How extact to do you to be (ever made a hotch potch beer)

[az77]

For AG, have you ever just used what malts/hops you had lying about without really measuring carefully weights and times etc... If so how did it turn out, you may have used lager malts with dark malts and lager hops with ale hops etc...

I imagine it would be a bit like me making mince i just throw in whatever i have, herbs, chilli powder, sweetcorn, tomatoes, kidney beans, veg, lots of things and is always tastes good enough.

[Spud395]

I reckon it's best to stick with accepted knowledge untill you get to know what you're getting from the different malts and hops.
But then I'm only heading fast for AG no2.
There's so much to learn, I think that would be a very difficult way to go about learning!

[trucker5774]

A recipe of some sort is best. If that recipe is a pinch of this and a handful of that with some of the other thrown in, then so be it...............it will still be beer. You will probably need to note what is the dominant hop and grain to get an idea of what the colour, bitterness and flavour will be......go for it!

[az77]

I'm not going to try it, just curious, everything in AG is so exact it seems.

[Brotherton Lad]

It doesn't need to be exact. Look at the variation in recipes, you'll see pretty wide margins of percentages of grains and hops (or yeast or water treatment or mash temperature) between one and the other, it's like making bread or baking a cake. You'll still make beer. To replicate that brew, or to make a clone of a commercial beer, then you need to be accurate in your measurements, otherwise you just make beer that's maltier or hoppier or stronger or weaker, or to your taste or not.
The recipes do, however, give you a good idea of how far you can push each parameter. You do need to keep the ingredients in a sensible order of proportion.
Your sense of a need for exactness may be because brewing software demands exact inputs, but people have brewed beer for millenia without computers or apps.

[trucker5774]

I'm not going to try it, just curious, everything in AG is so exact it seems.

Far from it!! you can take pretty much everything and round it up or down or alter it by a degree or two. Don't forget some of the recipes are scaled down from hundreds of gallons and the figures often seem a bit odd...................read this viewtopic.php?f=24&t=33931

[trucker5774]

....The "lad" beat me to it

[Brotherton Lad]

....The "lad" beat me to it

Just need to carry that over into fell running and I'll be fine.

[HighHops]

For AG, have you ever just used what malts/hops you had lying about without really measuring carefully weights and times etc...

Don't be affraid to experiment. That's half the fun. But if you don't measure and record what you've done then when you want to repeat a brew that you really liked you won't know where to start.

[Capped]

Being a few hundred grammes adrift of pale malt won't hurt,or 20g of crystal etc. Before I got me some super-accurate digital scales I used some crappy old mechanical ones. Always served me well and I never made a bad beer - even tho' the hop quantities must have been waaay out and I frequently (and still do) make recipes up as I go along - tho' I do write everything down,these days! As Highhops says,the problem with such a hit and miss approach comes when you make a spectacular beer that you want to repeat but can't because the original recipe was so vague!