What makes a recipe "yours"?

At what point can someone legitimately say a recipe is theirs, or uniquely theirs?

When you use only materials that nobody else has ever used. :wink:

This is an ongoing discussion, but I think a recipe is one thing and the brewing/fermentation process is another. It’s the recipe and the process that makes “the beer”. So a recipe is only part of the picture.

As far as “the recipe” goes , for example, Pliny the Elder is a recipe that can be found on the internet. If I were to brew that beer, I would credit Vinnie C. as the creator of the recipe but I would take ownership of “the beer” a clone of Pliny the Elder developed by Russian River.

I think it’s up to you to decide.  I made a clone of a beer a while back that combined two different published clone recipes of the same beer - I would call that my recipe.  Other times I’ll come up with a recipe on my own that ends up remarkably similar to someone else’s published recipe, but that’s still my recipe.  Other times I’ll start from a published recipe and diverge after a few times brewing it.  That is my recipe too, but I don’t hesitate to tell people the history of the recipe if they are interested (“my recipe is based on one from my LHBS, but I did this and this”).

Still, it’s a lot easier to say “my Pliny recipe” than to say “it’s a Pliny the Elder clone that is kind of a mish-mash of Vinnie’s homebrew PtE recipe and McDole’s recipe for Pliny’s Hammer with a tweak to the gravity and some rearranging of the malt and hops based on what I had and could find.  Oh, and I used palm sugar instead of table sugar, just for fun.”

I think all that matters is that you are comfortable with whatever you’re calling it, since recipes are only a starting point and brewing technique is responsible for most of the quality in a beer. I think of it like music - rock and pop musicians look down on cover bands, but classical musicians have been playing other people’s music for centuries.

I don’t think I should mess with existing recipes until I understand my process better and can reproduce the same batch. I just wasn’t sure how protective people were of their “creations.”

It’s easy to stick to a recipe if you’re buying kits since it all comes as one package, but if you are trying to put together the ingredients to brew a published recipe you might need to make some substitutions.  Feel free to ask for advice.

Honestly, the times I’ve stuck to a recipe are very few.  Maybe the first time I brew it, and then it starts to evolve and follows what Tom said and becomes my recipe for that beer.

Even with recipes I’ve created from scratch, which would be mine, and brewed for years, they’re always getting tweaked either for available ingredients or to tweak the flavor or whatever.

All of our recipes are pretty much derivative anyway.

if they are protective of their creations they wouldn’t share it.  i create recipes for the taste i am trying to hit.  i often look at published recipes of the style and see how much they vary from one to the next.  and as Tom said, a lot depends on what is available. My Heilge Nacht was supposed to be a bock type beer.  I didn’t have as much as I wanted and ended up dumping my grain stores in to it.  oat meal, rye, pilsner, some vienna, munich then homegrown hops.  people post recipes because they want comments, and we like to share our hobby a lot.

I think most recipes I find are too complicated (grain-bill wise). I find myself questioning the need for some grain additions so I usually simplify them. For instance, I say “It can’t be a German beer if you use over 3 different grains”.

A lot of people brew quite a few of my recipes.  I always ask that people brew it exactly as written the first time.  That way, you have a baseline if you want to make changes in the future.

No offense, but who are you to decide?  There’s nothing wrong with simple recipes, and there’s nothing wrong with complicated recipes, as long as you have a reason for every ingredient being there in either type.

I’m a little different.  If it tastes like a German beer to me, then it is one.  I usually don’t know the recipes anyway.  If the brewer wants to call it something else, that’s fine too.

I’ve made all my recipes from scratch since around 1998, so I consider them mine.  when I started creating recipes I might read 15 or more published recipes to get a feel for what others have done, but when it came time to actually write my recipe all books, magazines, websites, forums etc are closed and I come up with the recipe.  Then to make it even more mine I do an inventory or ingredients on hand and adapt my new recipe to what I actually have around, thus there is one more layer or separation between me and published recipes.
A few years ago a bunch of us over at realbeer.com came up with a recipe(actually one for AG and one for extract) and had Austin Homebrew put together kits with the ingredients for the ESB we all decided on.  Then everybody brewed it and we sent a couple of bottles of our beer to 3 other participants.  The differences were really outstanding so it was very obvious that recipe and even ingredients play a small part in brewing a beer.

i agree, i usually brew mostly german beers, and most of the main styles in the BJCP will really need a simple grain bill, but take a look at germanbeerinstitute.com and you can see the complexity of the possibilities and a varied grain bill may be in order to hit the taste you want.  (emphasis on what YOU want)

That I am the one who has to clean all of my equipment to include stubborn, stuck on krausen out of my carboys. Until someone else wants to clean for me, then they are mine.

That and I am having fun making up my own for the time being. ;D

All the recipes I brew now are mine. aside from a handful of Charlie P. recipes I brewed years ago the only clones I have brewed in the last several years have been “the” dry stout recipe (the well known Guinness clone)  and a Pliny the elder kit I ordered from B3 around 7 years ago basically because it was easier and cheaper to get that quantity of hops. and I just wanted to try Pliny but couldn’t get out to California.  :wink:

If you sit down and have an idea of what beer you want to brew and you design the recipe - even if you look at several other recipes to see what other people are doing - then it is yours. You can certainly get ideas from other people, but if you brew Denny’s BVIP and increase the munich malt or raise the bittering units slightly then it is still denny’s recipe.

This is a good club activity.  Our club has done this a few times.  Recipes are 10% of what makes a beer in the end, in my book.

Equipement and the procedures one uses with the equipement are much bigger parts of the equation.  Ingedients are also a big part.  How fresh are the ingredients?  If the recipe says Maris Otter, which malster selected will have a big influence on the beer.

Where is that published?  I’d like to look at it.  Does it go by another name?

+1.  I think it was Denny that recently said he had judged a contest that had 3 different entries of one of his recipes and all three were different and not like his when he brews it. (sorry Denny if I am attributing this incorrectly to you)