Simple Recipes for a Beginners

What style?

 

Welcome to the BA site, cc, and to the Homebrewing forum. Besides knowing your favorite styles beside Amber (and maybe favorite hops too if your favorite styles might include IPAs or DIPAs) it will be helpful to know whether you brew all-grain or extract recipes, preferred batch size and the size of your boil kettle and fermenter that you have, and if you can ferment ales with the temp around 65 degrees.

Also, have you read John Palmer's book, How To Brew? It's almost required reading for homebrewers, and the first edition is free to read online at Howtobrew.com

 

This beer is definitely flavored:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/cocoa-banana-sweet-stout-all-grain.386645/

But seriously... are you bring extract or all grain? If the former, are you interested in trying the latter? And what do you mean when you say "flavored?"

 

Homebrewing is an awesome hobby!
What does 'limited success' mean about your previous attempts? Did you want or expect something that was lacking, or maybe something was there that you didn't want/expect?

 

For pale ales I’m a big fan of 3 grains, 2 hops, one yeast. Really keeps everything from getting muddled.

usually 9pds base malt, 4-8oz of something like victory or c10, then 8 oz of Vienna or Munich. If I’m issuing Vienna or Munich as a base malt then I often only do 2 grains.

 

From a learning point of view, I actually like to go even simpler than that if I can - maybe one or two malts and one late hop variety for a pale, three malts and no late hops for a porter and so on - basically no more than one ingredient playing any role in the recipe. I find it helps me to get more of an idea of what each ingredient is bringing to the party. Later on I might want to use two or more dark malts or crystal malts or late hops in the same recipe but it's nice to have tried them in isolation first...

 

Here's one that's an extract/partial mash that you could try:

http://beersmithrecipes.com/viewrecipe/812980/lemon-ginger-honey-saison

Just modify it to your specifications.

 

Spices can be tricky to get just right. One way to do it is to make a tincture (with a small amount of vodka or other spirit) and then add to taste at bottling/kegging time. You can dose a sample of a similar commercial beer or homebrew in a glass (of known volume) with a pipette until you get it right, then scale up to your homebrew batch. -> Here's <- a link to a page where you can see/download a cheat sheet called "Scaling Up Flavor Sample Doses" for that.

 

Pilsner DME
Citra hops
Us05 yeast.
You can’t get more simple than this and it’s great.

 

3# Pilsner DME
3# Wheat DME
Bitter to 20-25IBU
Add whatever spices you want at 0min
BE-134

 

Dude,
6 LB DArk DME
Steep. 1LB crystal 60 for 1 hour
Boil
Add 2 oz goldings at first boiling
Cool
1 packet Nottingham yest
Nice beer

 

Since I don’t know your system it’s hard to know but....
Pilsen dme amount depends on volume, but hit a gravity of 1.050 to 1.060.
Assuming a 60 minute boil and 5 gallon batch
0.25 oz Citra @ 60 min
1.75 oz Citra @ 0 minutes
1.0 z Citra dryhop after fermentation for 5 days.