the brewing process: trial and error

Depending on your brewing equipment and set up - Cloning beers isn't terribly easy, nor is it extremely difficult but it does take a good amount of knowledge and skill.

With the brewing software that I have, I can build a recipe and get an idea for the color, bitterness and abv - a general idea of how it'll turn out. I'm sure breweries do a bunch of small batches for their tap rooms and one off's. Plus, having their knowledge about the process and ingredients helps out tremendously

 

Going to depend on the brewery and whether it's a one-off or going to be part of a regular line up. If you watched that DFH tv show they did, it looks like they infuse their weird ingredients into one of their beers that are similar to what they want to make, come up with recipe and do a pilot batch on the brewpub system, then make some tweaks based on those results for the production batch - and they run with whatever the result of that is.

IMO, there's too much, "let's see what happens if we do x, then instead of not releasing it or giving a discount on our failed/mediocre experiments, we'll put it in a large format bottle and sell it for 2-3x what we charge for our developed recipes" just to get beer geeks and the beer press to talk about their brewery in craftbeer today.

 

When you brew a lot, even on a homebrew level, you get to know your processes and what they will produce pretty intimately. I brew ~100 gallons a year and most of the styles I have brewed a lot of turn out pretty damn close to what I expected. There's the odd experiment that I wonder about but even those are pretty dialed in by the time I start heating strike water. I imagine even at something as small as a 200-300 bbl/year clip, that knowledge and intuition would be greatly amplified.

So I guess what I'm saying is, for good, experienced brewers, I bet that process doesn't take nearly as long as you might think.

 

Gonna echo what Lee says, for the brewer who has experience with the system he is using, and trying to use ingredients that are familiar I imagine it would take a maximum of 3 batches to get it dialed in to perfection, but likely many would be good to go after attempt number 1 or 2. These guys are that good.

I also brew a lot, and using my system I am rarely surprised by what I get, and generally know what needs done if it isn't exactly to my liking first try. That said, this recent porter I brewed with scraps is a pretty big disappointment I wasn't expecting.

 

An experienced brewer will have a pretty good idea of what recipe is required to achieve the desired result.A test brew is the next step and again experience will indicate any necessary changes or tweaks.Another test brew will follow and before long everything should be set. One problem when scaling up to full sized batches is that the result won't be exactly the same as the test brews but again experience is all it takes.