Recipes, finding and altering them

Where to find them?

There are 101 places to find recipes. For starters you will want to make sure the recipes are not to old as there have been many changes in the availability and types of ingredients. Even 5 to 10 years makes a difference. The brew shops will usually let you look through the books and pick a recipe. There are lots of recipe web sites out there however you may not get a well formulated recipe. Here are some trusted resources.

• Come to a club meeting and try our beer and ask for the recipe (my favorite way)
• Our club posts some of our favorite recipes on our site
• Zymurgy magizine and their site has some recipes.
• Brew Your Own magazine and their site has some recipes.
• Brewing Classic Styles book by Jamil Zainasheff has 80 award winning recipes.
• Fred Bonjour has compiled a list of award winning recipes.
• I (Ryan) store my recipes on Hopville.com
  

How to scale a recipe up/down?

Some times you may find a recipe that is for a larger batch size that you want. I would recomend using a program or free site Hopville.com's beer calculus program to help you scale a recipe.  When scailing a recipe I will try to:

• keep the same ingredient percentages
• keep the same OG within a few points
• keep the same IBU and IBU forumula. Find out what formula was used in the recipe. It can make a big difference! Jamil uses Raeger for example.
• keep the SRM close but not a huge factor unless its way off.
• compare your changes to other versions of the same style of beer

Substitutions

I try to follow the numbers OG, IBU and SRM but in the end knowing what grains, hop and yeast can be substituted will take experience. BYO.com has a hop chart that can help with Hop substitutions. The brew shop guys are a good resource also. Also remember that you do spend alot of time and a fair amount of cash on making the beer if getting the ingredient listed means spending a few more bucks it very likely is worth it.  If you just can't get something or are in a pinch then what can ya do. Ask the club members. Drive to Pine Island on a Sunday for second or the twin cities for another. No comment.

This Malt chart might help you substitute malts.

Grain to Extract

For beginners I would try to find a recipe that matches your brewing method. However you may need to change some grain to extract. The general formulas are

Liquid Extract = .75 x Base #
Dry Extract = .6 x Base #

More information can be found on Ted's Homebrew Journal - All-Grain to Extract & Recipe Conversion or this article on extract conversion.

 
Relax, and have a homebrew.
That's if for now. Maybe more to come.
Ryan