Just made my first batch from a recipe. Ready to try my own mix! Any tips?

The oats would go in the mash. If you are extract brewing, then a mini-mash. Steeping (as opposed to mashing) is not a best practice for grains (like oatmeal) whose starches have not yet been converted to sugars.

Most people would put the blueberries in a secondary fermenter and rack the beer on top of them. Boiling is generally not good for fruit additions.

Honey can be added during the boil, at flameout (end of boil), at high krausen, or even after high krausen. The later it's added, the more honey flavor and aroma will be retained. The downside is slightly higher risk of infection. But we're talking extremely low in any case.

 

Also, read this if you haven't already...
www.howtobrew.com

 

If you've only brewed one batch of homebrew, it's probably too soon to try to build your own recipe for exactly the reason you have illuminated: you don't know enough about the ingredients and processes yet. I don't want to discourage your excitement but at the same time I don't want to see you get discouraged by making your second beer likely not a great one. Not all beer styles are rocket science or require a complex recipe but it seems like there are some basics out there you don't yet understand that might make even simple recipe construction a challenge.

You don't have to buy kits, you can find lots of excellent recipes online to start with. If you find some good recipes on a homebrew blog or (sometimes) on a homebrew forum you can read or ask the author how they came up with the recipe and the specific mechanics of it. That can also help you learn more.

 

If you are interested in a good starting point for recipes, I would recommend the book Brewing Classic Styles. I personally gained a lot from listening to The Brewing Network's Jamil Show podcasts available on iTunes for free. There is also a ton of newer content on iTunes that covers a range of topics for home brewers. Long trips, cutting grass, or traveling with in-laws; always something to listen to and learn.

 

Yes, it's in the link. Steeping is just soaking certain types of specialty grains in hot water to extract color, flavor, and body.

Mashing is setting up specific conditions so that the starches in base malts and other grains will be converted to sugars by the enzymes in the base malts. It's similar to a steep, but requires more specific temperatures, water to grain ratios, and most importantly, a base malt that contains enzymes.

Mashing is the step that produces the wort that will go into the boil kettle.

Edit: this may help too... the dry malt extract or liquid malt extract you used in your first batch was produced by the supplier, using a mash, and then concentrated. If/when you make the jump to all grain brewing or mini-mashing, you'll be doing the same thing (except you won't be concentrating it down to a syrup or powder.

 

60 Minutes or longer seems like the norm for boil time. Like Scurvy said Brewing Classic Styles will help you learn what types of malts, hops and yeast go well with each style if you are brewing with extracts. It also has plenty of proven recipes in it. I would try to keep your first recipes simple. Don't feel like you need to add a bunch of ingrediants to make your recipe unique. The only batch that has not worked out for me so far involved fruit and was one of the first recipes I created.

With the hops a good way to go when first starting is use a clean bittering hop (Magnum, Warrior, etc) for your first addition at 60 min and then use flavor and aroma hops at 30 min or less. The closer to 0 minutes left in the boil the more flavor and aroma you will get. Use some sort of recipe calculator to get an idea of what your ibu's will be. Heres an example of my latest ipa hop additions.

60 Min 1oz Warrior
20 Min .25 oz of each Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus
10 Min .25 oz of each Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus
5 Min .25 oz of each Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus
0 Min .25 oz of each Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus

Dry Hop 1 oz each Simcoe, Amarillo and Columbus

 

Excellent advice, I would just copy/paste this for myself except that I don't have any simcoe or amarillo!

But seriously, there is a "formula" that seems to work well with hoppy beers, and this is pretty much it. Early bittering addition, most of the rest of the hops late (I go with 15 minutes or less, but close enough is good enough), don't skimp on the hops, dry hop.

BTW hops tend to cover flaws, especially if the flaws are minor. I figured this out for myself early on. Hoppy pale ales and IPAs are good brews for early in your brewing career. I'm trying to perfect a blonde ale right now and I'm seeing that it's a lot harder to cover up flaws when you're only using 2 1/2 oz of hops, with 20 or so IBUs.

 

I've had a lot of luck just looking at recipes and picking a few things out of each. I post some of those recipes on here and get really good feedback.

 

Read these books: Ray Daniel's "Designing Great Beers", John Palmer's "How to Brew...", and +1 to the earlier suggestion to reference Jamil's book/podcast.

 

Careful, the word is that pretty soon Palmer is going to be on Oprah. It seems that he learned everything from Tasty. The fraud.

 

Less is sometimes more. I always wanted to have 6 different malts and 10 different hops in my IPAs. They came out muddled. So keep it simple and good things will come.

 

They are just praying you look even a 10th like Hayden Panettiere.

 

My second recipe was one of my own. My first was a kit. I did a chocolate porter for my second extract with specialty grains brew. It was good!! I say check out some recipes, Kinda pick and choose your own malt and hop sizes and just see what happens. Take a simple recipe, add or take away from it, and it is kinda your own ya know! Don't overdo anything as said above. keep it simple. get the process down. No matter what you do, it will turn out wonderful

 

There is a lot of good advice on this post.

Mine would be to google "(beer you like) Clone." Pay attention to ingredients, amounts, hop times, etc. It'll help you get a better idea of what some of the ingredients bring to the puzzle. If you like IPAs and love 2-hearted from bells, you'll find out its all centennial hops, so you might want to incorporate them into the IPA recipe you're trying to come up with. Little things like that helped me when I was first formulating my own recipes.