First recipe for my first attempt at AG

G'day Dave, Welcome to the addiction Just about any regular ale should be easily achievable! Some thing like a Little Creatures would be ok! I'm not sure of your setup, that will slightly change recipes. Something as simple as

4kg Pale Ale/2-row type malt
1kg of Munich Malt
200g Medium Crystal malt

60min bittering hop addition to about 20IBUs
5min flavouring Hop addition of maybe 20g Cascade and 20g Mosaic
and a dry hop of the same later on

Should make a nice pale ale in similar style to LC

I'm not sure on how much that makes sense to you, but I am happy to detail it right out for you.
What system are you using, have you tested things like boil off rate or dead spaces in Mash tun and boil pot?
Cheers Gavin

Testing heat loss without grain isnt quite the same, the grain will help hold heat, so no use doing that. When you figure out what sort of "strainer" you'll use, whether it be a manifold, bazooka tube or bag. you will put maybe 10 litres in the mash tun and let it drain, make sure you have a hose on the tap of the tun hanging down so it helps create a siphon. and just let it drain. Measure what ever water is left behind, thats your mash tun dead space.

Boil off, yep just whack in 30L or something of water and boil it for an hour and measure whats left. If thats too hard, you can wing it for the first brew and you'll find out once its in the fermenter.

One thing that will help is to be careful when measuring in water amounts, if you use a two litre jug or something try and weigh two litres of water in it to double check, because they are notorious for being wrong and even 200ml adds up over the 40l litres you might use during a whole brew. Once you've done it once then you'll know forever if you can mark it or use a stick for measuring depth or a sight glass or whatever you are going to use, these days I only have measurements on my HLT.
Cheers!

Up to you mate, 33L would be a bit better, I've survived with a 32L one for years. You could get by with a 28L for a while, but a 33L would be a touch more versatile if doing a bit bigger beers