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Tips for creating your own recipes


Brewing Tips

If you’re new to brewing, the prospect of creating your own beer recipe could be very exciting but it can also be pretty daunting. There’s a lot of stuff that’s going on in a beer so we’re going to you some tips that’ll help you to start creating some good recipes. 

Chew on some grains

If you’re lucky enough to have a home brew store you can rock up to and weigh your own grains then you should be able to get an idea of the flavours generated by your grains by chewing on them.

Lets assume your malt bill calls for 90% lager and 10% Crystal. Go ahead a pick up 9 lager and 1 crystal and chew on then for a few moments and your should start to get an idea of the the overall flavour from the malt. 

Small batches all the way 

Most of you will know that over the last few months we’ve taken a little journey back to our brewing roots and started brewing smaller batches (LINK HERE). Since reducing my batch sizes i’ve been able to brew more often but as a result I’ve also been able to refine 2-3 different recipes. Brewing a gallon a time keeps costs down whilst allowing you to pay around with different ingredients. 

If you have the equipment and you want to learn about the flavour that yeast gives off; it might be worth brewing two gallons a time, using the same base recipe and then split the batch between two fermentation vessels and change up the yeasts and enjoy!

Tweak 1 thing at time

Every ingredient in your beer will obviously have an impact on the flavour of your beer and so if you want to make some adjustments to a recipe, we’d recommend you only change one  ingrediant a time to ensure you get the most of the ingredients and ensure you learn how that ingredient impacts the beer. 

Keep notes

The whole point of creating your recipe is so you can re-produce the beer when you need. Ensuring you’re taking notes throughout every stage is important. It may seem unnecessary but keeping solid records of everything you do when you do it through out the brew day will help when it comes to either reproducing a great beer or changing things up. 

If you’d prefer not to note down everything, ensuring you’ve clearly stored the recipe somewhere including the weights of any ingredients and make sure you don’t forget the IBU’s and any of the timings for when you add any fruit or hops. 

Have fun

There are hundreds of different tips or suggestions one could offer but it’s worth highlighting that the best way to create a killer recipe ultimately is to keep brewing and have fun. Sure, make sure you keep notes, don’t change too much at once etc… but what ever you do have fun. If a beer turns out bad, write it off and move on.