by warra48 » Monday Apr 20, 2009 5:12 pm
Definitely get a program like BeerSmith to help you formulate recipes.
One advantage is that recipes you borrow from friends, or acquire from recipe databases, is that they're geared to the original brewers equipment and efficiency.
Having a brewing program allows you to deal with that issue and dial recipes to your own system and experiences, and scale them to the size you want where that differs from the original.
In time, you'll treat other's recipes as inspirations, rather than as a strict prescription to follow.
A lot of the fun in homebrewing is designing your own recipes, and nailing a great brew.
By the way, I'm the fortunate recipient of a stack of recipes kindly sent to me by DrSmurto. I was able to download them straight into my BeerSmith program.