making recipes

I don't think that exists, at least not without hiring a personal brewer. You should study ingredients to learn what characteristics they give a beer, and then write your own recipes. Brewing Classic Styles and Designing Great Beer will help you with this.

 

Beersmith doesn't do exactly what you seem to want. But you do get ingredients with explanations, and the program maps how your beer fits to style, such as alcohol content, SRM, and IBU's.

Anwyay: Beersmith.

 

So you want to tell a program that you want a recipe for a pale colored slightly bitter beer with an aroma of citrus zest and pineapple with an ABV of 6.2% and the program will print off a recipe in a willy wonka type fashion?

Nothing of that sorts exist that I'm aware of.

 

Beersmith is the closest you'll find. It's pretty good too, worth the price. It's not perfect, but it's an a pretty powerful tool if you can get past the minor flaws. Vikeman's spreadsheet is another tool of similar utility, and he certainly knows what he is doing.

Making recipes is easier than you think. For one thing, beer is much more forgiving than most people think it is. If me and ten other people of reasonable experience were to be given a beer to brew, say "make a fairly hoppy pale ale with medium body, ABV 5.5 - 6.5% and a medium orange color," and were told not to search online or make any posts on forums, we'd surely get ten different recipes (with possibly quite a big difference between a couple of them). However, there's little doubt that every result would be tasty beer. You just have to get an idea of a baseline for a recipe, then tweak it. Some tweaks are better than others, but if you keep it reasonable, you probably won't make any drainpour ale. Almost all my recipes are somewhat experimental.

However, don't take it too far. I wouldn't even begin to know how to improvise a berliner weiss, a high ABV RIS, or a fruity tasting lager. Brew within your experience level, and step it up slowly. Beginners rarely make a terrific imperial stout, but it's not hard to make a terrific pale ale if your basic procedures are sound.

Personally, I like to experiment with SMaSH beers (single malt, single hops). You learn a lot about individual ingredients that way. Some have been better than others, but every last one has had every bottle disappear in short order, if that tells you anything.

And you can always dream up a recipe, then float it by a friend with more experience, or post it and see what feedback you get. I have done this lots of times. No shame in asking for help.

Good luck!

 

That resource is your brain, after it has been filled with some learning from reading/discussion and some experience brewing with different ingredients and tasting the results. There's no shortcut. Some of that reading/discussion can be on forums like this one... you can ask specific questions about how to achieve something, and get lots of input. And 'critique my recipe' threads can be helpful if you state your goals.

 

I heard that Pico Brew offers some excellent recipes. All at the push of a button. :-)

 

I'll double up, Beersmith, and post here..

Look up recipes of beers you like, and have brewed and liked. Tinker with those.

Got a recipe with:

90% Base
3% Carapils
7% Crystal

and you liked it, but thought it was a bit sweet, hops didn't pop, the mouthfeel was too much..

Post that, and someone would offer you to just do:

95% Base
5% Carapils

Mash 2* lower.


Get a recipe book and learn from those.

 

My brew process is deciding what style (loosely speaking because I'm not a stickler for the style guidelines) I want to brew. I look at a few recipes that are to style and I take what I like from each. I add and subtract from the style to my peronal taste. This will come with more brews under your belt. This is very similar to cooking, where you might stick to recipes to the T until you learn the lay of the land.

I like Fatc1ty's comment about running your recipe past other people. Seasoned brewers can help you get more of what your after before it's too late and you brew 5 gallons of something that missed your expectations.

 

missing your expectations isn't always bad tho. sometimes it just means you've got a different kind of tasty beer than you thought you were going to have. My current oatmeal stout tastes more like a sweet stout than an oatmeal stout, but it's still tasty beer. My first smash was way underhopped, but it was still a tasty (albeit malty) pale ale anyway. If you're not sure how much willamette to use, take the conservative estimate, then DOUBLE IT.

Solid process = high chance for tasty beer even, if your expectations aren't met.

 

So much of this. I recently opened a carbing bottle of a New World Porter clone that I missed the mash temp by a good 6* on. And it's STILL a tasty beer. Much more roasty bitter due to the lack of sweetness/body the higher temp would have provided, but I'll use the data and my wife likes it a lot, so it's still a win in my book. I've learned twice now that I need to overshoot my strike temp by even more (apparently my apartment is pretty chilly...or something).

I also experienced the under-hopping thing for a my first few batches that I thought would be hoppy. Nope. Nothing to fear. Dial it up.

At least on my fledgling system, I can sum up the takeaways to take my pretty good beer up another notch: More heat, more hops, more yeast.

 

+1 to Vikeman's remarks.

Four excellent resources for thinking about recipe design: Daniel's Designing Great Beers, Zainasheff and Palmer's Brewing Classic Styles, the BJCP Guidelines, and Mosher's Radical Brewing. Mosher's Tasting Beer is also worth a read. One of the best ways to learn about particular base malts and hops is to make SMASH (single malt and single hop) beers.

 

You should definitely do some reading of the books that Utahbeerdude and myself mentioned, since there are multiple ways to achieve body, you have to figure out what would work best for you. Partial mash can make a difference, in that you'll have control of the mash temp, or can add wheat malt or unmalted grains to add body, but you could add various and sundry crystal malts if you just steeped. Then there's always yeast strain selection. All of these will probably also alter the final flavor of your beer as well.

 

In general, to learn to build recipes, I think you will find it helpful to read other people's recipes and experiment with them occassionally. Beersmith or other programs will help you get a feel for how color, bitterness, gravity, and alcohol change as you change ingredients, but ultimately, you'll need to brew the beer to develop a sense of what you like and don't like.

I think the biggest mistake I made when I started to make my own recipes was to try too many new things at once. I recall an amber ale recipe that experimented with several specialty malts at once: rye malt, biscuit malt, aromatic malt, honey malt, crystal 60, etc. It was a muddy mess of a beer - I didn't like it and didn't know exactly why. Often, too many types of malt or hops will not let any flavors shine. I also learned to keep specialty malt percentages down. Figure out what your threshhold is for crystal malt, for example. For me, >10% is probably too much and often 0-5% is ideal. Also, play around with different maltsers - not all 2-row is the same, not all crystal 40 is the same, etc.

The SMaSH experimentation is a good idea. Of course, you can build on it to learn specialty ingredients: Single base malt + single specialty malt.

 

I'll give myself a little self-love here, but I think this is a handy way to go about things:

 

Holy shit your avatar looks like that guy..

 

Terrifying ain't it.