New to brewing!

Hi, so I just recently got into brewing with a home kit, and let me say I love it, but so far have only worked with pre made kits, so I just wanted to ask for some advice or where i can find some great information to start putting my own together and break away from these kits. Any information would be greatly appreciated thank you!

The best way to learn about ingredients so you can make your own recipes is by brewing  kits and analyzing what makes the beer taste the way it does.  Then look at the recipe the kit comes with.  Try brewing the same thing g again, but changing one (and only one!) thing in the recipe.  One you do that for a while, you’ll start learning which ingredients give what kind of flavor, and you’ll be ready to try your own recipe.

I recommend the book “Brewing Classic Styles” by Zainescheff and Palmer. It has at least 1 solid recipe for each beer style. This allows you to start from a known recipe for a particular style, and then after brewing it as written you can make small tweaks to see how that affects the recipe.

Welcome to your new obsession [emoji16]

How to Brew by John Palmer is excellent and remains an amazing resource as you gain experience. I think every brewer should read Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Charlie helped me remember to RDWHAHB – Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew! Have fun with brewing while you’re learning and figuring out what works for you. Anything by Denny (Conn…yup, the dude that responded to your post [emoji1598]) and/ or Drew Beechum is fantastic. Join the AHA and you get discounts that pay for the membership and a subscription to Zymurgy!

Cheers and welcome!

But still requires you to learn about ingredients first so you can make good choices to tweak.

like others have said, take the kit and change one thing. Its benefits are twofold, you get a beer you call your own and can see the impact that ingredient has, thereby becoming a more educated brewer.

Welcome to the obsession, its the best!!!

Well, chicken or egg. To try out ingredients, you want a basic recipe to work off of. Whether it’s from BCS or a kit, once you have a “known good” recipe, then you can swap a hop variety, or yeast strain, or base malt, crystal malt, roast malt, etc. to see what difference it makes.

Just wanted to say thank you all for the advice, and i will be sure to look into those books getting ready to go to my local supply store to start a batch tonight and i have one in mind that i might tweak and go from there but again thank you

Welcome NikFrees!  Another thing I would highly recommend, once you have a recipe put together that you think you want to try, post it in the Beer Recipes board.  There’s lots of folks here to give you feedback.  I posted my last three brews (I think it was the last three) and made slight adjustments based on the input from others.  It’s a great way to get advice and avoid certain pitfalls before you even brew.

Thank you joe, so i went to my supplier today and he is well experienced in home brewing and although he did not have the kit i was looming for helped me put together a kit similar to what i was looking into which is a black ipa but with his help and math we came to the base of like 20 oz of grain 8 oz of biscuit, 8 oz of cara brown and 4 oz of chocolate wheat with a sparkling amber liquid malt extract at 3.3 lbs and adding columbus and chinook hops through boiling after steeping for a total of almost a 50 min boil and 1 oz of chinook and 1 oz of columbus dry hop into 2nd stage fermentation it not to far from the base recipe other than using more raw ingredients and weight measurements but little change but the smell and aromatics really did come as what of I’ve known based on the recipe that i did before and is relatable so im figuring the taste will change at this point but hopefully for the better only time will tell in about a month after bottling and it is thanks to all the help i have received from this forum so far that i was even comfortable taking these type of steps with what little knowledge o have

Welcome to the hobby!
And what I’m doing now it brewing close stylies, I brew 4 batches at a time so I pick close in abv, recipe and change the hops or yeast help me decide what I want, another great think I begin to do is SMaSh, single malt and single hop, recipes this way I can learn about the ingredients I’m using, but what dennis said maybe is better, and don’t be afraid of trying new things in brewing

I also want to welcome you to the wonderful world of homebrewing!  There is some really good advice from Denny and others here.  Don’t be afraid to experiment.  The “one item substitution” is a very good point to take to heart.  This will teach you things abut ingredients.  You will make mistakes, we all have, and you will have to maybe dump a beer from time to time (been there, done that).

The most important thing that I can suggest is cleanliness and sanitation.  If your equipment and packagaing vessels (i.e. bottles or kegs) are not completely clean and sanitary, this is the quickest way to ruin a beer that you spent a significant amount of time making because of infection.  If that happens, don’t get discouraged, just regroup and learn from your mistakes.

Finally, in addtion to the books mentioned, don’t be afraid to ask questions!  Many of us here on this forum have been brewing a long time and we still ask questions and learn things here.    Good luck and welcome aboard!

Thanks and i use a stan sanitizer on all my equipment before using them as well as with my paddle and thermometer i constantly re sanitize through out the process i definitely try to keep it as clean as possible

Keep on mind that sanitizing is unnecessary on the hot side.  Only an issue after the boil.

NikFrees - welcome! You will find (as already demonstrated here) that the homebrewing world is populated with folks who want to be helpful and encouraging and who are on a continual path of learning themselves while also eager to share what they’ve learned with others. Ask lots of questions. I agree with all that others have said here. An additional thought - - have a reason for using any ingredient you’re using and for doing any steps that you’re undertaking in your process. This will come as you get more familiar with ingredients and have more experience but is perhaps good to keep in mind from the start. Recipes for many beer styles are very simple. Some recipes may be more complex but if so it should be because each ingredient or complexity in process contributes something that otherwise you could not achieve in your end product in terms of quality and flavor. The books folks have recommended are a great starting point for gaining these understandings of process and ingredients.

Welcome to this addicting hobby of home brewing!  One of the single biggest factors of me moving beyond kits is seeing more advanced brewing in action.  Do you have a nearby Homebrew club you can join?  Anybody else you know already brewing that you can witness an all-grain brew day?  All the reading, thinking, and researching didn’t compare to being able to witness a more advanced brew day.  Although it was more advanced, it answered a lot of my questions and took a lot of my uncertainty away to where it made me more prepared to take the leap from extract and pre-made kits.

Don’t make this hard. You’re soaking crushed grain in hot water at a certain pH and then draining the water off the grain. It’s an ancient craft people have been doing for ever.

For a 5 gal batch grab 10# of Pale(standard 2-row) or Pilsner malt and 1# of Munich or Vienna. If you want a yellow beer (what most people think of as ‘beer’) add 10 oz of crystal 10*L (C10). Different maltsters will name it differently (e.g. Carahell, CaraPils, Crystal 10, etc). If you want a golden color add C40 instead of the C10. If you want a Pale Ale add C60 or even C80 instead of the C10.  That’s a run of the mill, standard 95% base malt + 5% C malt formula.

I recommend 8.5 gal distilled water with 2.6 g each of Gypsum and Cal Chloride. 2.4 g Epsom Salt and .4g non iodized table salt and 5ml lactic acid. Heat the water, add the minerals and acid, drain off 3 gal and hold it warm. Combine the remaining 5.5 gal hot water with the grain. I like a 152*F mash.

When the mash is complete separate the liquid from the grain.

Add the 3 gal you held back. Separate that liquid from the grain.

That’s it. That’s a basic recipe. The rest is just like extract: boil, add hops, drain, ferment, package, carbonate, drink.

Of course the devil is in the details but you can build off that. As Denny said add or subtract one ingredient or process at a time so you’ll know what impact the change had on the control.

My opinion is to forget about home brewing books. Just read and ask questions on the forums, there are several. That way you get many opinions, usually a consensus will form and you will have more up to date information. Another good value of this is to get exposure to some alternate opinions and not just pure homebrew dogma. Good luck on your new adventure.

I’d recommend not limiting the sources of the info you take in.  Books, forums, podcasts, homebrew clubs, technical papers…all can be good sources of information.  Try things that fit what you’re looking for and decide for yourseelf.

I’m surprised that nobody mentioned Designing Great Beers by Daniels. That was the text that helped me step out of prescribed recipes and formulate my own.

The other thing that I find helpful, is to visit your homebrew shop and taste many of the various grains to get a better understanding of what each one might do for your beer.