The ability to experiment and create is at once the great blessing and profound curse of home brewing. On the one hand, we get the opportunity to make anything we want, often in ways that are unlikely or impossible for larger brewing operations, particularly when it comes to incorporating exotic ingredients that would be cost-prohibitive to a brewery. It's all well and good to have all of these options on hand, but it's a double-edged sword: some home brewers feel a bit paralyzed by the range of choices available to them, and/or they simply miss their target and don't keep re-brewing to dial it in! After all, there are so many other beers to brew.
It's in that spirit that we're jumping into some broadly-targeted "specialty" categories. Up first is a favorite of mine: smoked beers. It's my hope that you come away with some good rules-of-thumb that will get you closer to the mark the first time out, and encourage you to go back in for some revisions to make it perfect!
STYLE
There are effectively three smoked beer categories in the 2015 BJCP guidelines: Rauchbier (which we've already done), Specialty Smoked Beer (which incorporates specialty ingredients or undefined styles in addition to smoke), and Classic Style Smoked Beer. It's this last that I'll be focusing on here. The guidelines for each individual base style are obviously going to vary, but the guidelines do provide some useful guidance for any of those to which you might add smoke. The keyword today is balance. In whichever style you choose to smoke up, the smoke character should more or less equal in magnitude the strongest flavor in the profile, and complement and enhance the flavors present. This is both easier and harder than we might think.