Every brewer reaches a point in their hobby (/career/obsession/etc) that they are tired of following recipes found in kits, books, and magazines and want to create their own recipe. This happened to me pretty early on – batch #4 I believe – and the results were less than stellar.
Fast forward a few years and most of the recipes I use are of my own design. I’ve become a lot more comfortable with the ingredients and processes I use on brew day. This is familiarity is key to recipe creation, but I’m not going to cover how to create your own recipe in this article (that will come later), but I will cover how I created one recipe in particular. In this case, it’s my German Pale Ale, GPA 4.0.
I plan on doing a few of these articles. I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert, but maybe you’ll pick up a tip or two. At the very least, you’ll get some insight into my brewing thought process.
Inspiration
On the road, you have to make do with what you have
Every recipe and therefore every beer can be traced back to a point of conception. In the case of GPA 4.0 it was in August of 2010 on a business trip to Nacogdoches, Texas. The week I was there, the daily high temperature was somewhere between 95-100F. Fortunately, I was able to find a few beers to help beat the heat. One of these was Real Ale’s Rio Blanco Pale Ale. I tried all of their year-round beers that week, and they were all fantastic, but the Rio Blanco was my favorite.
It poured lighter in color than most American Pale Ales, almost leaning more towards a Cream Ale. In the nose there was a more biscuity and spicy aroma than any APA I’ve ever had before. Sure enough, when I took a drink I knew this wasn’t an average APA. Those biscuit notes from the aroma carried into the flavor along with a soft wheat flavor I would wager was white wheat. I use white wheat malt a lot in my beers, but most prevalently in my Honey Do Honey Brew. The spiciness I smelled reminded me of light Belgian ales. My guess was Saaz – which to me is one of my favorite and most easily identifiable hops. Sure enough, the bottle’s label proudly states the beer is brewed with Saaz. It wasn’t a punch-you-in-the-face hop character many APA’s are guilty of, and it didn’t finish quite as harshly dry. The key descriptors that kept popping up in my mind were “soft” and “round”.
I wanted to brew this beer. I thought it would make the perfect warm weather brew. It would be over 6 months later before I actually did brew a similar beer.
As much as I liked the Rio Blanco Pale Ale, I didn’t want to exactly clone it. The beer was in class of its own – a new style separate from American Pale Ale. Ideas for the recipe were in the back of my mind those 6 months after I left Texas. Then a friend and fellow brewer enthusiastically told me of a beer he discovered at the Einfach Brewery in McGregor, Iowa – it was a “German Pale Ale”. For some reason finding a name of this new “style” of beer was enough for the gears in my mind to click in place and start designing a recipe.
Choosing the Ingredients
I set out thinking about what would constitute a German Pale Ale. If the style were to be added to the BJCP Guidelines tomorrow, what would be in the definition? German malts: Pilsener, Munich, and Wheat; German hops: Tettnang, Pearle, Saaz (I know it’s not truly a German hop, but it does make appearances in German style beers); a yeast that allows for a clean finish that favors malt emphasis over hops; and a flavor profile that leans towards malt-hop balance. I also need to think about the size of the beer. I want to be able to have a couple of these in a night, but I don’t want to turn this into a session beer. An average (~1.050) starting gravity should be perfect.
Grain
I should start by saying that when deciding on what grain to use, almost all of my beers adhere to the following two rules:
1) The base malt (or malts) make up at least 80% of the grist. Any less than that and there’s a good chance you won’t hit your finishing gravity and the beer will come out on the sweet side. Conversely, I have made beers with 100% base malt that have turned out very nicely.
2) There are no more than 4 different grains in any beer. In my experience, the simpler the better. The first recipes I created were monstrously complex and this complexity carried into the finished product. There is a time and a place for complexity, such as with a Robust Porter or a Saison, but most of the time you’re just muddying the waters. Pick a few quality ingredients and let them stand out.
With those rules in mind, I started looking at malts. Although this is a German-style beer, I didn’t want too much of a grainy/biscuity flavor, so that ruled out Pilsener and Munich as the base, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized what I wanted was a “German take” on an American style. Most American styles use 2-Row as their base. 2-Row by itself would make for a pretty bland beer, so I want to include a little Munich. I’ve found that adding a pound of Munich to a recipe adds a grainy/biscuit flavor that isn’t overpowering. Oh, and I don’t want to forget the white wheat that stood out in my mind when I drank the Rio Blanco.
So now I have three grains picked out. And all three of them are pretty fermentable and can be used as base malts. American Pale Ales tend to use crystal malt, so let’s throw some of that in. I originally thought Crystal 60 would be the one to use here, but it added too much color and I would imagine too much caramel flavor, so let’s go with Crystal 40.
Now I need to pick the ratios. The 2-Row and White Wheat are my main players here. Too much 2-Row and the beer could come out bland. Too much wheat and the beer will get hazy and venture into wheat beer territory. My wheat beers tend to be 60/40 barley/wheat, so I don’t want to use 40% wheat. 75/25 might be better. That calculates out to 60% US 2-Row and 20% White Wheat to start off my base. I don’t want to use a lot of crystal either, since I want this to finish dry, so we’ll keep that at 5%. There’s 15% left over, so it goes to the Munich.
So to summarize my malt bill:
60% US 2-Row
20% White Wheat
15% Munich
5% Crystal 40
I like to use percentages when formulating recipes. It’s much easier than calculating efficiency and exact amounts. When I’ve settled on the percentages, I’ll translate those into pounds on BeerSmith and set my target starting gravity. So, in this case I’ll have 7 pounds of 2-Row, 2 pounds of white wheat, 1.5 of Munich, and 0.5 of C40. With my average efficiency sitting right around 70%, I can actually use those amounts and hit a starting gravity of 1.057. That sounds good to me.
Hops
I definitely need to use Saaz, and use it in a way that it has the dominant hop character. I don’t want to use it as the only hop, since I’ve found that this can result in a beer with a very 1-dimensional hop character. And this is a Pale Ale afterall, so hops are important. I have also found from personal experience that you generally get the best hop character by using hops from the same country or region in a recipe. I have a big bag of Pearle hops in my freezer, so let’s use that along with the Saaz. I’m a little ashamed to admit that, and its country of origin are my only reasons for using Pearle here and not another German hop.
Many published recipes give hop additions in weight (1.5oz Cascade at 60 minutes, etc) with no mention of Alpha Acid Units (AAUs), but then list a target IBU to allow you to hope for the best. The AAUs are hugely important – they are what determines the bitterness contribution of a hop. So I make sure these are correct in BeerSmith before I continue.
More important than IBUs is the MBR of a beer. I covered this in a previous article, so I won’t define it here. I found the OG, ABV, and IBUs for Rio Blanco off of the Real Ale site, so I had everything I needed to get the FG, and therefore derive their MBR, which is 44.1 (it’s interesting to note that the most famous APA, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has a dangerously close MBR of 43.8). 44 sounds like a good number for my beer too, so I multiple .44 by my target OG+FG to get 30.8. That’s my target IBU for this recipe.
Now I just need to find a way to split up the hop additions. I really only consider 4 points for adding hops in any recipe – bitterness (90-60 minutes before KO), flavor (30-15 minutes before KO), aroma (0, Knockout), and dry hopping. I want to use all 4 in this recipe as it is at its heart, an APA. I don’t want too much at bitterness since that can cause a harsh, overly dry finish. I think most of the hop character should come at the flavor addition or later. Using BeerSmith, I spread these out across the three boil additions in 10 IBU, 15 IBU, and 5 IBU increments respectively. Keep in mind that you extract more IBUs the longer the hops isomerize, so although it looks like my biggest addition is the flavor hops, it is in fact the aroma addition. On the same note, the flavor addition isn’t 1.5x the bitterness addition, but 3x due to isomerization.
I split these out so that each addition is about 3:1 between Saaz and Pearle hops.
Yeast
Last, but certainly not least is the yeast. I debated this one for a while. I wanted to keep to the German spirit of the rest of the recipe, but I really couldn’t find a yeast that met my criteria. That criteria was: highly attenuative, highly flocculent, and favoring malt character. That combination doesn’t really exist and is a contradiction of sorts. I started searching Northern Brewer for their excellent comparative yeast statistics.
I’m a big fan of White Labs so I really only considered them. My first thought was WLP001, “California Ale” – the Chico (aka Sierra Nevada) strain. I didn’t think that would really play well with the maltiness of the Munich, so I kept looking. Ah, WLP007, Dry English Ale (or the “Bond” strain as I like to call it 
. It’s one of my favorites. It’s very similar to WLP001, but mutes the hops just a little in favor of malt. 70-80% attenuative, medium-high flocculation. Perfect.
Conclusion
Well, at this point I had my recipe. I brewed it last week and haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but it looks and smells amazing. I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out.
To recap, here’s the recipe
1.057 OG, 30 IBUs
60% US 2-Row
20% White Wheat
15% Munich
5% Crystal 40
10 IBUs Pearle/Saaz @ 60
15 IBUs Pearle/Saaz @ 20
5 IBUs Pearle/Saaz @ 0
1oz Saaz and 0.5oz Pearle to dry hop
WLP007 yeast (with a starter)
