Best Source for Recipes

Permit me to share my personal opinion here. If you enjoy a prominent Pilsner malt flavor like bready malt flavor than brewing an extract Kolsch will not be for you.

There are Pilsner malt extracts available but for the most part they are neutral in flavor.

Needless to say but: your choice.

Cheers!

 

OK. So you brewed all the recipes on the BA Recipe Subforum and confirmed that they were weak. Now you are asking the forum that contributed those weak recipes where all the good recipes are. Yes, we're holding out. We only post the weak recipes and hog up all the good ones for ourselves!

All kidding aside, I do like the approach you suggest of taking a good recipe and making small adjustments to it to learn what they do and maybe to feel a little more ownership, too. Although Brewing Classic Styles is turns 10 years old this year, I think it is a great book for this purpose. It includes extract and all grain versions of recipes that are tried and true. You can brew them as is, or you can tweak them and be pretty confident that your recipe is good.

Recipe is just the tip of the iceberg, so don't get too hung up on it, but having a good recipe is a helpful step that allows you to then focus on improving beers through better process.

 

But here is the thing, one persons "failed attempt" is another person's best beer ever.

The challenge is that only you know what you enjoy and seek in a particular batch of beer. I could provide you the 'best' recipe for beer style A and if you accurately recreated that beer you might state: that recipe was a "waste of time".

You really are going to have to make the effort to learn multiple things, for example:

• Which ingredients and brewing process 'defines' a given beer style/batch
• What your personal preferences are for a given style/batch
• etc.

The best aspect of homebrewing is that you get to choose how to brew a given style of beer using your preferred methods.

Just brewing per homebrewer's X recipe (or commercial brewery's Y alleged recipe) will not entirely get you there.

As the old Mazda commercial stated: Life's a journey, enjoy the ride!!

Cheers!