Discovering new delicious beer recipes is what makes home beer brewing such a fun hobby. Not only can you discover great tasting new beers but you can tweak recipes and make a good beer taste even better. Making your own beer requires several different pieces of equipment and can range from low to high end prices. To simplify the process it may be easier to buy yourself a beer brewing kit.
The best way to find a good recipe is by searching online. There are lots of websites that provide a great list of beer recipes. Some even include a searchable directory and are categorized. Once you find a recipe that you want to try you will next need to gather the ingredients. If you intend on brewing your beer at home here are some common ingredients you will need and of course it all depends on what recipe you have picked out. The common ingredients are: water, malt extract and brewer’s yeast.
It’s usually the easiest to buy the ingredients online. You can usually find recipe packs with everything you need all bundled together. It’s a time saver and much easier to find those items online.
Here are a few recipes to get you started.
All Grain Porter
This recipes is based on Papazian’s “Silver Dollar Porter.” I suspect the difference in quality between this batch and an extract batch is going to be the difference between fresh-brewed coffee and instant. The wort had a much better hot and cold break than I’ve ever experienced using extracts, and it tasted better too.
Ingredients:
- 8 pounds, American 6-row (Klages) malt
- 1 pound, Munich malt
- 1/2 pound, crystal malt (90L)
- 1/2 pound, black patent malt
- 1/2 pound, chocolate malt
- 1/2 pound, roasted barley
- 1 teaspoon, calcium carbonate
- 1 ounce, Northern Brewer hops (boil)
- 1/2 ounce, Cascade hops (boil)
- 1/2 ounce, Cascade hops (finish)
- Whitbread ale yeast
American Wheat
Found this recipe at http://beerrecipes.org/showrecipe.php?recipeid=206
In this recipe, wheat made 27% of total grist. I would note that this beer was fermented warm (77F). The beer was very tart and had hints of cloves in the nose. I have also made an *American Wheat* (about year and a half ago) with wheat making 43% of the grist, fermented with Nottingham dry ale yeast at cooler temperatures (62F). This beer had the very same characteristics, tart with a hint of clove! I still believe that the yeast plays the greatest role in producing this clove character, but I believe that the wheat plays a large role in this flavor than generally accepted in homebrew circles. One final note, a group of brewer’s in my homebrew club did a not so scientific study of the affects of yeast. One yeast, EDME dry, produced a wheaty characteristic (though the beers brewed where not wheat beers).
Ingredients:
- 8 lbs pale 6-row
- 3 lbs wheat
- 1 oz N. Brewer (1 hour)
- 1/2 oz Hallertauer (1 hour)
- 1/2 oz Hallertauer (10 minutes)
- Nottingham Dry Ale Yeast. ????
Making your own beer is a fun and creative hobby. With enough practice you become really good and making beer and at the same time impress your friends. Once you get the process down you will find yourself making little tweaks to some of your favorite beer recipes and discovering a great new tasting beer.