BeerBorg

I find myself doing the same thing, BD. I want to just pick ingredients at will to create my own recipe and then adjust the amounts so that they yield numbers within spec of the style.

FrozenInTime wrote:I lean to the right, never left.

BB1 is left and BB2 is right so we usually end up in crisis mode on brewday - does that make us frontal.

I start out left, planning and researching ingredients, but dang if at brew time I don;t go all right and start adding this and tweaking that. You have to be a little left in order to keep everything sanitized, but I enjoy experimenting too. Oh by the way tossing a whole nutmeg into the LBK is not a good idea. Just sayin'

Monty

Left brain brewer here, but confident enough to substitute similar malts and/or hops to use what I already have on hand.

BigPapaG wrote:
@ mashani only brews when there is a high chance of of a lightning storm so his 'creations' can come to life...

Count me like others:

Right-brain in terms of being creative with recipes, but very left-brain when it comes to actually formulating the recipes themselves.
I also measure to 1/10oz on my grains so I can easily tweak or reproduce when needed. If I could, I would count the damn yeast, too.

I have done a few frankenbiers when I had some extract on hand and found myself with time to kill, though. Some of this, some of that.....but even then I rote down exactly when I put in it in case I brewed the best beer ever. Which it wasn't.

a bit of both. Sometimes I just brew so of this grain some of that hop that sounds good. I play mad scientist/chef a lot. Other times everything is very exact. Such as developing a clone recipe. As long as the result is great beer I am a happy brewer

I'm definitely a research and recipe brewer. I'll pick a style and find the ingredients that let me stay within those guidelines, so sort of creative there. On brew day, everything is pre-measured and ready to go ahead of time. No pinch of this or that for me. My thinking is if I don't know exactly how much of what I put in it, then how can I replicate/improve it next time?

As I am still new to Home Brewing, I am still in the follow the rules exactly phase. I hope to try new recipes as I gain a little confidence after getting some more batches under my belt.

I mostly brew on the right side ( right is right - Right? )
I am fussy about sanitation though and I log everything I do and use for future reference.

wait you guys got a left AND a right side??

wait you guys got a left AND a right side??

BigPapaG wrote:@ CrazyClimber
You didn't tell us where you fall on this topic...

Definitely left brain.
For me, the planning is a lot of the fun. Scheduling brews in advance so that I have what I want in the pipeline at a certain time, formulating and tweaking a recipe in BeerSmith, naming the beer, designing the label, etc.

I'm a "type A" personality, and the science of brewing appeals to me. Don't get me wrong, the art of brewing is appealing, too.

I think that's why so many of us are as passionate about it as we are: it appeals to many different types of people, across the spectrum. Whether you're left brain or right, or somewhere in between, you can find something about brewing that satisfies you greatly.

Y'all know that bit that Jeff Foxworthy does where he says, "If you (do such and such) you might be a redneck."?

Well, if your brews have fermentation notes that look like this...



...you might be a left-brained brewer.


On the serious side though, how about that Fromunda yeast? 1.075 to 1.020 in just under 96 hours. Pitched dry.

Kealia wrote: I also measure to 1/10oz on my grains so I can easily tweak or reproduce when needed.

Now I never do that. I just measure to the ounce and don't stress about it. If that means I get a bit of variation if I brew the same thing again, I just consider that to be interesting. Especially with the darker grains, I don't think there is that much more variation then the differences between the grain I buy inherently has anyways (IE English Chocolate or Special B or similar dark malts may have 100+SRM difference anyways, and corresponding subtle differences in flavor, so no way to really make something with it exactly the same anyways from year to year). In that regards I just RDWHAHB.