Part of a brewer’s skill is the ability to take a favorite beer recipe and be able to improve it with small adjustments. Learn the best strategic way to approach taking your existing recipes to the next level with pro brewer and head of the American Brewers Guild Steve Parkes.

PDF of Presentation Slides: https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Steve_Parkes_Nanocon_2025_Scaling-Up-presentation.pdf

Your Malt COA is a valuable brewing tool if you know how to use the listed numbers. It can be a roadmap to maximize your malt during a brew day and that will result in better beer. Ashton Lewis, who works for Rahr Malting and BSG in addition to being BYO’s Technical Editor, will walk you through Malt COAs so you can understand the key numbers to focus on to get a better handle on the malt you are about to use. Then he’ll give you tips how to translate those numbers into actual brewing procedures and strategies in the brewhouse. You’ll leave with a better understanding how to study your Malt COAs to come up with brewing plans to get the most from your malt.

ASHTON LEWIS
TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND TRAINING MANAGER, BREWERS SUPPLY GROUP
TECHNICAL EDITOR, BREW YOUR OWN MAGAZINE

Click on the link below for a PDF of this session’s presentation slides:

https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Malt-COA_NanoCon.pdf

You made great beer as a homebrewer and you’d like to use some of your favorite recipes at your upcoming Nano brewery. As most brewers know it isn’t a matter of just proportionately increasing ingredient amounts when you boost your batch size, but what is truly the most accurate way to adapt your old homebrew recipes to a larger Nano system? Steve Parkes of the American Brewers Guild and Drop In Brewing Company will give you all the details you need to scale up that recipe so you recognize that beer in the glass as the same one you used to make as a homebrewer.

STEVE PARKES
OWNER AND LEAD INSTRUCTOR, AMERICAN BREWERS GUILD
FOUNDER AND BREWMASTER, DROP IN BREWING COMPANY

Click below for a PDF of this session’s presentation slides:

https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Steve-Parkes-2023-BYO-Nano-Con-Recipes.pdf

Homebrewing has become a very technical pursuit. From humble beginnings of boiling extract on stovetops, the last 30 years have brought ever more science and sophisticated equipment into the homebrewing process. A recent podcast guest of mine commented that many homebrewers are far more sophisticated in their equipment and processes than the average professional craft brewer. It’s commonplace these days to speak with homebrewers who carefully craft water profiles, mash schedules, and even mash pH adjustments in search of the perfect beer.

Unfortunately, sometimes the artistic side of brewing can be lost in our relentless pursuit of technical excellence. Beer brewing is not merely an exercise in tracking numbers. It is a profoundly creative pursuit as well. It is the intersection between art and science that makes a great beer, and not just chemistry and hitting all of your numbers.

Central to the artistic side is the understanding and careful blending of flavor and aroma. For even beer brewed using sound techniques can taste bad, and I’ve sampled many examples of outstanding beers brewed in far from ideal conditions. I’d argue there is a more recent trend entering both the craft beer and homebrewing markets that focuses on flavor and not just science.

Pancakes and Beer

I was making breakfast one morning with a box of Bisquick^TM at my side. Bisquick^TM is a simple boxed pancake mix composed mostly of flour with a bit of rising agent in it. However, on the side of the box of Bisquick^TM is a series of recipes for other things you can make from the mix. Recipes included biscuits, shortcake, pancakes, dumplings, and waffles. A quick search online turns up more recipes for things like cakes, pies, cheese balls, pot pies, stuffed mushrooms, and many other foods that use Bisquick^TM as the primary ingredient.

Browsing the recipes on the side of the box, I noticed that they all share some combination of common ingredients like milk, butter, eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla, but these ingredients are arranged in slightly different ways to create the wide variety of Bisquick^TM-based foods. All these foods are based on subtle combinations of the same basic ingredients.

The other thing that I found interesting is that as adults we all have knowledge of the various ingredients. Each of you know what butter, sugar, milk, vanilla, eggs, flour, and oil taste like because you’ve been tasting them since you were big enough to stick your finger in the butter or bowl of sugar and put it into your mouth. You literally have a lifetime of knowledge on each of the ingredients used to make biscuits, pancakes, shortcake, or any number of other foods.

Beyond that you also know what combinations of ingredients taste like whether it be butter and sugar mixed to create cookie dough or flour and oil used to make bread. This knowledge has been developed over a lifetime of tasting, cooking, and enjoying foods made from a handful of staple
baking ingredients.

But what of beer? Do you really understand the difference in flavor between a brown malt and a crystal 60 malt? How is the flavor and aroma of Citra® different than Mosaic®? What happens to the beer flavor if you use an English ale yeast instead of a California ale yeast? These are questions that are important to be able to answer if you want to build the best recipes as flavor and aroma are at the very core of brewing – even more so than mash chemistry or yeast pitch rates.

Expanding Your Flavor Knowledge

There are several ways to develop a larger base of expert knowledge on ingredient flavor and aroma and how those flavors manifest themselves in a finished beer. The first of these is to gain expertise in judging beers.

Becoming a formal or informal beer judge will expose you to the major styles, flavors, and off-flavors in beer as well as the terminology used to describe beer flavors. Understanding that “diacetyl” refers to a buttery popcorn-like finish in the beer, for example, gives you a common reference point and term you can use that fellow brewers understand. You also will gain knowledge of common imbalances in beer and how they affect flavor.

Formal beer judging can also be a great experience as you’ll understand a wider variety of beer styles, often have access to the underlying recipe used in homebrew competitions, and have a chance to compare your opinion on beer with other judges who may be more experienced.

As you gain experience judging you can expand to evaluating commercial beers, even though you may not know the exact recipe used. I try to take a few minutes with any new beer I taste to evaluate it as impartially as possible to see if I can pick up imbalances, off-flavors, distinct ingredients used, as well as formulate an overall impression in my mind. With time it is not hard to pick out a specific hop or
malt used.

Another great method for expanding your flavor expertise is Single Malt and Single Hop (SMaSH) brewing. This involves brewing small batches of beer with only one malt and one hop so you can see precisely what the flavor from those ingredients is. You can expand this to brewing batches varying only the water or yeast, or adding a second hop or malt to see how it impacts flavor as well. Learn more about SMaSH brewing in this article on the subject.

Ingredient Sensory Evaluation

Beyond beer judging and SMaSH brewing, another method to develop ingredient knowledge is through sensory evaluation. This involves methods to individually taste or smell ingredients to simulate what they might smell or taste like in a finished beer without having to brew the beer. These methods will be the focus of the remainder of this article.

Hop Sensory Evaluation

Hops add well over 500 flavor and aroma compounds to beer. As a result of the craft brewing revolution and dominant position of IPAs in the craft beer market, we know more about hop bitterness, flavor, and aroma than ever before. There has also been a revolution in how we use hops. While at one time hops were mainly valued for their preservative and bittering properties, the most prized hops are now selected for their aromatic properties.

Fortunately, sensory analysis of hops is simple to do and provides an excellent indication of hop aroma, freshness, and flavor. I personally prefer to evaluate several varieties of hops at a time as I find that this gives a baseline for evaluation and helps to highlight hops that are truly fresh as well as those that are of poor quality. The best way to perform sensory analysis of hops is to have at least three varieties available, though certainly more can be used. Most professionals use a small panel of people, which lets each person evaluate and discuss their own perceptions. Having a hop sensory panel is a great activity for a brew club or small group of brewers.

When evaluating hop pellets, begin with a few pellets and crush them up with the back of a spoon until you get a fine powder. Put a pinch of the powder into your hand and rub both hands together until the hops begin to warm slightly and then open your hands and insert your nose down into the hops. This is called a “dry rub” and it should give you a burst of aroma highlighting the hop variety used. You can also do hop rubs with fresh hop cones (which can give you a sense of when to harvest if you grow your own hops) or dried whole-leaf hops. In this case, place one or two hop cones between your hands and do the rub. As you perform your sensory analysis it is helpful to take notes on the aromas and flavors you pick up from each variety.

By using several varieties, you can also get a strong indication of the freshness of each. Likely one or more varieties will really be fresh and popping with myriad aromas. It is also likely you may run into a few stinkers with a muted, stale, or otherwise unpleasant aroma. Often these poor-quality hops were not harvested, processed, packaged, or stored right, and may not necessarily reflect the underlying flavor of the variety itself, so before writing off a variety try evaluating them from a few different crops/vintages/suppliers.

I do urge all brewers to perform a basic dry rub on their hops before you begin to brew. In my experience as many as 1 in 10 homebrew-sized packages of hops I’ve sampled can be of poor quality. The last thing you want to do is brew a great beer and drop sub-par hops into it.

Hop suppliers have been performing aroma sensory evaluation for many years, and many suppliers publish this information online. Most hop suppliers and merchants express data using spider charts on their website showing panel aroma evaluations for all their varieties. For instance, Hopsteiner hops are evaluated by a panel of judges for aroma on a scale of zero to five in the following characteristics: Citrus, Fruity, Floral, Herbal, Spicy, Resinous, Sugar-like, and Other. They also publish an aroma specification for each hop and in many cases suitable substitute hops to use. This type of information is useful to help you narrow your hop search and provides a guide when performing sensory analysis to see which aromas you can pick up yourself. Other suppliers provide similar flavor profiles and aroma intensity information on their websites as well. 

With the wealth of information from hop suppliers, it makes sense to use it to your advantage as you begin your ingredient evaluation, but always evaluate hops yourself in a sensory panel.

Grain Sensory Analysis

Evaluating the flavor of malts has traditionally been a bit tricky short of brewing with them. Many of us have tried chewing raw malt, which does give some sense of the flavor of the malt, however I find it unsatisfying and hard on your teeth. Fortunately, several years back the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) published a “hot steep” method for malt sensory analysis that is easy to perform at home but still gives you a good representation of the flavor profile of the malt.

This method involves making “hot tea” using finely crushed malt, hot water, and a coffee filter. The process is best done with several malts at a time so you can do a comparative analysis. Like hop sensory analysis, this is a great project for a homebrew club or panel of brewers working together and sharing impressions.

The precise method to use is summarized here. Note that different quantities are used depending on the malt type (base malts, specialty malts, or roasted malts):

Weigh a sample of 50 grams (1.75 oz.) of base malt. If evaluating specialty malts, instead use 25 g (0.88 oz.) of specialty malt blended with another 25 g (0.88 oz.) of pale base malt. For dark roasted malts, use 7.5 g (0.25 oz.) of roast malt with 42.5 g (1.5 oz.) of pale base malt. Obviously, you can double or triple the amount of malt and water if you need a larger sample for a group
to evaluate.

Mill the grains in a clean electric grinder for about 10 seconds. A coffee grinder works well for this as you want a coarse flour consistency — finer than what you would typically use for brewing.

Heat 450 mL (15 fl oz.) of water to 149 °F (65 °C) and combine it with the crushed grain sample in an insulated Thermos or growler and shake it for 20 seconds to mix the grain and water. Let the mixture stand for 15 minutes.

While the mixture is steeping, place some filter paper (Alstrom 515) at the top of a clean beaker or glass. A coffee filter is a suitable substitute if you don’t have access to lab paper filters. Wet the paper with some deionized water.

Swirl the Thermos/growler to bring the particles back into solution and pour the mixture into the filter. Draw the first 100 mL (just under 1⁄2 cup) off the collected wort and pour it back into the thermos to collect any remaining grains then pour that also into the filter. Allow the filter to drain completely leaving your liquid sample.

Let the sample cool and do your sensory evaluation when it has reached room temperature, within four hours of filtering.

The final sensory analysis is done by tasting the cooled samples. While more time-consuming than chewing raw malt, this method provides a good approximation of the finished malt flavor and provides a great baseline for comparing the flavor and aroma of two similar malts. It is basically the gold standard for malt sensory analysis short of brewing a beer with it.

As with hops, some of the larger malt providers publish sensory analysis along with their malt data on their websites. Many maltsters provide spider charts or flavor wheels on their websites for all their malts with the sensory profile done by a panel using the ASBC hot steep method. These generally offer panel evaluation of the following flavors: Sweet, Malty, Bready, Graham Cracker, Honey, Biscuit, Nutty, Toast, and Grainy. Along with this they provide general descriptions and recommended applications for each malt. These data sheets and analysis can be used to aid in searching for grains as well as guides when doing your own sensory evaluation of the malts.

Yeast Analysis

Unfortunately, there is no known method to do yeast sensory analysis short of brewing beer. If you are fortunate enough to be near the White Labs breweries in Asheville, North Carolina, or San Diego, California, they do offer a variety of beers made with the same wort but different yeasts. Here you can sample, side-by-side, identical beers made with different yeasts to see what the differences are in the finished beers. Obviously, you can do the same at home by splitting a batch of beer before fermentation and using two different yeasts to compare strain traits. Be sure to record the results!

All major yeast labs provide fermentation data that can help you compare yeast strains on paper and determine what flavors to expect in a finished beer. The basic data you will find from most yeast provider data sheets includes:

Type – The type of yeast – typically Ale, Lager, Wheat, Hybrid, Wine, or Champagne.

Attenuation – The percent of the sugars (gravity points) you can expect to ferment into alcohol — usually quoted as “apparent attenuation.”

Temperature – The recommended fermentation range for the yeast.

Flocculation – An indication of how quickly the yeast “falls out” of beer after fermentation.

Alcohol Tolerance – Highest alcohol percentage the yeast can tolerate before it goes dormant.

Other Variables – These days you will often find if a yeast strain is POF+ (positive for phenolic off-flavor), STA-1+ (positive of the STA-1
gene that indicates diastaticus), as well as whether a strain will ferment maltotriose.

Out of the above, the genetics of the yeast strain found in Other Variables is probably the most impactful and helps dictate attenuation. A high attenuation yeast will give you more alcohol but fewer sugars, resulting in a cleaner but lower bodied beer. A low attenuation yeast will leave more unfermented sugars for a maltier finish with more body and malty flavor in the beer.

Also of interest is the fermentation data, which is collected by analyzing beer made with a given strain. Unfortunately, this data can be hard to find and depends on multiple factors related to wort and fermentation process, but some yeast providers have started publishing it. These may include:

Isoamyl Alcohol/Acetate: The primary ester in beer and a measure of ester production for yeast. Banana or pear blossom flavor in small quantities.

Acetaldehyde: Intermediate compound produced during fermentation (green apple flavor).

Ethyl Acetate: (Ester) Strongest of the common esters (fruits, pears, solvents if too much).

2,3 Pentainedione: Vicinal Diketone (VDK like diacetyl) gives a honey flavor, but has 10x lower flavor threshold.

Diacetyl: (VDK) Buttery popcorn-like flavor.

1-Propanol: Fusel alcohol can give off alcoholic odor to a strong solvent-like or moonshine flavor at higher concentrations.

Ethanol: Simply the alcohol percentage of the test batch

Hours to 50%: Time it takes to reach 50% fermented — indication of how quickly the yeast ferments out.

You may notice that many of the flavors listed are considered “off-flavors” above certain thresholds in certain beers. For example, excessive esters or diacetyl would not be desirable at all in a European lager but might be perfectly at home in an English pale ale. While these compounds are natural byproducts of fermentation in both cases, a European lager yeast would produce much lower levels of both. So, if you have access to this data for your yeast strains you can use that data to help make flavor comparisons.

Water Analysis

Sensory analysis can also be performed on water. John Palmer has been running sessions for several years now where participants sample various water profiles, often built up from distilled water and salt additions to create specific profiles used in brewing. You can purchase distilled water from your local grocery store and calculate the adjustment salts to add using your favorite brewing software or online water calculator. Most people can taste the difference between different water profiles using this method, and it can be a useful introduction to the varied world of brewing water.

The challenge, of course, is that the water chemistry does react with other ingredients during the brewing and fermentation processes so tasting water alone does not really give you a completely accurate picture of how the water might manifest itself in a finished beer. For example, waters with different sulfate-to-chloride ratios may taste slightly different in their plain form, but they won’t reflect the malt/hop balance you will get in a finished beer without the actual malt and hops.

Not surprisingly, changing your water profile does have a profound impact on the finished beer and in blind taste tests water is one of the simpler changes to detect. This is probably because it makes up over 90% of the base in most beers and also that many of the major water ions do interact during the mash or fermentation to produce slightly different flavors in the finished beer.

While there is no “water supplier” guide you can use to help you select the perfect water profile, there are many available water profiles that you can easily match using brewing or water software. These generally have two forms — either “match a city” or “match a style.” Most brewers have moved away from matching particular brewing cities, in part because the breweries in these cities often make small changes to their water. Also, as our knowledge of water has improved, we’re now able to make more precise adjustments to achieve a given goal. 

While mash pH and sulfate/chloride water adjustments are a topic that could easily fill several more articles, a good place to start is to find a water profile that is suitable for the style of beer you are brewing and then adjust your local water as needed to match that profile.

Summary

The recent focus on flavor in both craft beer and homebrewing has pushed more brewers beyond “technical” brewing to understand the artistic side of brewing. Fundamental to this approach is understanding the flavors and aromas of beer ingredients and how those flavors manifest themselves in beer.

I encourage you to carefully evaluate new beers from a flavor and aroma perspective, and to use sensory analysis where possible on individual ingredients to understand their contribution. Over time you can gain expert knowledge of ingredient flavors and aromas like the expert knowledge you have for common baking ingredients and foods. Only by understanding ingredient flavor and aroma can you make the shift from brewing by the numbers to brewing to create specific flavors and aroma in your beer.

SMaSH stands for Single Malt and Single Hop recipe design. SMaSH takes the idea of simplicity in brewing to its logical extreme — by limiting the brewer to one malt, one hop variety, and one yeast strain. It’s a great technique for brewers looking to simplify their beer, and move beyond the kitchen sink syndrome.

BYO’s Technical Editor Ashton Lewis walks you through SMaSH concepts in this BYO+ video.

SMaSH is an important step on the path to understanding how isolated ingredients impact your finished beer. Some of the advantages of SMaSH include:
• Understanding what a single hop variety tastes like in isolation, and what it brings to your beer.
• Understanding how different base malts impact the flavor of your finished beer.
• Highlighting the differences between yeast strains.
• Getting the brewer to think seriously about brewing techniques and what they bring to the beer — including mash techniques, hop additions and timing, water additions, fermentation schedules and finishing your beer.
• Moving towards a philosophy that emphasizes using ingredients and techniques to achieve a specific flavor or effect in the finished beer, and away from the kitchen sink approach to brewing.
• Understanding what flavors you like in your beer, and which ones you don’t.

Q: In the January-February 2023 issue of BYO, you reference your water tool. Can you please shed some light on that?
— Frank Long • Cooperstown, New York

A: Me and my big fingers! Did I type some words about my water tool? While it’s tempting to geek out with water math, I’ll try to keep this answer informative without jumping down the drain. In my opinion, the first step in assessing brewing water is the calculation of residual alkalinity using Kolbach’s method from 1951. While it’s nice to understand the units behind the calculation, it’s not required. Residual alkalinity (RA) = (bicarbonate concentration [mg/L] x 0.046) – (calcium concentration [mg/L] x 0.04) – (magnesium concentration [mg/L] x 0.033). For the sake of discussion, assume we have a water report for our local water and know we have 76-ppm (same as mg/L) calcium, 18-ppm magnesium, and 295-ppm total alkalinity as CaCO₃.

We have everything we need to calculate RA, except we need to convert 295-ppm total alkalinity as CaCO₃ to ppm HCO₃^– by multiplying 295 by 1.22. RA = (295 x 1.22 x 0.046) – (76 x 0.04) – (18 x 0.033) = 12.9 °dH (that’s German degrees of hardness, another term that is nice to know about but not required to use the math). Because RA is positive, we know we have alkaline water that will increase mash pH over a standard mash test performed using distilled water. When RA is negative, mash pH is lower than the standard mash. The other thing RA gives us is a magnitude of change; (+) 10 °dH corresponds to an increase in mash pH of ~0.3 and (-) 10 °dH corresponds to a reduction in mash of ~0.3. Looks like our water is pretty darn alkaline and is predicted to drive our mash pH up by about 0.4 pH units! Now what? This is where my water tool helps provide solutions.

There are a few approaches to using this type of water: 1) brew a beer using acidic specialty malts (like roasted or caramel malts) to balance the alkalinity of the water; 2) add calcium and/or magnesium salts to reduce RA; 3) dilute RA with reverse osmosis (RO) water; 4) add an acidulant (usually lactic acid, phosphoric acid, or acid malt); and/or 5) remove alkalinity by boiling and/or treating with calcium hydroxide. These methods, except for the last, are all easy to use for brewers of a wide range of brew sizes, including us homebrewers. And as is the case with many a brewing solution, simultaneously using more than one method is totally cool.

So, that tool you’re asking about combines the approaches listed above, except for alkalinity removal, into an easy-to-use calculator ultimately designed to predict mash pH based on water RA, which we have just calculated, and grist bill. Although mash pH is the process variable most brewers focus on when adjusting brewing water, water components unrelated to pH are also a big deal because they affect beer flavor. John Palmer refers to these components as seasoning, which is really a great analogy. Chloride, sulfate, and sodium targets are entered along with targets for calcium, magnesium, and bicarbonate. The calculations predict mash pH based on the target water profile and grist bill, as well as providing a “water recipe” to use for the brew. When the target concentration of any ion is less than the concentration in the water being treated, RO dilution water volume is calculated.

In addition to knowing the RA of the untreated water, some grist bill basics are needed. This is where mash pH prediction becomes approximate. While the standard malt analytics used to prepare a certificate of analysis (COA) for base malts includes wort pH, special malt data do not. But we do have rules of thumb for how special ingredients like crystal, light-roasted, dark-roasted, and acidulated grains affect mash pH. For each percent of these grain types, pH is reduced by 0.025 (crystal), 0.002 (Munich), 0.03 (light-roasted), 0.05 (dark-roasted), and 0.1 (acidulated) pH units. For example, a mash made up of 95% Pilsner malt with a wort pH of 5.8 (this is from the malt COA), 5% crystal malt, and water with RA = 0 (same as distilled water used for lab testing), will have a mash pH of about 5.68 (5.8 – (5 x 0.025)). The source of this information is from Siebel Institute of Technology’s lectures about brewing water and residual alkalinity and provides the practical brewer with estimates.

In my opinion, the first step in assessing brewing water is the calculation of residual alkalinity using Kolbach’s method from 1951

Let’s assume we are brewing a beer with the water loosely defined above, do not want to add any brewing salts, liquid acids, or RO water, and want the mash pH to be about 5.5. To crunch the numbers, the only two things to consider are RA (12.9 °dH in our assumed water) and grist composition. The water RA tells us our mash pH is going to be pushed up about 0.4 pH units (12.9 °dH / 0.3 pH units per °dH = 0.43) from the lab wort pH (5.8 gets bumped to 6.2), so this brew will either require a big dose of specialty malts with color because light-colored special malts are not very acidic, or we can add acidulated malt to help bring the mash pH into balance. One solution that works out is using 40% base malt, 50% Munich malt, 5% light-roasted malt, and 5% acidulated malt. That grist bill could be a dunkel. Not a bad beer to brew using my example water that just happens to match a reference for Munich water.

But what about brewing a Pilsner with this same water? A great start to this problem is to reduce the very high RA. Calcium additions are an option, but the best water profiles for Pilsner beers have a neutral RA and are relatively low in total dissolved solids (TDS is the sum of all water ions). Adding more salts to the base would simply drive TDS up. The best solutions are either diluting with RO or removing alkalinity. Alkalinity removal is a literal science project and not simple without the requisite set-up, so I am not going to that well.

Diluting with RO water is simple, but target ion concentrations are first required for the calculation. In example 1 below, the calcium target was set to 50 ppm (down from 76) and the bicarbonate target was set to 100 ppm (down from 360). The water tool does the rest, providing base water and RO water volumes, along with required salt additions, options for acid additives, and the profile of the adjusted water. Note that there is still some residual alkalinity because I set the target bicarbonate level down to 100 ppm. The summary below includes a good dose of acid to bring the mash pH down to the target of 5.45.

Using the same water with 12.9 °dH, let’s pivot into IPA territory. Now, we want to know more about water than simply the ions driving pH because IPA water typically has much more “seasoning” than Pilsner water. Per Kunze, Munich well water (source not stated) contains little sulfate or chloride; 10 and 2 ppm respectively. Let’s assume our IPA is brewed using 90% pale ale malt with a lab wort pH of 5.7, 5% wheat malt for added foam stability, and 5% light crystal malt for color. This grist and water combination will yield a higher mash pH than our target of 5.4 because of the high RA.

As high TDS waters are common for classic ales and because our base water has very little sulfate or chloride, a good approach to this beer is to reduce RA by adding a combination of calcium sulfate, calcium chloride, and/or magnesium sulfate. The choice of salts depends on what we want in our profile. The water recipe below is one of many possibilities. The combination of grist bill and water salt additions gets us really close to our target mash pH, while providing a similar adjusted water profile to the mineral-rich waters used in classic ales. In example 2 found below, the predicted mash pH (not shown) is still a bit higher than the target and my water tool suggests the addition of a bit of acid to correct.

To download a copy of Mr. Wizard’s water calculator, click here.

Q: An important part of my homebrewing hobby is the development of web-based brewing calculators. The biggest challenge is finding good technical information. Web searches often yield vague results, formulas with errors, or formulas based on non-metric units. Where do professional brewers find high-quality technical information? Which books would you recommend for technical reference purposes?
— Gary Fisk • Americus, Georgia

A: I also consider developing my own calculation tools a key part of my hobby and, previously, part of my job as a commercial brewer. I have a pretty handy collection of calculations and will touch on what has been valuable to me along my tool-making journey, starting with your question about sources used by professional brewers. The short answer is brewing school. Whether brewers take brewing classes in universities like Weihenstephan, UC-Davis, KU Leuven, Oregon State, Heriot-Watt, Auburn, and Virginia Tech, or through private brewing schools like Siebel and the American Brewers Guild, the same basic beer math is taught. And these days, it’s all taught using the metric system.

Perhaps the most fundamental group of brewing calculations are those related to wort and brewhouse yield. All schools teach students that kg extract is equal to liters of wort multiplied by the product of wort specific gravity (kg per liter) and wort Plato (kg of extract per kg of wort). This basic relationship opens up a whole set of calculations related to mash calculations and efficiency. Textbooks like Kunze’s Technology Brewing and Malting and The Comprehensive Guide to Brewing (Gabriela Basarová, Jan Savel, Petr Basar, Pavlína Basarová, Tomás Lejsek) include examples of these equations and how they are used. Another really helpful book is Steve Holle’s A Handbook of Basic Brewing Calculations published by the MBAA (Master Brewers Association of the Americas) in 2003.

When it comes to hop math, there is really only one equation universally used and that is how to calculate hop charges based on some level of bitterness in terms of international bitterness units (IBUs). Unfortunately, the golden key that makes hop calculations tick is the elusive utilization term; most brewers refer to tables relating utilization to boil time, wort gravity, and hop preparation type. Some brewers calculate oil contribution based on hop analytics, but this is not commonly used.

There are also a range of brewing calculations related to mashing-in, mash heating and boiling, wort heating, boiling and cooling, and beer blending and dilution. These calculations are all based on fundamental math used in food engineering/processing. Much of this is left out of brewing texts and is the sort of topic often left to classroom lectures. The good news is that Q = MC_p∆t is the key to all of the heating and cooling equations (Q is heat energy, M is mass, C_p is specific heat, and ∆t is temperature change). The only obscure constant that can be hard to find is the specific heat of malt. The specific heat of malt and other brewing grains is about 1.8 kJ/kg*Kelvin (0.43 BTU/lb.*F).

Another great source of information about brewing calculations is found on brewing ingredient and process aid specification sheets. My brewing calculation workbook includes separate tabs for usage rates of beer finings, enzymes, and nutrients. These are the sorts of tidbits of information that can easily be added to your library of nuggets as you try new things.

And finally, there is water. I am a picky user of tools and really don’t like any water calculator that I have trialed and wrote my own water tool based on the water basics first laid out by Paul Kolbach in the early 1950s. 

Whether you primarily brew with extract, conduct a partial-mash, or brew all-grain, the end result is your own homebrewed beer. When it comes to recipe design it doesn’t really matter how you brew. What many consider the “next-level” in homebrewing begins when they can design and create their own recipes. It’s art. It’s science. It’s flavor. It’s philosophy. Nothing quite like brewing beer can marry all these concepts and boil them down to fit in a pint glass!

When most people jump into recipe design, they are choosing a personal philosophy sub-consciously. Our brains typically push us toward either a left-brained or right-brained approach. On the left side, you have more mechanical and methodical ideas based around beer and styles you know. You might believe there’s a theoretical perfect recipe if your recipe follows the numbers and processes set forth previously in books and by other brewers. You may see excessive creativity as deriving something “out of style” for a particular beer, maybe even as a sloppy approach. On the right side, you have artistic expression that you may believe should not be constrained by beer styles, ingredients, and maybe even tools or processes. 

It’ll come as no surprise that to make beer you’ll need a little bit from both camps. What you typically have available is the information you’ve already gathered. This will be around ingredients you’ve seen used, equipment you have, brewing techniques and processes you’ve been introduced to and used, and outlined beer styles. Whatever knowledge you have is a starting point toward recipe design. Wherever you’re at on your journey, you can start working toward designing your own recipes. The further along you are the more knowledge and experience you might have. Being knowledgeable about ingredients, equipment, techniques, brewing processes, and beer styles will allow you to be a technically proficient brewer, as well as an artistic and original recipe designer.

Whether you lean toward non-traditional, highly experimental one-off beers or are looking to create and perfect your own recipe of a beloved traditional beer style, keep in mind that beer recipe design is going to require you to be artistic yet calculated. Understanding how beer is built and then understanding your own approach and philosophy will help you achieve the best results.

Artistic Brewing: Cultivating Your Creativity

Many folks are drawn to beer as a creative outlet, whether they know it or not. I’ve met plenty of brewers who derive satisfaction from the process of creating something. They may also be unleashing a small amount of their own creativity without even knowing it. For the most part they are simply crafting beer. There is a difference between art and craft. Art is personal expression; craft is creating using learned skills and techniques. They crossover quite nicely in homebrewing. You may be crafting beer but I bet you could get more out of the process if you put some of your vision into the product, even if that vision seems hard to find right now.

How does beer become artistic? Allowing yourself some artistic license is a great first step. By simply making one conscious decision outside a given set of parameters, like a recipe or style, is all it takes. Maybe it’s a process change or experimenting with a hopping technique. Any decision that deviates from the given or the expected that you made on your own is an artistic decision. The biggest challenge is knowing what can be adjusted, and what parameters you might need to stay within to get a good result.

A great starting place is changing a single ingredient in a recipe you’ve brewed with a specific intended result in mind. For instance, it may go something like this:

• I brewed this American pale ale and it turned out great using a recipe from BYO.
• I just drank this IPA at a local craft brewery with El Dorado® hops and I really liked the aroma.
• My American pale ale recipe calls for 2 oz. (56 g) of Cascade hops added at 0 min.
• I’m going to substitute 3 oz. (84 g) of El Dorado® for the 2 oz. (56 g) of Cascade hops in the same recipe next time.

You’ve made a creative and artistic decision! What has aided or guided you in this decision? 

• You brewed a successful American pale ale and now have a baseline recipe and process.
• You drank a beer with a hop profile that you enjoyed and took the time to identify the hop and appreciate the aroma.
• You also learned somewhere along the way that hops added at the end of the boil are used for aroma.

What’s allowed you to be artistic in this scenario are a handful of experiences — brewing a successful beer, drinking a beer and understanding what went into it, as well as learning along the way what specific hop additions provide in a beer. Without doing things like brewing, tasting, and studying or trying brewing processes, ingredients, and equipment, you won’t be able to unleash your creativity to its full extent.

We know beer can be artistic and a creative outlet, but let’s take it one step further — should it be without rules? Should it be abstract? Probably not in most cases. There are some guardrails that come with anything, even art. We do have boundaries, even if brewers are constantly pushing them, and these boundaries can be good. An abstract beer might be something that distorts what beer is or makes it something else. Maybe it’s brewed with just tomatoes and hops, open fermented with moldy bread, then carbonated and served in closed trash bags. It has many characteristics of beer, but if you handed someone that trash bag, their assumption isn’t that it’s going to be beer, or something they want to drink.

Use the guardrails brewing provides to your advantage, to help you imagine what your next beer recipe will be without giving yourself infinite possibilities. Just make sure those guardrails aren’t too close, restricting you from thinking about how you might brew artistically.

Technical Brewing: Applying Practical Principles

I have met many brewers who simply look to hone the craft of brewing beer. This in and of itself, without trying to take any artistic license, is a significant challenge. What it means as a brewer is that process and technique come before all else. For the technical brewer, a recipe should fall well within the guidelines of a style or be a very close interpretation of a commercial style. The idea of ingredient substitution may be non-negotiable. Unlike some creative brewers, the idea for many technical brewers is to repeat the process on a known brewing system, given a known recipe, until they can brew it to perfection. Sure, this may require some process and brewing system tweaks along the way, and maybe even some recipe adjustments. 

Applying yourself to the craft of brewing is important. Being able to brew using a variety of techniques and ingredients will hone your skills and will improve your beers. Those techniques will ultimately provide you with the ability to brew anything you want. 

Say you jump into recipe design and want to brew a sour beer, but have never experimented with different souring techniques, you may be severely limiting yourself. You’ll be better off learning what can be created via kettle souring, traditional souring techniques, or even experimenting with spontaneous fermentation or blending aged sours before you go too far down the road of exploring recipe design in the sour space. This will require you to take a step back and look at tried-and-true processes and recipes first.

Another reason some folks may choose the path of leaning toward being a more technical brewer is because they are looking to homebrew competitively. If you enter competitions, your beer will be judged on intangibles, around unique flavors, balance and other characteristics, but likely the majority of points to be gained or lost will be how well you brewed to the style guidelines. Technical brewing is critical when it comes to competing well. I’m sure it will be argued that creativity is needed, and I agree, just not to the extent of being a sound technical brewer.

Figuring Out Flavor & Philosophy

Two things worth touching on are flavor and philosophy. Flavor is the most critical aspect of beer. If you don’t enjoy how it looks, you might be able to move past that if it smells and tastes great. But if you don’t like how it tastes, you’re just not going to enjoy drinking the beer no matter the other characteristics.

Sensory aspects of beer, especially around flavor, make up a large portion of recipe design and being able to determine what those different aspects are is critical. The most difficult is flavor sensory. You must understand what ingredients will taste like, as well as beer styles, and how to describe them. This is oftentimes one of the hardest things to learn and overcome. Consider sensory understanding the magic ticket to beer recipe design. Aligning your own perception to others can be difficult. Your definition of fruity, floral, caramel, or chocolate may be different than mine. Ingredient manufacturers and brewers do their best to provide this information to you as a brewer and consumer, and it’s a great starting point to align with what’s generally accepted and understood.

Philosophy might be a bit harder to quantify but you likely see yourself as somewhere in-between an artistic brewer or a technical brewer. Are you targeting making the most flavorful beer possible, maybe around a particular hop, or even a fruit? Or are you usually trying to make the best possible beer to a particular style, or commercial example? That might give you some clues. What’s best is to make sure neither one completely defines you and you come out of your safe brewing space now and again. Challenging yourself to brew well to style, or out of style with new ingredients, is important to grow as a brewer and recipe designer.

Bringing it All Together: Designing a Dark Mild

OK, so it is important to allow for creativity while having a technical understanding of brewing and how they relate to recipe design. Now let’s bring this all together by going through the process of building a recipe together. I suspect that if we both go on the same journey, aspects of our beer recipe will be different!

Let’s say a recent trip to my favorite local brewery introduced me to a lovely English dark mild ale. I thoroughly enjoyed it and went to ask the brewer what went into his recipe, but there were no brewers in sight. There isn’t much on the menu about the beer besides some fluffy language and a stated ABV of 3.5%. Now the recipe creator in me kicks in. I start by making a few mental recordings: Not much hop character, a nice chocolatey note, and a bit of caramel note. It was also a bit sweeter than expected, but enjoyable. 

The next day I go looking around to see if I can find any other dark milds at my local beer shop or maybe from another nearby brewery to explore the style a bit more. Nada, nothing. Although I love the beer I just had, I also know its time on tap may be limited. Time to give brewing a dark mild a shot!

Right away I know a few things based on the beer I drank:

• It’s English in origin and it’s an ale. It likely was brewed with British hops and an ale yeast. 
• I also know an ABV I might like to target based on the beer I tried, 3.5%. 
• Based on the darker color I saw in my glass (not to mention it’s right there in the name), I know I’ll be using some dark malts to derive some color. I also know there are other ways to add color to beer, but that dark malt is the most common.  This fits nicely with the chocolatey note I tasted. 

You’ll always need to make some logical assumptions when a recipe isn’t given and starting with what is most likely is always good or you’ll spend a lot of time going in circles. Again, this is where it’s good to have a basic grasp of styles, ingredients, and basic brewing processes.

There is more information available and more tools to help me in my re-creation. One tool I can’t stress the value of enough is a recipe design app. Otherwise you’ll have the additional stress of doing the math, double checking it, and revising a recipe by hand until you get to the right color, bitterness, and ABV. It all becomes very tedious. There are numerous options available, and they all work well. Find one you enjoy using. There are free options available like Grainfather’s app, Brewer’s Friend, or Brewfather. Other subscription options like BeerSmith, Beer Tools, and a variety of other apps may offer more of what you’re looking for. Many will have style guidelines built in providing you the technical parameters you’ll want your recipe to align to. 

Another critical source of information is style guidelines defined by the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) and the Brewers Association (BA). Both have slightly different definitions, but either could be utilized to help determine what ingredients and brewing techniques we want to use. The BJCP will provide more detail around history, ingredients, and brewing techniques used, as well as commercial examples. This is extremely valuable to the recipe designer. You can find these guidelines on the BJCP and BA websites.

Alright, so we’ve set the scene — we have a beer we know a bit about, we have BJCP style guidelines we’ll use, and we have a recipe creator software we’ll bring it all together in. The specifications we’ll use are listed as vital statistics in the BJCP guidelines, as they provide a range of technical specifications necessary to get us as close to something of a dark mild as possible:

OG: 1.030–1.038 

IBU: 10–25 

FG: 1.008–1.013 

SRM: 14–25 

ABV: 3–3.8%

Starting with the grain bill, or extract and grain, is always a great starting point. You’ll need it to get the proper original gravity (OG) and final gravity (FG), along with what you’ll soon choose for the yeast. In the case of malt it’s easiest to start with base malt or extract. This will be the malt that gives you most of your sugar. Looking at the characteristic ingredients provided in the style guideline, you see pale British base malts are most common. If using extract, the easiest substitution is simply a light malt extract.

By having a few general parameters set in my recipe design program I can simply add 6 lbs. (2.7kg) of base malt and see that gives me an expected 3.1% ABV before I put any other ingredients in or change parameters. These assumptions preset in the app can be valuable (mine are 75% mash efficiency and 75% attenuation) and can be tweaked later. Knowing I’m targeting 3.5% and will be adding more malt and fermentables, I’ll leave it there. The style allows crystal and dark malts, as well as adjuncts and sugar. Time to have a play and get creative! 

I’m feeling adventurous and start mentally mapping all the options available and consolidating to a couple I might like to try:

Adjuncts:
• Corn flakes
• Wheat flakes

Sugar:
• Dark brown sugar
• Table sugar (sucrose)

Crystal Malts:
• Carastan malt (35 °L)
• Crystal (60 °L)

Dark Malts:
• Chocolate malt
• Roasted barley

What sticks out in remembering the dark mild I tried is that chocolatey note, so I want to get this into my recipe first. I decide to add a 0.25 lb. (110 g) of chocolate malt as I see it puts my mild right in the middle of the color specification at 18 SRM. If I wasn’t familiar with the fact that chocolate malt provides chocolate flavor and related cocoa notes, I would need to research my malts further. I do also know that other caramel notes help define the chocolate flavor in beer as our brains also need some of the other characteristics of chocolate to pull it all together, like sweetness and other sugary flavors.

From there I want to keep focusing on flavor and other attributes I liked — a caramel note and a sweetness. I may need to rely some on the yeast for sweetness (not sugar, which will ferment out), but can also consider it during my grain bill decisions. I’m considering crystal malt (60 °L) because I have it on hand, but through research I also found that many milds have Carastan malt, which mentions toffee as well as a slight bready note, which I didn’t pick up on in my beer. Looking at the crystal 60 I have, the manufacturer mentions that it’s sweet with a mild caramel flavor. I could continue looking for another malt, but can assess that what I have on hand will be close enough. If it’s a malt I’ve used, I’ll try to harken back to the flavor it may have contributed to other beers. I add 0.25 lb. (110 g) of this to my recipe as well. This addition brings my gravity and color up slightly, but anticipated ABV is still just under 3.4% ABV.

One thing that may have attributed to that sweetness was possibly some mouthfeel. By using some wheat flakes I know I can boost the mouthfeel. I decide to add 0.25 lb. (110 g), which may also aid in head retention. Something I’d like in this beer, even if I can’t recall the head from the mild I had at the brewery.

With no further tweaking this brings my recipe to an OG of 1.036, my color to 18 SRM, and my ABV to 3.5%. All within style specification! I have one more ingredient to consider and that’s the sugar I was originally thinking of using. In this case I don’t want it or need it. The beer finished sweet, not dry, and I know that adding something like sugar will likely dry my beer out. No sugar this time.

Time to move on to hops. Because hops can add a very distinct flavor at both high and low levels, hops can get quite personal in recipe design. In the case of a dark mild where the hops were practically imperceptible, my only task is to make sure they don’t show up too much in the beer. I look at the characteristic ingredients and it tells me I can use any hop. Likely because the expectation is that it’s barely perceptible in the beer. In this case, I could dig out any hops from my freezer and simply calculate my IBUs. Since the style allows for 10–25 IBUs, I’ll aim for the low end, and pull out some Willamette.

Knowing how hops affect beer is important. When added to the boil for the entire length you’ll simply boil off the volatiles and isomerize the acids, leaving the hop to impart a small amount of flavor compared to the bitterness it will impart. Mid-boil and later additions contribute more flavor versus bitterness, and late additions (in the last 10 minutes) or post-boil will contribute some flavor and lots to aroma. In this case, I will add these for my full boil, typically 60 minutes, so that the flavor and aroma isn’t too distinct. I have some Willamette on hand. My recipe calculator shows that 0.75 oz. (21 grams) will give me 14 IBUs. This leads to one other consideration — I had considered shortening my boil, but that would possibly leave me with more hop flavor and aroma. Plus, the tiny bit of kettle caramelization 60 minutes allows for will likely have a positive effect on this beer as I’m targeting a darker color, caramel flavors, and some sweetness. So, I’m going to stick with a 60-minute boil for this recipe.

That leaves me with the yeast. With the large number of manufacturers this may seem daunting. It really isn’t. In fact, it might be the easiest decision of the bunch. Most yeast are named based on style, region, or country a style comes from. If not, the yeast manufacturer typically provides a list of beer styles the yeast is recommended for online or even on the package. In the case of my mild ale, I looked at what was available locally and began researching the yeast manufacturers by style. When it came down to two choices I opted for White Labs WLP002 (English Ale) yeast. Why? It was recommended for the style, but it also had lower attenuation, meaning more sugar left behind. 

If you recall, I had preset my attenuation at 75%. My expectation for this yeast is only 70%, which means a higher final gravity, leading to a lower ABV. Once I change this to 70% in my calculator, my ABV goes down to 3.3%. A big deal? Not really, but that 3.5% ABV mild was great (and was the only real number I had to go off when starting this venture) so I want to adjust some accordingly. By simply adding 0.5 lb. (225 g) of British pale ale to my base to compensate for the loss in attenuation, I’ve achieved my 3.5%. I’ve moved my OG up to 1.038, right to the top of the style guideline’s range.

A few more calculations around water and mashing based on a bit more research and I know I’m going to be fine with a single step infusion mash at my usual 152 °F (67 °C) for 60 minutes. Had this style required something more technical like a decoction mash to develop the correct flavor I would have needed to consider this. Fermentation will be as per the instructions on the yeast, nothing out of the ordinary. I’ll keg, and review what typical carbonation levels for a mild might be — it looks like between 1.3–2.3 volumes is acceptable.

This exercise we just completed is one way to create a beer recipe. Had you drank the same dark mild as me and wanted to brew a beer close to it, you may have made some different decisions. That’s OK, who’s to say which would be better? When it comes to beer design you can only use the tools in front of you, as well as your own knowledge of brewing processes, techniques, styles, ingredients, as well as your own equipment. And after tasting this beer I’ll have the pleasure of comparing my recipe to the original example and tweaking my recipe if desired. When you put in the work to become a better brewer and appreciator of beer, the world of beer recipe design will open wide. And what is left to be learned through experience is never ending! 

Don’t Hold Me Back! 

You may have the idea that beer styles are just “the man” telling you how to brew and are holding you back. Maybe you have an idea for a beer that doesn’t fit any style. That’s fine and great! To get beyond style guidelines takes a particular amount of knowledge of what styles are out there already and even the processes and techniques used. Beer doesn’t need to fit a particular style guideline. Beer as a beverage has a significant number of expectations that come with it — grain base, in most cases hops, carbonation, and some alcohol. This all provides a medium in and of itself, and sets the expectation for you as the brewer, as well as for the drinker. This is where style guidelines are great — a beer drinker can assume, based on what they know about beer styles, that a beer in a particular style will taste a certain way. It helps set an expectation, and they may be able to make an early assumption whether they’ll like it or not. If you give a drinker a beer with no detail around style they may be hesitant to try it, or come in with the preconceived notion that they won’t like it. Guidelines can be great for the brewer as well as the drinker, with the limitation that not all beer can be defined by a particular style guideline.

Learn the best ways to jump into creating your own signature beer recipes and understand the keys to developing a specific grain bill, hop schedule, and ingredient proportions to meet your homebrewing goals in this four-hour workshop video. Brad Smith, owner of the popular BeerSmith recipe software and a Brew Your Own Magazine contributing writer, has helped thousands of homebrewers design their own recipes and now you can learn from this recipe design expert how to use both scientific and artistic approaches to end up with the beer in your glass you had envisioned. Explore ingredients, techniques, and even your own brewing system to get you on the right path to craft your own recipes.

Presentation Slides – Brief Intro: https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Recipe-Formulation-Brief-Intro-1-of-4.pdf

Presentation Slides – Ingredients: https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Recipe-Formulation-Ingedients-2-of-4.pdf

Presentation Slides – Processes and Techniques: https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Recipe-Formulation-Processes-and-Techniques-3-of-4.pdf

Presentation Slides – Recipe Formulation: https://byo.com/wp-content/uploads/Recipe-Formulation-Presentation-4-of-4.pdf

Brew Your Own Magazine’s Technical Editor Ashton Lewis shows you how to properly evaluate hops before you ever add them to your brew.