Getting back into home-brewing, starter recipe suggestions?

Thats easy. This being summer and you being in Michigan I would do a Saison.

 

What do you like to drink?

 

SMaSH ale. Go with the marris otter as your grain if you want to add a little more complexity, but i've found standard 2-row to work well. take your pick on the hop front, i've used glacier, magnum and simcoe with great success .

2 Row + Glacier

8.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row)
.25 oz Glacier @ 60 min.
.25 oz Glacier @ 45 min.
.50 oz Glacier @ 10 min.
1.0 oz Glacier @ Flame out
wyeast 1056

 

What size batch was this?

A magnum smash, eh? Just 2-row and magnum? what was your recipe and hops schedule? How'd it come out?

I might have to try that. To be honest, I've never used magnum for anything but bittering. I should probably see what it can do for other things. Perhaps with some GP or some other base malt I haven't tried yet, or even with more of a pale ale base with a little crystal malt.

 

5 gallon batch. GP sounds like it would probably work well.

unfortunately, i can't find the magnum and simcoe recipes. i thought for the magnum, we toned done the bittering additions (i think 1 oz at 60 minutes) and loaded up at flame out (1.5 oz or 2 oz), but still don't expect a ton of flavor and aroma. from the homebrew forums, looks like people are using a little more grain with the magnum to balance the bittering. on the plus side, these recipes aren't very expensive so you can experiment. or, you could decide to dry hop after fermenting for a week to improve flavor and aroma if you don't like what's coming out of the fermentor at that point.

google search turned this up: http://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/magnum-smash

 

Cool. I tend to load up smash ales with late hops, to really get the flavor profile from them. Probably would do a small bittering charge and like 2oz at 5 min and 2oz at flameout if I were to do it (same as bravo/munich smash). Oh, and plus dry hops.

 

If you are new to homebrewing and you like IPAs, then I would start with that. IPAs are hard to mess up, hops will cover up a lot of off-flavors. I recommend this extract w/ specialty grain recipe, its an easy one:http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/brewing/recipe-kits/extract-kits/dead-ringer-ipa-extract-kit.html
That was the first beer I ever brewed and it came out very good.

 

i think a dry hop addition would help especially since the magnum aroma is nuanced. i don't recall doing one, but it has been many moons since i did the magnum smash. good luck!

having recently moved, i haven't had a chance to brew in a couple of months. need to go dust off the kettle after this thread...