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Recipe Design Tab

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The recipe design tool is the central area for building new beer recipes.  It is intended to allow you to quickly select a set of ingredients and see instantly how it affects your beer.  You can perform all of the steps to build your recipe from this single tab.  The other tabs (yeast starter, mash details, fermentation) are used to detail and record your brewing process - but the recipe design takes place here.

 

Recipe design can be a complex process.  For details on making better recipes, see the articles referred to below.  For the basics, follow the process shown below.

 

See Also: Scaling and Adjusting Recipes, Finding your Way Around BeerSmith, Using Profiles and Styles and Adding Custom Ingredients

 

Online Articles: BeerSmith Guide, Recipe Design, Hop Bitterness, Beer Color, Hop Techniques, Mashing Techniques, Understanding Brewhouse Efficiency, Partial Mash Brewing, Beer Style Articles

 

Recommended Recipe Design Process

oOpen a new recipe by clicking on the Add Recipe button from My Recipes view.
oThe Recipe Design tab will be selected by default
oEnter the name of your recipe, your name as the brewer and pick the type of recipe you want to create (all-grain, extract or partial-mash)
oChoose your equipment profile by clicking on the equipment name button. If you have not already done so, it is recommended you set up an equipment profile to match your particular set of brewing equipment.  This should populate the batch size, efficiency and boil size fields.
oIn the style guide section, select a target style for your beer by clicking on the Style name
oIf you are an all grain or partial mash brewer, select the Mash profile for your beer by clicking on the mash name - if you are a beginning all grain brewer, I recommend you choose the "Single Infusion, Medium Body, No Mash Out" profile.  See Mash Profiles for more details on available profiles.
oStart adding ingredients to your beer using the various "Add" buttons next to the ingredient list.  As you add ingredients the color of the beer glass icon and estimated original gravity, bitterness and color will be adjusted.  These numbers will continuously be compared to the style you selected and displayed on scale below the ingredients.
oYou can select your carbonation (bottling/kegging) method and aging profile to match your beer near the bottom of the dialog

 

Customizing your Display

oIn the bottom right of the design view you can customize your display using dozens of recipe fields using the Select Fields button

 

Adjusting Grain Percentages

oClick the Grain Pct button next to the ingredients list
oAdjust the recipe grain percentages until the total is 100% and press OK - BeerSmith will adjust the weights of the grains to match your percentages

 

Adding a Picture

oYou can use the "+" and "X" buttons to the right of the beer glass icon to add your own thumbnail picture (or delete it) of your brew