A beamforming method and apparatus are disclosed, to expand coverage of a PDCCH in a particular direction, and improve demodulation performance of the PDCCH. Under this method, a cell-specific reference signal CRS wide beam can be combined by a base station with N CRS narrow beams to form N CRS composite beams. A first beam can be selected by the base station from the N CRS composite beams. Beamforming processing can be performed by the base station on a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) based on a weight of the first beam to form a second beam. The first beam and the second beam can be sent.