There have been a few new brewers join the club forum as of late and I have seen this topic come up so I thought I would share my process for writing recipes, other members please feel free to discuss your thoughts, process etc.
For me writing a recipe comes almost entirely from experience at this point. Unless I’m going to brew a new to me style or something I haven’t brewed in a long time that is. If you are new to brewing, or new to writing recipes I would highly recommend keeping a binder in house or files on your pc with your recipes and notes, including tasting notes. I keep both a hard copy and BeerSmith backups updated on a regular basis. I keep a hard copy because I have lost recipes with a hard drive failure before. Even the backup files had some corruption so I now keep a large binder with all of my recipes, brew day notes, tasting notes, current hop inventory, a list of beers I want to brew as well as ideas to incorporate into those beer. I keep a rough schedule for my long term beer as well. When I want to add fruit, oak or dry hop to sours, or other long term Brett and Belgian beer.
The tasting notes are essential to me. Even if you are an extract brewer you can keep the recipe sheets and jot a few notes down, even simple improvements you would like to see next time you brew that beer, it doesn’t have to be official tasting notes. For example, say you brew an IPA and you enjoyed it but you felt it was thin. You could note that and make an addition of wheat to increase mouth feel. You like the extra mouth feel but not the flavour that the wheat contributed so you make notes to try an addition of oats next time. You see where I’m going with this.
Finally, brewing on a consistent basis. It’s hard to improve and keep styles straight if you brew 4 times in a month and then have so much supply you don’t need to look at your gear for months at a time.
Brew, take notes, repeat…