Beer Recipe Design

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that the basic principles of beer recipes design are often misunderstood and rarely well articulated. This week we’re going to look at how you can design a great beer recipes at home using a tried and true process. What follows is an what I consider an overview of the essence of beer recipe design.

Starting a New Recipe

When I build a new beer recipe, I almost always start by picking a target beer style. This is not to say that the style defines the whole beer as there is plenty of room for interpretation and creativity, but by starting with a beer style, you establish the baseline for the beer you are going to brew.

A good starting reference is the BJCP style guidelines. Organized by the Beer Judge Certification Program, the style guideline provides detailed specifications and suggested ingredients for nearly 100 different styles of beer. So if you want to brew an Irish Stout, or Bavarian Weisse, this is a good place to start. These guidelines also provide ranges for average bitterness, color and original gravity for the beer which can help you achieve the appropriate balance for the beer.

Choosing the Ingredients

The next step in designing the beer is to pick appropriate ingredients. Beer is made from malt, hops, water and yeast (occasionally with a few spices). Before you jump to doing detailed design, do a bit of research to determine what ingredients in each category are typically used your target beer style, and in roughly what proportions. For proportions, I prefer to work initially in percentages such as 80% pale malt, 15% carmel malt and 5% chocolate malt – this makes it easier to scale things later on.

The BJCP style guide provides some information on typical ingredients used, but often does not have detailed breakouts of proportions. The BeerSmith Blog Style Articles do provide more detailed information on the history of different beer styles and percentage of ingredients used. Our recipes page also provides some great examples, as do a number of other online recipe web sites, though one must be careful when using someone else’s recipe as often they are far from the actual beer style.

Another great resource is brewing books – one of my favorites is Ray Daniel’s book Designing Great Beers, which has detailed analysis of percentages of ingredients used in award winning and commercial beer examples. Finally, you can often find articles or messages for a particular beer style using a simple google search or search on a discussion forum.

The goal of all of your research is to determine ingredients appropriate to the style. Using the wrong ingredients, or selecting the wrong proportions will result in a beer with the wrong flavor and balance. You will rarely go wrong using ingredients that are authentic to the style.

Brewing by the Numbers

Once you have your ingredients selected, and have them apportioned in roughly the correct way its time to actually enter the beer into a spreadsheet or program such as BeerSmith, and run the numbers. This is an important step, which many beginning brewers skip, but if you don’t have the recipe properly adjusted and balanced for your equipment and your settings you will likely end up way off your target style.

The critical parameters to look at as you enter and adjust your ingredients are:

  • Original Gravity (OG)– A measure of how much fermentable and unfermentable malt you have added to the beer. The original gravity typically determines how much potential alcohol you will have in the beer, as well as how malty the beer will be. The style guideline provides a range for this parameter.
  • Bitterness (IBUs) – Bitterness from hops balances the flavor of your beer. For beer design, you want to estimate your bitterness in International Bitterness Units (IBUs). Again you want to use the style guideline to determine the appropriate IBU range.
  • Color (SRM) – You can estimate the color of your beer from the ingredients used. Estimating the color is important, as you don’t want your pale ale to be black or your stout to be blonde in color. Obviously darker malts add color.
  • Bitterness Ratio (IBU/GU) – The bitterness ratio gives you a rough measurement of the bitterness to malt balance for the beer. A hoppy beer will have a high bitterness ratio, while a malty beer will have a low one. We have a separate article on calculating bitterness ratio as well as the ranges for different styles.
  • Final Gravity (FG) – While it is very difficult to accurately predict final gravity ahead of time, I often look at the final gravity for the style to get an idea of the attenuation needed from the yeast. Attenuation refers to the percentage of sugars consumed by the yeast, and some styles require high attenuation yeast to achieve a smooth clean flavor, while others need low attenuation yeasts for complex flavor.
  • Carbonation (Vols) – The carbonation of the beer should match the style. Carbonation is measured in volumes, where one volume would essentially be a liter of carbon dioxide gas dissolved into a liter of beer. Fermented beer at room temperature with no additional carbonation contains about 1.0 volumes of CO2. Authentic English ales are often served with little or no carbonation (1.5-2.0 vols) while many German beers are highly carbonated (up to 3.0 vols). If you research the style, you can often determine the correct carbonation level for the beer.

Brewing Techniques

After you have the proper ingredients and have balanced the recipe by the numbers, the final step is to look at the techniques needed to brew this style of beer. Different styles definitely require application of a variety of brewing techniques. Some of the techniques to consider include:

  • Hop Techniques ­– A variety of hop techniques are available, most of which are covered in our article on hop techniques. Examples include first wort hopping, dry hopping, late hop additions, bittering hops, and use of a hopback. Different beer styles require different methods to achieve the appropriate balance.
  • Mash Techniques – For all grain and partial mash brewers, adjusting your mash temperature is critical to achieving the appropriate body for your beer. Lower mash temperature during the main conversion step will result in a lower body beer and higher mash temperatures result in more body. In addition, advanced brewers may want to consider advanced techniques like decoction mashing if appropriate to the style.
  • Fermenting, Lagering and Aging – The temperature for fermenting your beer should be appropriate for the yeast and beer you are using. Yeast manufacturers as well as most brewing software publish appropriate temperature ranges for fermentation of each yeast. Aging and lagering should also match your target style.

Beer design is clearly one part art, and one part science which is what makes it an interesting and enjoyable hobby. However, if you do your homework, select quality ingredients, run the numbers and follow good brewing techniques you can make fantastic beer at home using your own recipes.

Thank you again for joining us on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. If you enjoyed this article, don’t hesitate to subscribe. Also I recently added a “tip jar” to the left sidebar here. If you feel the blog provides value, you can make a contribution of any amount.

16 thoughts on “Beer Recipe Design”

  1. Good post, but may I offer a clarification on what you said about original gravity?

    You’re right that original gravity includes both the fermentable and unfermentable elements of your wort. Two worts with an O.G. of 1.048 might have very different proportions of fermentable sugars.

    The target beer style might want a higher or a lower percentage of fermentables in the wort. E.g., a pilsner should be highly fermentable while a scotish ale not so much.

    You touch on this in your section on mash temperatures. An advanced brewer can control the proportion of fermentables by the stiffness and temperature of the mash.

    It’s harder for beginning brewers. Their best choice is to do a little research on the malt extract they use. Generally speaking, Laaglander and John Bull are said to be less fermentable and Muntons and Alexanders more.

  2. Wow, I didn’t know there was so much involved in brewing… My dad used to use those kits you can buy but never did anything beyond that.

    I suppose if you want to show your creative side, it’s better to be employed at one of the smaller beer suppliers, as the mainstream ones won’t stray far from one recipe.

  3. Hi , i had questions about beersmith 2. i downloaded the free trial . I have only justed started brewing with all extract from my local homebrew store which carries brewers best , i just finished a batch of imperial blonde ale with a strawberry flavoring and the color of the ale looks more like an amber color then a deep gold. Can i plug in the recipe i recorded into a notebook to make refinements and adjust color into beersmith2, I also noticed that i did not see a listing for munton’s liquid malt extracts… is there a way to input that into beersmith2 as well

  4. Not sure what I am doing wrong but I simply want to add and or edit Briess LME to my recipes but one; cannot find it in the trial application’s database and two; can’t seem to make any additions that stick. Please enlighten me…

  5. Pingback: Five Critical Tools for Beer Recipe Design | Home Brewing Beer Blog by BeerSmith

  6. i have bought this program twice and still can’t bring it up on my computer as more than a trial copy wtf

  7. Hi brad,
    I have recently purchased beer smith 2. Previous to that I was on your free trial.
    These two scenarios have overlapped and I was wondering if that would effect my general access to beer smith?
    when I select a recipe, I download the recipe yet I can never find it? It’s in my recipes and I’m getting irritated. Please help me.
    Adam

  8. Are you downloading it to a separate file? The simpler method is to go to View->Cloud Search and when you find a recipe you like just click “Copy Local” and it will put a local copy in your My Recipes folder. Drop me a note at beersmith at beersmith.com if you still have troubles.

    Brad

  9. Seems like the fermentation primary start date is always the brew date. Correct?
    Can I make the fermentation start date different from the brew date?
    I usually let the wort settle a day with a blanket of CO2. Then drop trub with a site tube/yeast harvester from bottom of the conical, oxygenate, and then add 2 stage starter slurry to begin Primary.

  10. griller diller

    does Beersmith3 have any info on water chemistry adjustments? Please advise. thanks

  11. I am loving my BeerSmith 3, and do not use any other brewing programs.
    Question: I bought the BeerSmith 3 for my IPad. Why can I not use it or get license for both IPad and my Windows computer.? I have BeerSmith version 2 on my Mac, but it’s an envy where use computer like a laptop.
    Thank you once agai for an explanation brewing program.

  12. If you purchase a desktop Gold or higher membership you get access now to both the desktop version and the web version which you can use from any browser – including all your devices.

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