Brewing beer - step by step, part 3: Designing a recipe

How to create a simple Pale Ale recipe in Beersmith

When I want to design a new beer recipe I use the Beersmith software, there are several other softwares available for this but I have found that Beersmith is the right one for me. I start by selecting the Add Recipe button:

That will bring up this view, where you can give the recipe a name, choose which equipment profile to use and set a brewing date:

When that is done it is time to choose a style for the beer, this will give you guidance when adding malts and hops!

I have choosen the American Pale Ale style for this recipe. The sliders for gravity, bitterness, color and estimated alcohol percentage will guide me in keeping the recipe within the parameters set for this style of beer.

Time to add some malts!

Here I am adding the Maris Otter Pale Ale malt, my standard base malt. I'm using 4kg/8lbs of Pale Ale malt for this recipe. I will also add 250g/½lbs of caramel 60L malt to get some color and sweetness to the beer.

After adding the malts the style sliders look like this:

The sliders for gravity, color and est. ABV is all within the green sector, looking good so far!
Now I will need some hops:

For this recipe I have selected the Citra hop, a good allround hpo that can be used for both bittering and aroma. I add 20g/0.7oz of Citra to the recipe and that will give me this result :

Well within the style! If you want to adjust the recipe you can actually drag the sliders in the desired direction and the software will adjust the corresponding ingredient amount! But I am satisfied with this result.

For this to be a beer recipe I will need a yeast and I will use my go-to yeast Nottingham from Danstar:

Now I have added all the ingredients to the recipe and the result will look like this:

To the left the ingredients are listed and to the right is an approximation of the finished beer color, looks delicious!

Tomorrow I will walk you through the mashing parameters and discuss the Brew day sheet!