making recipes

Definitely good advice here.

I made a couple muddy ones too, probably from trying to add too many malts. But every SMaSH beer I've made has been somewhere between pretty good and great. Definitely try some smash beers. If you're still doing partial mash, then make a partial mash smash. Use the lightest extract you can find, extra light hopefully, and do a mini-mash with a base malt of your choice. Add only one type of hop and make a pale ale of about 6% ABV.

All my smash beers use 12 lbs of grain, so they're all about the same ABV (they're much easier to compare against each other if you keep the recipes similar). You could perhaps use 3-4 lbs of extra light extract and mash about 3-4 lbs of a base malt. You could even experiment with some of the more flavorful base malts, I am a huge fan of Munich, plus there's golden promise, Vienna, Maris Otter, and others I'm sure, plus different brands of the same malt.

BTW it's ok to make a hoppy smash. You're trying to learn about specific hops and specific grains. Some of my smash beers have essentially been IPAs. My Munich / citra-bomb smash was definitely an IPA.

It may be nearly impossible to make a truly lousy smash beer, unless you're just being obtuse on purpose. Simplicity leaves few places for confounding factors or error. And the beers come out surprisingly good.

 

I will add Brewing Better Beer by Gordon Strong to the list.

 

This video is well worth the 30 minutes.

 

Great video, I posted it on my blog. Everyone should watch it.

 

Before you start trying to make recipes you need to understand the ingredients. That is probably the #1 thing brewers (myself included) do not do enough before trying to write recipes. You don't have to brew with every type of yeast, hop, grain and adjunct but get a strong sense of the flavors of the ingredients you would use and how they are commonly used. I think JZ's advice about steeping grains in water and tasting the water is a good way to understand what flavors you get from grains and you can play around with mixing them and see how different grains taste together in different proportions.

 

I would just take one of the recepies you've already tryed and change a couple of things (malts, yeast, hops,...) but keep the initial proportions