Inductive versus Deductive Recipe Formulation

I figure out what I want to brew, come up with a recipe, then inventory the store room and adjust the recipe as needed.

 

I'm inductive, but kinda wish I was deductive.

 

Pencil me in as 'conductive.'

 

Neither and both.

 

Beer is good.

 

You're overthinking it.

 

How about putting together a recipe and simply waiting to see how it turns out? With experience you find out what works anyway and can formulate a recipe which is going to give what you're looking for.

 

Deductive. The way you defined inductive amounts to a crap shoot. (Though I'm not sure. Is inestimated actually a word?) Not that I don't experiment with a new ingredient from time to time, but I'm starting with an idea of what it will contribute.

Edit: your question is kind of interesting in terms of the averagely perfect projects. I'm guessing that most people started off with their own idea of the perfect american stout (or IPA previously), and used your definition of 'deduction' to guide their initial votes. But once that individual vision goes off the rails, I think (from reading the comments) that there are several strategies people are using in future voting.

 

I most certainly do both of these things. I might start a recipe using the deductive model, and then buy ingredients. But I might end up with more ingredients than I need to use, just because of the quantities sold do not match the recipe. For those items that I have and excess of, I will try to inductively construct a second recipe... "What would I like to do with this extra 3 oz of roasted malt? How should I reuse the remaining EKGs? What could I make by topcropping that yeast..." etc. I like this latter exercise because it adds a different kind of creativity to this phase of brewing.

 

My brew begins to take shape the moment I stand at the LHBS and pull grain, hops and yeast.
Since the final product is never 100% pre-determined, its always 100% spot on.

This madness has worked exceptionally for years.
Cheers.

 

Depends on the beer. Sometimes I start with the idea and work backwards to determine a recipe. Sometimes I have a new hop variety or a delicious fruit, and I come up with an interesting way to use them (not entirely knowing what the result will be). Just tapped an IPA with Pacific Jade and Apollo, neither of which I’d used before.

 

This is heavy! Think about the possibility of looking at your finger tip and there is a whole universe inside......

 

I determine what I want my final product to be and then pick the ingredients that I need to make that happen. Although sometimes I will pick a yeast strain I want to use and then design a recipe around the characteristics of that yeast that I want to highlight.

 

Sometimes I start with a flavor profile in my head and use my experience with ingredients I've used in the past to come up with a recipe. Sometimes I use a commercial beer as a starting point, look at a bunch of clone recipes and then come up with my own version based on my desired preferences. Most of the time I just brew my standard house IPA and use whatever hops I have on hand - since I brew 10 gals., I usually come up with a dryhopping combo that I think would work, then let the 1st 5 gals. tell me how to tweek the dryhopping in the second 5 gals.

 

Heck, half the time I just eyeball the hops and scoop them out by the handful, what does that count for?

seriously tho...

I would say that I take an ingredient based approach, not necessarily having a specific final product in mind, only a fairly general one. If I want to try a particular ingredient, I start with that, build the rest around it, and see what comes out of the bottle in the end. It's a particularly good approach for me since I like making SMaSH beers and generally don't mess with particularly complicated recipes or procedures. If you're wanting pale ales and IPAs, this works great, just don't skimp on the hops!

Such an approach isn't good for everything tho, I would not expect this approach to produce a particularly good RIS, for instance. For some of my recipes I've taken a more 'community' approach, and sought advice about recipes before brewing (stouts, rye etc).

 

Seemed like a legitimate question to me