Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Designing Great Beers

I just finished reading the first section of Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. The first section talks about what goes into a recipe, from the malt bill, color characteristics to hops, calculating bitterness and yeast. I'm a few chapters deep into the second part of the book which goes into details of the various classic styles of beer that are out there. I highly recomend this book for anyone who is trying to learn how to create your own recipes.

After I got through part one, and highlighting all the formulas and good things Ray had to say, i decided to try and put together my own recipe spreadsheet that has the calculations for IBU's, water needs based on evaporation and other factors, beer color ( I use HCU's and convert to a range of SRM's) and hop bitterness. Overall I think it's a good spreadsheet. I designed a recipe using the sheet and compared it to one of the online recipe calculators and I was damn close to exact. That made me smile. I have yet to brew the beer because it's an all grain recipe and I am in need or 4 stainless steele fender washers to complete my mash tun and for the life of me can't find a damn place that sells them. I'm hoping to have them soon, and FINALLY make the move to all grain!

On to the point of this post......I wanted to ask some people out there if they would take a look at my sheet, test it out and let me know their thoughts. Just post your email and I'll send it off to you. I'm a firm believer in feedback, and I think a lot of readers of my blog are brewers and coudl help me out with this. It should actually work for extract w/specialty grain recipes as well as long as you know the gravity of the extract and efficiency. So, post or send me an email and I'll send it off to you. Thanks for you help in advance.

Cheers,
Jason

1 comment:

Mark Andersen said...

I'd like to try out your spreadsheet. I think you've got my email address. If not let me know. Thanks.