Recipe Formulation

Hi,

Does anybody have any recommended book or sites regarding recipe formulation?

Im not looking for how to calucalate how much grain required for ABV and bitterness etc. Im looking for the basics, like how to choose which grain to use and which hops to use for desired flavours etc.

Wondered if anybody has any good information on this.

Thanks

The book that helped me out the most is Ray Daniels "Designing Great Beers".  It is a little outdated in information, but the methodology is sound.  After that, I need to credit Randy Mosher's "Radical Brewing" and "Mastering Homebrew", Palmer and Zainasheff's "Brewing Classical Styles", and Gordon Strong's "Brewing Better Beer".

The Mosher books got me thinking about how and why I am adding certain grains.  Zainasheff's recipes in BCS come with good explanations of why certain grains were chosen for each style presented.  Gordon Strong's book was more about process, but touched upon how different processes influence flavors.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're going to have to do a bunch of homework!

Go to your local liquor stores and micro breweries and start sampling beer. First get a case of plain old American lager: Bud, Bud Lite, etc, etc. This will be the "control" for your experimentation; compare each beer to the control beer and to the other beers you sample. You don't have to drink all the Bud, but you can use a few sips to help you compare what most people used to call, "beer" to the new stuff you're discovering.

Once you identify a few beers that approach your ideal beer, and a few that are just plain old nasty, you can use them as aim points for the beers you want to make - and those you now know to avoid.

You're unlikely to find your ideal beer on the shelf or on tap - if you did that you wouldn't need to brew your own. The idea is to find styles you like then use your imagination to define your target area.

durrettd said:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're going to have to do a bunch of homework!

Click to expand...

Bad news? This is the kind of homework one can enjoy. 

durrettd said:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you're going to have to do a bunch of homework!

Go to your local liquor stores and micro breweries and start sampling beer. First get a case of plain old American lager: Bud, Bud Lite, etc, etc. This will be the "control" for your experimentation; compare each beer to the control beer and to the other beers you sample. You don't have to drink all the Bud, but you can use a few sips to help you compare what most people used to call, "beer" to the new stuff you're discovering.

Once you identify a few beers that approach your ideal beer, and a few that are just plain old nasty, you can use them as aim points for the beers you want to make - and those you now know to avoid.

You're unlikely to find your ideal beer on the shelf or on tap - if you did that you wouldn't need to brew your own. The idea is to find styles you like then use your imagination to define your target area.

Click to expand...

Certainly, if you are looking to 'brew to style', obtaining and sampling beers which epitomize the particular style you are looking to match is a much needed step.  That being said, formulating recipes involves knowing and understanding your ingredients, being able to visualize how they fit together (taste, aromas, mouth feel), and understanding how everything fits together within a recipe.  I started with just the BJCP guidelines and just a bit of a fair number of malts (courtesy of my LHBS) to chew on (literally) to get me started.  The Daniels book was a good boost to the process of developing a formulation, but came several recipes later.

Next in the process of recipe development, I started to take a serious look at brewing to style.  At this point, the buying and sampling of recommended, and some not recommended, standards for a given style becomes important.  Reading Mosher's 'Tasting Beer', helped quite a bit in developing a method for distinguishing aromas and flavors instead of just drinking beer.  To get the most from learning from commercial sampling, this is a critical step.  I can distinguish different malts quite readily and am usually pretty close in guessing what goes into a recipe.  Hop aromas and flavors are beyond me, as I seem to be very sensitive to hop bitterness.  Many of the west coast IPAs are ultra-resinous, bitter, undrinkable witches brew to my palate.

+1 on Brewing Classic Styles and Designing Great Beers... my two most often used books these days.

go and get a subscription to brew your own magazine. they have a lot of informative articles about what ingredients can give certain flavors.

+1 on the Brew Your Own magazine...been a great help!!