BeerBorg

This requires a little explaining on my part.

I guess what I really mean is how do you formulate your recipes, and roughly what percentage of them are totally original?

For instance, I go from one extreme to the other. For my 2.5 gallon batches, I use HME/LME recipes and don't change them at all, for ease and quickness of preparation. But my 5 gallon batches are all AG batches, and they're recipes I've invented on my own. There really isn't any in-between for me.

For the most part I think and consider what it is I want out of the beer. I imagine the finished product and go from there. I take inspiration from commercial beers, from other brewers and I consult Brewing Classic Styles a lot to gauge what I'm thinking of doing recipe wise up against what is considered a tried and true recipe. I've never brewed any recipe as is from another source. There's always been some twist to it to make it mine or more original or maybe it was simply a small substitution. Maybe for better or worse...who knows.

Me some are, some I change to fit my rig & tastes. Food in general is like tying fishing flys or lure making to me. I think it as all been done before just waiting to be rediscovered.

Sometimes I build from the ground up using a particular style color, ABV, etc in beer smith. Other times I look at the ingredients used in a beer on a brewery website and proportion them according to my taste. Sometimes I look at brewing classic styles. I am pretty much all over the map on this one. I rarely do any clones and most of my beers are 100% my own formulated recipe.

I've not brewed per recipe for a long time. I always change to fit me-me-me. I have done a couple that I have just come up with myself, but I'm not that smart to do them up right. I usually look at established recipes them customiz dem. Most times when I come up with something, I look around in da books or online and see they have already been done, so I guess I am just a copy-cat with a small change thrown in.

I'm all over the map. As you know I started with MrB and moved quickly from straight-up to steeps and hop boils.

I went AG (BIAB) within a few months and then started with a few clones scaled down to get the process down and learn about different hops and flavors.
Then I started looking at recipes within a style to learn about the commonalities so I could formulate my own recipes which I do most of the time.
There are a couple of clones that have made their way into my rotation (Levitation and Dead Guy) that I really like, though. I've tweaked them a bit to meet my needs but I'd be hard pressed to call the recipes mine.

My pale ales are mine 100%, though. Well, except this very last one that I brewed that I got from Swen.
It's the pale ale from Yazoo that I tried when I was out there.

In theory I would guess that 75% of what I brew is original if I had to swag a number.

I tend to formulate everything according to style. I still have one MrB craft series that I will brew strait up. And 3 creamy brown UMEs from MrB as well that I will hop up and make an english style brew. Then my MrB days will likely be over. Ive been doing smashes to get a taste for ingredients and next year will concentrate on more elaborate brews. These last 5 months have solely been about yeasts and hops to fit a particular style. My biab technique has gotten better and my efficiency has gone up 3.5points using just a base malt. Its still only about 66% and hope to get it around 70 by years end. To summarize, its basically style.

It has been a long while since I've brewed using any extract. Ever since I started brewing AG via BIAB via SMEIBB, I've been brewing either recipes I've converted to all grain, or using all-grain recipes from BrewToad or even other members kind enough to share with me. I feel like the recipes that I have tried to develop on my own need work and haven't come out as good as recipes I have helped others develop, and I'm certain a lot of that is because I didn't ask for any insight or advice from anyone back then, but now I know better. A lot of the influence for me to brew strictly all-grain anymore is the cheaper price of grain versus extract. I'm always on a limited budget, and especially so lately that money has been pretty tight that I haven't brewed as often as I used to.

As for what I brew, it's usually based off of style. Initially I only brewed styles I knew I liked. These days, I'm pushing myself to try new ones and hope to grow my pallet. A vast majority are either recipes from sites or other fellow brewers, and few are my own design.

I sometimes use other peoples recipes but mostly it is my own that I use.

When I start creating my own recipe I will usually pick a style of beer that I want and then use the recipe from Brewing Classic Styles to establish a baseline. Then I will look at other beers in that style and see what makes them unique. I will then test out a bunch of those items until I get it the way I like it.

I use tested recipes from a number of sources, or tweak a recipe to fit what I have on hand.

haven't brewed with a HME since feb but plenty of dme brews. most of mine are original recipes, even the recipes i copied only got brewed straight once. then i start changing things.

For me, I just kind of think about what type of beer to make. My two original recipes were 3lb bags of DME, one wheat, one amber. Then, I just fell onto the hops. I purchased them based on what I think I wanted out of my beers. I went with some Mt Hood for the wheat for the "clean" hop flavor, but knew I wanted to pump in some citrus, so Falconer's Flight (after I got Swen'd at the LHBS). For my amber I knew I wanted some real good citrus, so I got Centennial, and I still had the Falconer's. So, I bought all that before even having a solid recipe, just I kind of generality. I will admit, it wasn't 100% original because I got pretty good advice from some people in the taproom, so they get some of the credit. Then, I sat down with qBrew and put in the AA values and really focused down on the IBUs and what type of profile I wanted. My 'Murican Wheat Ale I would say was mostly original, with help from the taproom. The amber ale was a bit harder, and I changed my hop profile in qBrew many times before finalizing. I used a recipe book (200 Clone Brew Book), and I found a couple amber ales that I have tried and liked, and compared the hop schedule to what I wanted out of my beer. Ultimately deciding on the schedule. So, that one was pretty much almost 100% original.

I kinda do all of the above. Sometimes I just wing it based on ingredients on hand, or if I have a new ingredient I want to try. Other times I grab a recipe from one of the several recipe books I've picked up over the years. And sometimes I like to clone beers I've liked before and seek out recipes from trusted sources. Occasionally I'm slid a recipe from a brewery/brewmaster that I try. And at least once I win a contest and thus use those ingredients either straight up or as an ingredient base.

Have you used up all of those winnings yet?