Newbie Question - Recipes for Grainfather

[Royston Hellaby]

Hi,

I'm just starting out in brewing and jumping right into all grain brewing and using grain father. To make it even more difficult for myself I really want to create my own IIPA recipe.

My question is, what app/site do you suggest works best with the grainfather to create recipes etc.

Apologies if this has been covered already, had a quick look and couldn't find anything obvious.

Thanks

Royston

[Craig Howard]

My suggestion to you ( and myself when I get to full grain brewing) ...is to start with a baseline brew.

A reference point and a way to learn the brewing craft and your hardware.

I have started with Kits for this reason.

Other opinions may vary on this.

[Royston Hellaby]

Thanks for the reply and I was also thinking kits, but finding it difficult to not just go for it and try something based on recipes for similar beers. 

[Sam DT]

+1 for using all grain kits for getting started it really does help to get your method nailed down plus almost guarantees that you'll be brewing great beer from the outset. I still regularly re-brew from some of the original recipes I started out on.

If you do go for a recipe off a forum the Epic pale ale recipe on here  is worth a crack - it's bang on and then you can try a bottle side by side to assess how well you have done.

If you do an IIPA for your first beer make sure you either use an existing recipe and read up on how to's on IIPAs - you'll need a high attenuation yeast and a really big pitch plus lots of wort aeration to get you close to your target gravity. Personally I think they're at the more challenging end of brewing as you're really pushing your yeast to the limit. The first one I tried had way too much speciality malt and ended up way too sweet. 

[Royston Hellaby]

Decided on a kit, but went all in and bought a "Pliny the Elder" clone kit!

If it turns out vaguely like the original I will be very very happy.

[Grant R Baker]

Not Grainfather specific but BeerSmith works well once you have learnt how to use it.

 

Otherwise Brewers Friend and Brew Toad have online recipe makers... I am not sure how well they work with the GrainFather system as they most just deal with batch size.

 

In wanting to do a Imperial IPA you need to consider that maximum amount of grain the GF can handle when trying to achieve your ABV.

[Royston Hellaby]

I've had a brief look at brewtoad and did find someone had created a grainfather recipe on there.

Talking to the people at hauraki homebrew it sounds like it can take 9kg or just over, so I'm thinking I should be ok aiming for something in the 7.5 - 9% range, but may start smaller and work up to that.

[Crusader-Rob]

the information suggests up to 9kg, but alot of people are saying its more comfortable at 8-8.5kg, but for a pliny you shouldn't have a problem.

[David R]

Many IIPA's (like Pliny) will have some dextrose in there to help dry it out a little and to bump up the ABV without increasing the malt body. You should have no problem getting it into the 8-9% ABV range with the grainfather, my Pliny recipe (in Beersmith for a grainfather-size batch) only uses ~6.8kg of grain and 280g dextrose.

If you want to create your own IIPA recipe you really want to get your head around the different hop varieties and how they work together. Anyone can brew an average IIPA; it doesn't take a rocket scientist to throw together a ton of hops and a simple malt base, but brewing an exceptional one is far more challenging. Have a look at what the likes of Russian River, The Alchemist, Stone, etc etc use and start from there.

[Royston Hellaby]

I actually bought a pliny clone from the dunedin malthouse, and as you said it's grain and dextrose, brew day is 8 days away, cannot wait to get started.

[David R]

Does it tell you what the hops are, or do they just come in packets for "90 min" "dry hop" etc?

I've seen a few recipes for Pliny, the original article (written by Vinnie himself) didn't have any Amarillo in it, but I believe they are now using it too...

[Royston Hellaby]

Yea, seems pretty good, all packs of hops individually packed with timings and weight/content. Can't recall all of them off the top of my head, but def Chinook, Citra I think etc