Given that this is aimed more at newbies I made some edits to clarify jargon like BU/GU, which have hit the character limit again so here's the rest of the grist, bittering, hops and yeast sections
Grist (continued)
I'll mash for a bit under an hour (or sometimes overnight) at about 66°C, then transfer the bag to an empty bucket, squeeze a bit (without going crazy), pour over about 3 litres of the sparge water, have another bit of a squeeze and pour what comes off into the main wort, then pour the remaining sparge water over it and have another pour/squeeze, then let it drip into the bucket until the start of the boil or so and tip in anything that's come out. If I remember I'll do a mashout of 10 minutes at 76-77°C which is meant to help with head retention but I've never done the side-by-side comparison.
Convert to pale dry malt extract (DME) by multiplying by 0.57, so extract brewers will use
2.75kg of light DME in 20 litres final volume (5.3 US gallons, 4.4 imperial gallons). Or 3kg in 21.8 litres if that's easier.
My default is pale floor-malted Maris Otter from Warminster or Fawcetts, but as above you can use Golden Promise, heritage varieties, extra pale, Vienna, whatever takes your fancy. So if you're aiming for an ABV of 4.8% or so (depending on your yeast) you want :
4.8kg (10.6lb) Warminster/Fawcetts Maris Otter pale OR 2.75kg (6lb) light DME
Bittering
Bittering is measured in International Bittering Units (IBU) (or EBU in Europe which are virtually the same). But 25 IBU of bitterness might taste very bitter in a 2.5% table beer but hardly bitter at all in a 10% barleywine, it just gets "lost" in the malt and your brain doesn't perceive it the same way. The BU/GU ratio gives a much better idea of how you perceive bitterness. BU/GU is simply "bitterness units" divided by "gravity units" (the last digits of the OG, 48 in this case) Commercial beers can give you an idea of how BU/GU relates to your perception of bitterness eg (estimating based on 1:1 ABV:OG) - this is just looking at the bitterness, not the general flavour !!!
0.85-0.9 Lagunitas IPA, Yorkshire bests like Landlord, York Terrier
0.70-0.75 Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Southern bests like London Pride
0.65 Sam Adams, Greene King IPA
0.45 Beck's, Heineken, Fat Tire
0.25 Budweiser
Once you know what gravity units you want (derived from the OG in the previous section) and decide what BU/GU target is your taste, multiply them to find your target for total bittering. I like the taste of bitterness up at Yorkshire levels, so I want a BU/GU of 0.87. With an OG of 1.048, that means I want 0.87 * 48 = 42 IBU.
Especially if the SMASH hop is high in alpha acids, you can expect some bitterness contribution from the late additions. So it will vary depending on which SMASH hop you're using, but if I want 42 IBU in total then I typically want about 35 IBU from the 60-minute addition.
As I mention in the previous post, I deviate from a classic SMASH in bittering with EKG come what may. If you're using your SMASH hop to bitter, then the amount you need depends on the alpha acid content. If it's 10% alpha then 30g in 20 litres gives 37 IBU, which is near enough. If it's 15% alpha then you get the same bittering from 10/15 = two-thirds of the amount, ie 20g. If it's Saaz at 3.33% alpha, you will need :
30g * 10/3.33 = 30g * 3 = 90g for 37 IBU of bittering
Which is why nobody other than Czechs use Saaz for bittering, and why the development at Wye College in Kent of hop varieties specifically for bittering, was a huge advance for brewing.
But if your taste is for bitterness more like Greene King IPA, then you'll want a BU/GU of 0.65, so if OG = 1.048 then you'll want 0.65 * 48 = 31 IBU total for this beer and so you'll want about 25 IBU of bittering from the 60 minute addition, which will be 20g of a 10% alpha hop.
You can end up using quite a bit of your 100g packet for bittering, which is one reason I like to use separate bittering hops and keep the "SMASH" hop for flavour additions at the end. You can use a dedicated bittering hop like Admiral, or even isomerised hop extract - 10ml of the Ritchie extract should add about 35 IBU in 20 litres and has the advantage that it doesn't need boiling for 60 minutes, although boiling for 20-30 minutes is a still good idea to ensure no DMS. So :
35IBU of bittering at 60 minutes, or use alpha extract and boil for 30 minutes
Green hops
Diversion - this kind of recipe/thinking is well suited to green hop brews (or wet hops as the cousins call them). Although you can mess around with estimating IBUs of homegrown hops using hop teas, they're rather wasted as 60-minute additions as the big advantage of green hops is that they've not lost the volatile flavour compounds that normally evaporate during drying. So unless you have loads of homegrown hops, you're better off using commercial dried hops for bittering a green hop brew, and concentrate on using the homegrown crop as dry hops, then working backwards through the whirlpool and late boil if you have enough to spare. It can also work to use the cones that ripen early on brewday, and the ones that ripen later in a dry hop a week or two later.
But you need to use green hops ASAP - after 24 hours they're only good for the compost heap. The Kent brewers start the boil then go to the farm to pick up the green hops whilst the water is heating. That's fresh!
And green hops are mostly water, so you need about 7x the weight of green hops compared to dry hops. That's a lot of volume to absorb wort. And I would keep any dry hopping with green hops pretty short, to avoid picking up grassy flavours, 24-48h is enough.
Hops
This was probably what you were thinking of when it came to "recipe" but there's not too much to it IMO - just smear it out so that you're getting a bit of the character of the hops when boiled, dry-hopped, and at intermediate temperatures. As discussed above, using a bittering hop allows more to be used as flavour additions. It's convenient to use 100g (3.5oz) in total as that's the standard pack size in Europe, but don't sweat it - use 4oz or whatever is easiest. I will vary the schedule depending on the hop, but give or take 10g it look something like :
Protafloc (or Irish moss etc) at 10 minutes (before flameout) - optional, I usually don't bother but some malts give a more turbid wort
20g (0.7oz) of "SMASH hops" at 10 minutes before flameout
15g (0.5oz) at flameout
25g (0.9oz) whirlpool - around 70-80C for 20 minutes
40g (1.4oz) dry hop - ideally going in a point or two above FG, but sometimes at pitching, sometimes after FG is reached.
Yeast
Can be more important than the M and H bits of a SMASH - split a Chinook SMASH into three, ferment with US-05, T-58 and WB-06 and see how T-58 biotransforms the Chinook's grapefruit into lime, whereas WB-06 trashes hop flavour completely. Or to go really left-field, use Lallemand Philly Sour, a
Lachancea species that will take the pH down to 3.6 (see
this article for more).
But unless you're deliberately testing yeast, it makes sense to use a fairly clean yeast that gets out of the way of the malt and hops, especially for West Coast-style hops. So FermentisUS-05 or Lallemand BRY-97 are the obvious dry yeast, but Fermentis 34/70 fermented at ale temperatures also works. Dry yeast avoids the need to aerate the wort, but if you want to use liquid yeast then WLP090 San Diego is probably a better "Chico" than WLP001 or 1056, or go to the source and
harvest from Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
WLP800 Pilsner (actually a clean ale yeast) and Wyeast 1450 Denny's Favourite are also decent shouts. If you want to take advantage of kveik's temperature tolerance, then I guess one of the clean kveiks like Omega Lutra, Bootleg Oslo or WHC Ubbe could work, although I don't have direct experience of them.
Personally I like the character that English yeasts bring. Lallemand Verdant is the pick of the dry options in that line. For liquid, WLP041 Pacific is an underrated yeast that isn't flashy but gives an easy drinkability to the beer; despite the name it is British in origin, allegedly from Gale's.
Harvesting from a bottle of St Austell Proper Job is another good option, and probably works out cheaper even allowing for a bit of DME to grow it up in - and you get "free" Proper Job!
Ferment according to the needs of the yeast, typically around 18-20C liquid temperature. I bottle once the gravity is stable - typically after 7-10 days but it depends on the yeast, priming to around 1.8 vol CO2, which needs about 4g/l table sugar if the beer is at room temperature. I rarely find I need to add gelatine to fine it, but a cold crash of 24-48 hours before bottling is usually a good idea.
Oh, and the most important piece of kit for any brewer is a pen and paper - obsess about recording what you do so that if something goes well or badly, you know what to do next time!
