Someone who has successfully completed a few home brews and is excited about ad
ding their own take on a beer recipe can easily fall into the trap of diving in too quickly and aggressively changing multiple components to a recipe. This is a mistake that can lead to wasted time and effort.
By now you’re hopefully keeping a brew log and recording every part of the brewing process.
But let’s imagine you’ve identified a few opportunity areas to improve upon a recipe. For example, say you want to add some new herbs for a change in flavor and also want to add some additional hops to the profile. Even if you kept a perfect brew log, if you chose to tweak both components to your recipe at the same time you would be unable to know how those changes ultimately affected your recipe.
You may have come across a perfect alternation to one of the two changes made to your recipe, but the other alteration didn’t work as well. The problem is, when you sample your new beer you’ll have no way of knowing if one or both of the changes were incorrect. All you’d know is, “this beer tastes off.”
This is why it's important to make only one change to a home brew recipe at a time. If you experiment with only one component of your recipe, you’ll better understand how that adjustment specifically affected your beer.
This may seem like extra work in the moment, but it will save you time in the long run.
Remember to keep consistent and thorough track of any change in your Brew Log, so you can easily adjust based off multiple rounds of experimentation. Once you’re satisfied with a change to your recipe, it’s time to experiment with the next change!
We’d love to hear from others out there! Do you have any additional thoughts on the idea of tracking changes to recipes? If so, we invite you to join the conversation and share your thoughts below.
