Once you have your ingredients selected, and have them apportioned in roughly the correct way its time to actually enter the beer into a spreadsheet or program such as BeerSmith, and run the numbers. This is an important step, which many beginning brewers skip, but if you don’t have the recipe properly adjusted and balanced for your equipment and your settings you will likely end up way off your target style.

The critical parameters to look at as you enter and adjust your ingredients are:

§ Original Gravity (OG)– A measure of how much fermentable and unfermentable malt you have added to the beer. The original gravity typically determines how much potential alcohol you will have in the beer, as well as how malty the beer will be. The style guideline provides a range for this parameter.

§ Bitterness (IBUs) – Bitterness from hops balances the flavor of your beer. For beer design, you want to estimate your bitterness in International Bitterness Units (IBUs). Again you want to use the style guideline to determine the appropriate IBU range.

§ Color (SRM) – You can estimate the color of your beer from the ingredients used. Estimating the color is important, as you don’t want your pale ale to be black or your stout to be blonde in color. Obviously darker malts add color.

§ Bitterness Ratio (IBU/GU) – The bitterness ratio gives you a rough measurement of the bitterness to malt balance for the beer. A hoppy beer will have a high bitterness ratio, while a malty beer will have a low one. We have a separate article on calculating bitterness ratio as well as the ranges for different styles.

§ Final Gravity (FG) – While it is very difficult to accurately predict final gravity ahead of time, I often look at the final gravity for the style to get an idea of the attenuation needed from the yeast. Attenuation refers to the percentage of sugars consumed by the yeast, and some styles require high attenuation yeast to achieve a smooth clean flavor, while others need low attenuation yeasts for complex flavor.

§ Carbonation (Vols) – The carbonation of the beer should match the style. Carbonation is measured in volumes, where one volume would essentially be a liter of carbon dioxide gas dissolved into a liter of beer. Fermented beer at room temperature with no additional carbonation contains about 1.0 volumes of CO2. Authentic English ales are often served with little or no carbonation (1.5-2.0 vols) while many German beers are highly carbonated (up to 3.0 vols). If you research the style, you can often determine the correct carbonation level for the beer.
 
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