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    There is some additional background material in appendices that might be useful when working with recipe formulation. Appendix A includes basic beer math, the common equations you’ll need tounderstand to work with recipes, and examples on how to use them. Appendix B describes how to work with recipe software, and how to select software to best support your needs. Appendix C discusses how recipes can be converted to use malt extract as a fermentable, and the special issues that extract brewers face when dealing with recipes.
    Conceptualizing Recipes – When I start thinking about a new recipe, whether it is completely new or a major variation of an existing recipe, I don’t rush to entering data into recipe software. I tend to start organizing my thoughts first before turning to any automated tools.
    I use recipe software to support my recipe development, but mostly in the revising and refining phase. It’s useful to know how to perform common calculations by hand, or to quickly validate the output of recipe software using rough approximations. It’s equally helpful to know how to quickly use brewing calculators to automate otherwise tedious calculations you might need to make in the course of brewing.
    My recipe formulation process starts with writing down ideas and adding notes, particularly if I’m doing online research or am considering multiple options. I start with a general idea of what I want to brew, such as the beer style, a similar commercial example, a set of general parameters, or a target flavor profile.
    This is where experience comes into play. You are driven by intuition when you start building a recipe. Given enough experience, you will understand things that have or have not worked for you in the past, but also what has worked for other brewers. Understanding recipes created by other brewers pays off when you do start building your own.
    When working with fermentables, it is helpful to develop the skill to think in percentages rather than weights. You may develop a feel for flavor contributions from different weights of grain if you have a standard batch size, but it’s beneficial (to your overall brewing skill) to learn how different percentages of grain impact flavor since that knowledge is batch size-independent. The equivalent skill for hops involves learning how to think of bittering additions as bittering units, knowing that the specifics will be determined by the available hops.
    The mental model I have for recipes is similar to the charts and tables in Ray Daniels’ Designing Great Beers . For each style of beer you brew, you have a set of ingredients you might use. This isn’t the full universe of ingredients; it’s a constrained set of choices based on what you believetastes good in that beer style. For each ingredient, you have a bounded range of percentages that you may use in your recipe (base malt may be 50–100% of the grist, while dark malts may be under 10%, for instance). This model isn’t something someone tells you; it’s what you build as you gain experience, updating as you learn.
    When you create a recipe, you are making decisions using that model. You select individual ingredients from that constrained list, and you set their percentages of the recipe as a value within the range you’ve previously determined. You still have to learn to predict the flavor profile of the combination of ingredients you select, but at least you have substantially pruned the problem down to a manageable size.
    Don’t worry about precisely identifying a value for each ingredient in your recipe initially; you can start by including a range. This makes it easier to adjust later since you have some built-in flexibility. I start by specifying the ingredients that have the largest flavor impact on the beer, which isn’t necessarily the ingredient with the highest weight or percentage. As you select specific ingredients, decide if you want to describe them generically (e.g., pale ale