How do you put together an original recipe?

Just a suggestion:
90-95% base malt (pils, marris otter, 2row ect)
1-3% transition malt (something to bridge the gap between base and specialty) (ex. Munich, kolsch)
1-7% specialty malt (special b, Munich, bristish crystal)

Hops to your preferential flavor and bitterness

Yeast to your preferential flavor and attenuation.

It helps (but is not required) have a goal when developing a recipe and try to produce a well made beer. At the end of the day, well made beers are like BJs, the worst one you've ever had was pretty damn good.

 

purchase some brewing books like Brewing Classic styles, or How to brew. You can start by making the recipe as is then adjusting to taste by substituting different ingredients, and before you know it your making your own recipe.

 

I suggest reading "Designing Great Beers" by Ray Daniels. It gives you the basics and foundation for a lot of styles, then where things can differ. I found it very good reading when starting to formulate my own recipes.

 

For creativity.. if you envision what you want out of your beer, I always work backwards, deductively, to pick ingredients based off of what characteristics I want it to impart in my beer.

For scaling up.. Malt yield PPG. Check out how to brew. For instance:

Vienna malt typical yield = 30 pts
30 pts per lb per gal
30 pt x 15 lb / 10 gal

If brewing 10 gal batch for 1.045 recipe. Or

45 = 30 x (X)/10 ... to solve for lbs malt needed.

Hops are a bit trickier when scaling up.

 

I work backwards..

Get an idea of a style I want, and how big or small I want it to be. Then I start with the base grains, any addition grains like crystal and roast malts, and little things like that.

Then I make the hop bill, and pick my yeast based on the style, and back to the original size and how I want the beer to be. Full body, sweet, dry and crisp, and keep in mind anything extra I will do to do the beer.

To get a handle on it, check out other peoples recipes, we have a database here that was just started and is growing, and you can use them and others online as example of what majority of the people do.

 

+1. Ray's book is geared more toward recipe formulation and understanding what makes up certain styles. Also... The new revision of the BJCP guidelines is going to include a 'signature' ingredient section for each style that will be helpful as well. It wont be out for a few weeks though.

 

They should have a couple of different versions (printed or paperback book) usually between 10-15 bucks on the BJCP web site.

 

I will suggest doing a search on this site for brew cipher. It is a excel sheet a user created that essentially calculates alot of the variables for you. It is a little intimidating at first, if you aren't familiar with some of the terminology, but i think you can put an existing 5 gallon recipee in it, and then change the volume, and hit the scale button, and it will scale up the grain bill for you.

 

It's all about Malt PPG. Grain and extract will give you a certain sugar yield per lb per gallon, my post above gives an example. If you want to scale up this is how.

 

Why don't you just stick with making 5 gallon batches that are your own recipes first? You have the base idea of what is needed in that realm as far as proportions go, now take off the training wheels the kits provide and do it yourself. The ratios are already established because you have worked with many of them already, so just complete the circle here.
For my own brewing? I try to get an idea of what I want out of the beer first, and then I go in and fill out the blanks to back that idea up. It could start out with a basic premise for flavor, or more precisely, a singular ingredient I'm fixated on and want to use and what that brings to the beer I will be brewing. From there on in, every other inclusion I bring in has to enable and activate that.
There are a clutch of books that will be of great benefit here. It just depends on what you want to do with your OWN beer as you start making those recipes of your own. If your into brewing to style, of which I am not. Designing Great Beers is an excellent read because it focuses on brewing to style, Ron Pattinsons recently published book Homebrewers Guide to Vintage Beer is also very worth checking out if your interests are in brewing to what history tells us is a style. Beyond that, Sam Caligiones "Extreme Beers" and Randy Moshers "Radical Brewing" are also excellent reads. Personally, I have about trashed my copy of Moshers Radical Brewing book, and it's only been in my library for a little over a year. Take that as both a recommendation and a generous hint.

 

you really do need to know your brewing technique well enough to make some assumptions here. figure out your system efficiency, how much gravity do you extract from your grain? how much bitterness does your technique extract from your hop additions?
with those two points of reference the rest is really not very difficult.
if it helps, you should consider that even the worlds largest brewhouses begin each new recipe on a very small pilot system. not 5 gallons, but a mere fraction of the intended batch size.
Cheers.

 

Join www.beertools.com , they do the math for you. You can also dial up www.brew365.com for a free water calculator.

 

know what sort of work each ingredient is doing. at the very least, that'll help you know what sorts of experiments you can try out.

 

Scaling (homebrew) recipes is based (esentially) on ratios.

If a 5G recipe calls for 10# of malt...then an 8.5G recipe needs 70% more ((8.5 / 5) - 1) * 100 = 70%...i.e., 17#.