THERE IS NOTHING wrong with using existing recipes – in fact, some brewers prefer to use recipes that are tried and true rather than spend precious time in experimentation. If this appeals to you, you’ll find lots of sources, including friends, books, and websites. Brewing “clones” of well-loved commercial beers is also popular. Magnanimous commercial brewers often post a home-brew version of a popular recipe on their own websites. Just because you are using “someone else’s” recipe doesn’t mean you can’t put your own mark on it by adjusting the specialty malts slightly to achieve a lighter or darker color, substituting one hop variety for another, or using a different yeast.
In this chapter, you will learn the fundamentals of recipe formulation. You won’t find it overly technical – I tend to take a commonsense approach to recipe creation, particularly in the case of those new to brewing craft beer at home. That’s not to say brewing methodology and calculations are not important. They certainly are, but I believe the novice and occasional intermediate home brewer shouldn’t be overly burdened with information which, at their level, won’t have a significant impact on the beer. If you have a basic understanding of beer’s main ingredients, their properties, and how, why, and when they react and interact, you will be able to adapt existing recipes or formulate your own simple ones easily enough.
Earlier, I compared brewing to cooking, more specifically, baking. When you make a pot of soup, you can get away with throwing in a little of this or that, or adding a random ingredient without compromising the results. That approach doesn’t work with baking, or for that matter, with brewing. Sure, brewing beer lends itself to some flexibility, but like baking a cake, the necessary enzymatic and chemical reactions will only take place under controlled conditions. Equally important: you want it to taste good.
Collaborations on recipe formulation require considerable sensory evaluation.
Recipe formulation can be a serious business.
To that end, I have a short list of rules – really suggestions – for the beginning brewer:
• Brew to style
• Brew a beer that you would like to drink
• Understand the properties of barley, hops, and yeast
• Use only ingredients that are fresh and/or have been stored properly
• Use appropriate ingredients
• Remember that the process doesn’t end with the boil.
I once had an assistant brewer who, on his first day, was disappointed to learn I worked from a predetermined recipe when brewing the pub’s house beers. I explained that a 15-barrel (465-gallon) batch of beer doesn’t lend itself to experimentation; customers, the ones paying for the beer, want and expect a consistent product. To be sure, that doesn’t rule out occasionally “tweaking” a recipe by making subtle changes, such as adjusting the quantity of a specialty grain, substituting a similar hop, or modifying the process slightly.
Chefs and bakers are often reluctant to share their formulas, but you’ll find brewers to be more generous with their recipes. That’s because brewers know how difficult it is for another brewer, particularly a home brewer, taking into account the raw materials, brewing system, characteristics of the house yeast, and brewing techniques, to replicate a recipe exactly. A great beer is not just the result of a great recipe; the execution of that recipe is just as important.
I will again use the example of baking a cake. I’d have no qualms about giving three friends my signature (and hypothetical) cake recipe and inviting them to bake it in their own kitchens. Each friend would purchase his or her favorite brands of ingredients, might interpret the directions differently, and would use their own oven, resulting in variations in temperature. Each would also employ their own techniques and baking style; some perhaps less diligent than my own. Lastly, I have no doubt each would decorate and serve the cake differently than I had done. To me, beer is very much like that cake.
The logical place to start is with the style. What beer would you like to brew? A light-bodied golden ale or a fuller-bodied amber or brown ale? A robust porter or stout? It makes sense to brew a beer that you, personally, would like to drink. However, it’s also advisable to keep it simple, at least until you’ve successfully brewed several batches. All of the above styles are good choices for a beginner. They are also ales, so temperature control will not be an issue.
Professional brewers hope to have their beer recognized at prestigious competitions. A steward pours a flight of beers to be judged at the Great American Beer Festival, held annually in Denver, Colorado.
As we discussed in an earlier chapter, all beers are brewed to a particular style, and I strongly recommend keeping to this, particularly when you begin to brew beers. Making a beer with established parameters will help you to gain familiarity with a particular beer style, and on a practical note, you’ll know how the beer is supposed to look and taste, and whether or not you’ve brewed it successfully.
The style of beer you decide to brew will determine your ingredients: the quantity and type of grains or malt extract, hop variety or varieties, and the strain of yeast. Remember that you have some flexibility within established style guidelines. To use another cooking metaphor, let’s use the example of chicken piccata. The dish is typically made with coated and browned chicken cutlets, butter, lemon juice, and capers. If you don’t like capers, you can simply leave them out. Depending on whose recipe it is, you expect some variation. However, if you ordered chicken piccata at a restaurant you wouldn’t expect to be served a dish with red sauce. Or cheese.
With the right recipe and execution, home brewers can achieve the gold standard.
So, back to beer styles. Like a classic food dish, each style has its own specific set of guidelines, a range of parameters that dictate how the beer should look, taste, and smell. If the beer is to be entered in a professional or amateur competition, any variation from the established guidelines will result in the beer being disqualified.
You’ll want to keep your ingredients in line with what you are brewing. While a classic, West Coast hop with citrusy notes is completely at home in an American IPA or pale ale, it would be out of character – and not to style – in a European-style lager. The same holds true for the yeast you select. If you’re brewing a dry Irish stout, you can use a specific strain for that style, or a more generic ale yeast – the choice is yours. You would not, however, use a Belgian ale yeast for a true stout, nor would you use anything but a German Hefeweiss yeast for an authentic representation of that particular style.
“Malt” or “grain bill” refers to the base of the beer, regardless of whether malt extract is being used in addition to or in place of grain. The grain bill determines flavor, body, color, and alcohol content. To make a lighter-bodied beer, assume about 1 pound of malt extract or 1½ pounds of grain per gallon. So a typical grain bill for a 5-gallon batch of this style of beer would be around 5 pounds of extract or 8 pounds of grain. This formula would result in an original gravity in the range of about 1.032 to 1.042, depending on the type of extract (light, dark, dry liquid) and/or grains (pale or specialty) used. A more typical grain bill might call for 5½–6 pounds of extract and 8–10 pounds of grain. Stronger, more full-bodied styles will require even more.
Another example I like to use when giving brewery tours or training staff is to compare the mash tun to a coffee pot. If you want to brew a stronger pot of coffee, there are two ways to do it: either add an extra scoop or two of coffee at the start or decrease the amount of water for a stronger cup. So increasing or decreasing the amount of extract or grain will have a direct effect on a beer’s alcohol content.
A pale malt is generally used as a base, with additional specialty malts used to contribute color, aroma, and flavor. Some lighter-colored specialty malts also contribute fermentable sugars, though highly kilned malts – roasted and black for example – do not. Here’s why it’s necessary to have an understanding of your ingredients and the process. While you might be tempted to brew a beer using all specialty malts, including that wonderful raisiny crystal malt, or that intense coffee-like roasted malt, you won’t have enough fermentable sugars to turn your wort into beer.
Grain color, and more importantly its impact on the color of the resulting wort, is often represented in degrees Lovibond, a scale created by the British brewer Joseph W. Lovibond in 1883. This scale is a visual standard and somewhat subjective, therefore the more modern Standard Reference Method (SRM), measured more accurately by a spectrophotometer, is often used to describe beer color instead. Malt is still assigned a Lovibond rating; this will be helpful in determining the color of your beer.
Beer color ranges from very light straw-hued American lagers (2–4 SRM) to very dark stouts (25–40 SRM) with a wide spectrum of shades in between, for example, golden, copper, orange, amber, red, garnet, and brown. Note that it can be difficult to achieve a very light-colored beer when using malt extract.
Hops have resins that contain alpha acids (AA), which contribute to the bitterness in beer. These resins are insoluble in water. When hops are boiled in wort, the resins are dissolved and a chemical reaction called isomerization takes place, facilitating hop absorption. Only a percentage of the available bitterness is utilized. The longer a hop is boiled, the more bitterness is extracted. Each hop variety is assigned a bittering range measured in AA, a percentage that indicates the hop’s bittering potential. This value will fluctuate with each year’s harvest.
Hops are added to the wort at the beginning of the boil (bittering addition) and at the end (aroma or finishing addition). These two additions are sufficient for many recipes. Often one or two midboil additions are added, as well, if a hoppier, more bitter beer is desired.
Each beer style is assigned a bitterness, or International Bittering Unit (IBU) range. IBUs are also included in beer style guidelines. For example, a German pilsner has a range of 25–45 IBUs, a dry Irish stout a range of 30–45 IBUs, and an IPA a range of 40–60 IBUs. Hop bitterness is less noticeable in malty, heavy beers.
The yeast you select should be appropriate to the style of beer you are brewing. If you elect to keep it simple (recommended) it will be a fairly neutral yeast with little or no influence over beer flavor. This is also a good time to discuss temperature, while acknowledging that most novice home brewers have no reliable way to control it. The yeast strain you’ve selected will dictate the range in which you’ll ferment your beer, although for ales, that range is fairly forgiving. A warmer fermentation will result in a fruitier, more estery beer, appropriate for many styles including English ales, while a slightly cooler temperature will yield drier, crisper beer. Too warm, and you leave your beer open to a host of off-flavors. Some years ago, I was given a home-brewed beer with strong lavender notes. It was actually a pale ale fermented in a 90ºF attic!
By now you’ve realized we haven’t discussed water treatment. I’m sure many will disagree with me, but at this level, it’s an unnecessary burden to place on the novice brewer. Many home brewers (and some commercial brewers) never treat their water and still make great beer. Anyone wanting more information on the subject of water chemistry can find it elsewhere (see “Further Reading”).
Lastly, you will want to know the alcohol content of your beer. This is an easy calculation as long as you have a good hydrometer, calibrated to give an accurate reading of liquid between about 60–70ºF. Subtract your final gravity (FG) from your original gravity (OG) and multiply by 105. This will give you the alcohol by weight (abw). Now, convert that figure to the more commonly used alcohol by volume (abv) by multiplying by 1.25 (105 and 1.25 are constants).
As an example:
1.042 (OG) – 1.010 (FG) = .032 × 105 = 3.36% abw 3.36 (abw) × 1.25 = 4.2% abv
Recipe formulation can be challenging, particularly when formulating more complex styles of beer. Luckily, in addition to software designed especially for the home brewer, there are numerous free online sites and resources that provide guidance and built-in calculators that allow you to determine extract yield, bitterness, color, and other parameters quickly and painlessly. Unlike that pot of soup, your brew isn’t finished just because the boil has come to an end. Your beer is still weeks away from being done – don’t neglect the follow-through. Despite using the correct methodology and calculations, the only surefire way to guarantee your beer will turn out the way you want it to is through experience.