Homebrewing Advice

[Badger]

So I've brewed maybe a dozen or so of my own beers. Every time I've done it I've just walked into the homebrew store and picked out a recipe.

A couple of guys at work are having a homebrewing contest in March, and I need to come up with my own recipe for a Stout. Any lessons I can learn from anyone out there who has crafted his own brew before? Recomendations for a starting point? I'm really excited to start studying this as it's going to increase my brewing know how as I'm no longer just following a recipe.


MMMmmmmmmm beer.

[Recliner]

Hopefully you've been keeping notes on every batch that you have brewed, so you have a general idea of the flavors the different ingredients bring. Pick your favorite ones and toss them together and see what comes out.

Another idea would be to take your favorite recipe and try making some small changes to it so that you get a better idea of what flavors those ingredients that you changed cause and then aim for what you like the best.

[johnbgsu]

A good place to look would be brewboard.com. The web site is deicated to people who love to brew. I would come up with a recipe that sounds good, then post it on the forum and ask for advice. Many of the members are very experienced and have won many awards for their brew.

[Badger]

Thanks for putting your first post in my thread.
I guess resources are more what I'm looking for (websites or good books) than actual recipes. I keep all my old recipes, but haven't done a good job of catalogging results.

Ideally I'd like to do it as Recliner suggested, but I brew about ever 2 months, and I'm always wanting to try something new, so I don't really have the time or patience to hone a recipe and compare slight variations.

I guess I'd get this to some extent if I started keeping track of results more. That'll be a priority for this batch. Also I don't trust that my palette is developed enough to properly analyze the beerI make and how the slight variations affected it.

[Klompy]

Make sure the malt you buy is a decent quality malt. I learned this lesson the hard way. I searched online for the best price on ingrediants, and bought enough malt for about 3 recipes. The starting gravity was way off, and it ended up being a really watered down beer. For the next 2 batches I had to adjust water down from 5 gallon, and cut down on my hops to make it come out right.

I made a russian imperial stout about 6 months ago that came out really well, I'll dig around and see if I still have the recipe.

If you're doing all grain though, you're out of my league and I have little to offer.

[RunDownHouse]

Designing Great Beers is supposed to be a really great book for recipe formulation.