars or is there any special treatment you need to do for the water profile to adjust for the style? What other adjuncts do you need to manage? Is there a specific yeast ester you want or do you want a highly-attenuative strain?

For the sake of example, I’ll stick with the Mexican hot chocolate stout idea that I mentioned earlier. For a beer in this style, I know that I’m going to need a base malt, some darker roasted malts, and probably oats. For flavor adjuncts, I’m gonna need spices, chili peppers, and cacao nibs, at least. Do I need anything like oak chips or anything else? Which yeast?

Now, I’d say that this is another part of where the art side of brewing comes into play. One of the principal elements of design is economy. It’s not so much in the money sense of the word economy, it’s more in the literal meaning of the word: careful management of available resources. In art, this means taking a restrained approach and only using exactly what you need to convey your idea – no more, no less. I like to apply this methodology to my brewing. Effectively, SMaSH beer are the ultimate exercise in this concept. But applying it to a “normal” beer, it’s more along the lines that every ingredient should have a purpose. If you ask yourself the question “what does this malt/hop/spice/xyz do in the beer”, and struggle for an answer, you should probably take it out. Another point being if you have 2-3 similar malts that do the same thing. That’s just redundancy. Perhaps an easier term to put in context would be “efficiency” – if you don’t need it, take it out. Is an IPA with 8 different types of hops really necessary? Do you need to use 10 different malts in a grist? Another favorite saying in any industry is KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid. In summary: unless you’ve got a good reason for an ingredient and it’s integral to your beer, keep things as barebones as necessary.

Now, back to the beer. Knowing my tastes, I’m going to tailor this recipe to suit my needs: I want an English pale malt for the base, I’m going to use a combination of Black Patent, Midnight Wheat, and Chocolate malt for roasty/charcoal qualities, dark coloring, and chocolate/coffee tones (respectively). I also like the flavor and silky mouthfeel that oats give me, so definitely put some of those in as well. I’d like a hint of smokiness, so I could use a small amount of smoked malt, or I could compensate in other ways, like with chipotle and poblano peppers. I want some more chocolate flavor, so I should use cacao nibs, and I also want some mole-esque spices, so cinnamon, maybe some majoram, aniseed, or pepitos (pumpkin seeds) for some authentic hints of flavor. Maybe allspice berries and ginger? What about coffee beans? Should I add lactose to make it a milk stout? Once you get there, you iron out the details.

Say I’m going to make a Oaxacan Mole Stout. For this recipe, I’d start with:

Pearl malt base malt, with small amount of BP, MW, Crystal 80L, and Chocolate

Neutral English ale yeast

Willamette and Tettnang hops

Chipotle and Guajillo chiles for peppers

Cinnamon, ginger, allspice berries, pepitos, and raisins for spicing

Cacao nibs and coffee

Now, this is a fairly convoluted recipe, but only because I wanted to highlight all the angles that you might want to consider when it comes to designing. For a NE-Style IPA, it might look more like:

Pilsner malt base, white wheat, flaked oats

London III yeast

Citra, Mosaic, and Cashmere hops

It comes down to how balls nasty you’re gonna be going with the style and how much you feel like you need to be showy/opulent/referential to what you could be drawing inspiration from.

For Partial Mash/extract brewing, the process only truly differs in what you get to select from. You don’t get to have 25 different base malts, you maybe have 8 different extracts. Effectively, these malt extracts will just be a replacement for a base malt, but you’d still need to figure out specialty malts, yeast, hops, and anything else you need to add to the batch. The differentiations will become more apparent in the next step. In that case, it might more look like:

Pale/Pilsner Extract (dry or syrup), white wheat, flaked oats

London III yeast

Citra, Mosaic, and Cashmere hops

The best advice, overall is to approach this like cooking: look at the flavors of your ingredients, how to best use them, and then utilize them to their fullest. Compliment or contrast, layer them, mix them gently. Don’t be afraid to make some teas/tissanes to figure out what the flavors are or just eat them straight up. Try out some new techniques. Brewing beer can be a culinary adventure!

|TINKERING|

So, now that you’ve got the framework laid out, it’s time to start putting up the walls. At this point, it’s time to hash out the finer details of your beer – ABV, IBUs, color, flavors, and how exactly to utilize all the junk you planned out last step. This is where I might start consulting the BJCP guidelines if I’m brewing a more well-known style, just to try and stick within the realm of what’s considered “normal”, i.e. for a doppelbock, what is the typical starting/finishing gravity, what’s a good level of bitterness to shoot for, etc.

The first point that you need to deal with before going any further is going to be your finalized grist/grain bill. Before you start trying to calculate out IBUs and color or anything else, you need to build out the foundation of the house. So, deciding if we want to make this Mole Stout a dry Irish, an English porter/stout, or a Russian Imperial will dictate differences in numbers for what you’d use.

Unless you’re some sort of brewing rainman, you’re going to need to employ some sort of brewing calculator. I personally like using Brewer’s Friend’s online calculator, and it’s a great free resource, but BeerSmith and BeerTools (which are pay to play, but also inexpensive), as well as a myriad of other online offerings like BrewToad, Brew365, and others that you can find with a quick tickle of the keyboard in Google.

The goal here is to take all those ingredients that you listed out in Part B and translate that into hard numbers that will end up being your final recipe. Literally, tinkering with numbers, minutia, and other aspects to tweak the beer into being exactly what you want it to be. At this point, having information like efficiency helps, but isn’t 100% crucial. It just makes it difficult to make a more accurate assumption on what your exact yields will be. If you are slightly lackadaisical, and just care about your OG and FG numbers, then you might not be as gung-ho about this part, more using it for a general guide than a hard set rulebook.

Shooting for a slightly imperial stout, let’s go with 7-8% range and a nice dark, inky black color. Numbers for 5 gallon batch of a beer like that might look like:

11.5# Pearl Malt | 71%

2# Flaked Oats | 12%

1# Chocolate Malt | 6%

.75# Crystal 80L | 5%

.5# Black Patent | 3%

.5# Midnight Wheat | 3%

Now, there’s reasons for all these amounts too. The half pounds each of Midnight Wheat and Black Patent both drive the color deep in to the dark side, netting us about 50 SRM, like I wanted. While I initially picked them for their color and flavor properties, it’s also important to know that if you use too much of the Black Patent/Roasted Barley family, you could very well end up with a beer that would be reminiscent of fellating a Kingston briquette. Well many specialty malts, a little goes a long way. Certain other culprits include dark roast Crystal malts (such as 120L+, Special B) and other grains like rice, corn, and sorghum, which all can contribute extra flavors if used in high percentages.

The base malt is going to be the workhorse here. It will contribute some flavor (as I picked Pearl over something more neutral like American 2-Row), it’s really the Christopher Walken of the team – everyone loves it, but it’s not the real star, just a great supporting actor. It’s not going to add an insane amount of flavor, The oats are going to add some silky Boz Scaggs’ Low Down-type smooth mouthfeel and the chocolate is going to add a little color and a little flavor (I mean, it’s in the name) while the Crystal 80L is gonna slide in with some sweet rhythm guitar type accompaniment to round out the ensemble and, in tandem with a slightly higher mash temp, keep the beer from getting too thin or too dry. Speaking of mash temps, since we didn’t want a beer to completely ferment out and stay on the more thick and slightly malt-forward side, something from the range of 152F-154F would be an ideal point to balance fermentability and residuals. In a brewing calculator, you can bump weights up and down and see the effect that your tweaks would have on the batch. A little more base malt, a little higher mash temp, some more roasted malts… Each change will have an effect on your final product, but with technology, it’s cool to be able to predict and see what your choices should lead you to.

For the extract/Partial Mash brewers out there, a recipe might look a little more like this:

9# Maris Otter Extract | 65%

2# Flaked Oats | 14%

1# Chocolate Malt | 7%

.75# Crystal 80L | 6%

.5# Black Patent | 4%

.5# Midnight Wheat | 4%

So, now that we have the tang of our barley-pop blade, it’s time to build the hilt – hops. While they might take more of the first seat in an IPA orchestra, in many other styles the hops may be more akin to playing the timpani in the rhythm section: not completely hidden, but definitely in the shadows making things happen. The two hops I prefer for stouts are Willamette and Tettnang. Willamette, a common substitute for Fuggle, is great for a nice mild bittering hop, despite its low AA% compared to hops like Warrior or Magnum, but it does have very high co-humulone levels, which are actually higher than Magnum’s. Tettnang, on the other hand, is a Germanic noble hop, part of the Saaz family, that contributes some light spicy tones. From experience, I know that that duo is a solid combo for hopping an imperial stout. Shooting for something around the 45 IBU mark would be ideal to compliment the maltiness of the stout, so to hit the ideal:

2 oz. Willamette @ 60 min.

1 oz. Tettnang @ 30 min.

1 oz. Tettnang @ 10 min.

For a balance of bittering, flavor, and aroma, those 4 ounces, spread out across the boil, would achieve the goal of a solid bitterness and a lightly spicy finish. Again, with the malts, you can fiddle around in a calculator and see just how much you additions add to the beer at different times and can either add, subtract, move later into the boil… the world’s your oyster on this.

With other styles, like IPAs, you’re going to run into more issues, like how bitter you want, when to add them to the boil, using hop extract, hop bursting, doing a whirlpool addition, hop steeping, dryhopping, double dryhopping… While the malt side of an IPA is going to be a lot more simple than other beers, the hop side will, indeed, be your main source of work. But, much like assembling a malt profile, hops work in the same way. Focusing on having a balance of bitterness and aroma, having flavors that compliment or contrast each other… oh look, cooking terms are back.

The yeast would be the next step of the equation. While London III is great for IPAs, since the yeast can give off a slightly fruity ester when fermented at the right temperatures, I’d prefer to have something slightly more neutral. While California Common/WLP001 is a common choice for many American style, I like English ale yeasts in my stouts. Particularly the Wyeast Neo Britannia from Northern Brewer is amazing (but sadly only available from them), but others such as Safale S-04 or Wyeast British Ale (1098) would be excellent alternatives. Both have a medium-to-high attenuation rate and have a medium flocculancy while providing little to no ester character to the beer. Tweaking in this aspect might be trying different yeasts in different batches.

The spices are going to be a large catch for most people. Things like vanilla, coffee, cacao nibs are common and simple to use. Generally, a quick soak overnight in a sandwich bag with some cheap 100 proof vodka is enough to sanitize any sort of wild yeasts or bacteria on their surfaces. Combined with the fact that they don’t need a super long contact time with the beer (4-10 days) and can be put directly into the primary or secondary fermenters, those aspects are almost a gimme (Note: I don’t soak my coffee, I just “dry-bean”, which I know some people do. Others also may cold brew and blend it back in a bottling. Again, tweaking). Different beans all contribute different flavors, so it’ll be a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure to figure out which ones you want to use in your own beer.

On the other hand, things like cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, and the whole other slew are a little more volatile as far as dosing. You could put them in the boil, but they might draw out too much flavor if you add them too early or used too much, but could not be enough if you were too late. Aging on them for an extended period of time could also bring out some astringent or vegetal flavors, and some of them pull out more readily then others (cloves are a major offender on this front). Since we’re making a Mole stout, with peppers, this is also another super hazard, as once there’s too much heat, it’s near impossible to correct.

What I’ve found easiest to try and manage the spice combo is to make a simple tincture. By that I mean essentially infusing cheap, high-proof vodka with the spices to make a home made extract (that’s why vanilla extract smells boozy, y’all). Throw in the cinnamon and pals, let it sit for a few days, and boom. You got a Mexican spice blend extract (which could also be used to make some Oaxacan White Russians). Ideally, I’d suggest doing the peppers separately so that way you can dial in the exact heat you want at without either over or under spicing the batch. Even if you added too little or two much to an extract, you can always either add more or water it down to suit your needs – you just made a nice little flavor concentrate and aren’t going to have to rely on those cheap, synthetic flavor bullshits. Both of these extracts can be set off to the side and added incrementally at bottling to your exact preference, instead of the ol’ pray-and-spray method of “oh god, I hope this isn’t going to fuck things up”.

|FINALIZING|

Now that you’ve done all the research, math, and creative stuff, you finalize your recipe. That’s not exactly a big fancy step, that just means that you finish all your adjustments, whether it be from your recipe, fixing a water profile, whatever. Write it down on paper or in a word document. This is it. This is what you’re going to brew. Well, within reason. Sometimes there’s necessary improvisation on the fly. Order your grains, get your shit together, and bide your time until brewday. Check everything and then check it again. All your ducks better be in a row.

|BREWING|

Do you, champ. You made it. Brew your goddamn beer like the boss you are because you made your completely own, original brew. Keg it, bottle it, whatever your process is. At this point, you know more than I do. Hopefully, after all that work, everything came out as close as possible to how you planned them and you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

|”TASTING NOTES”|

As you can see, the first three parts of this process are incredibly more complicated than the actual execution. As ol’ Ben Franklin said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. It’s better to be incredibly thorough during your planning than try to fix problems on the fly.

Oh, and if you were curious, that fictional beer we made had a name – Señor Baracho. I got attached enough to it through out this entire adventure that I thought it effectively deserved a name.

Now get out there and make your beer!

P.S. – Here’s a list of resources in case you want/need some more information to help in the creation process:

References for Malts and their qualities:

All about Hops and their qualities:

Yeast Strains and their Producers:

Additional Reading: