Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide To Brewing Classic Beer Styles

Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide To Brewing Classic Beer Styles

Author Ray Daniels provides the brewing formulas, tables, and information to take your brewing to the next level in this detailed technical manual.Amazon.com ReviewPart 1 ofDesigning Great Beers is a complete book in itself, focused solely on home-brewing ingredients and techniques (includingthree superb chapters on hops alone). proves himself the "techie" type, infusing his introductory chapters with as much brewing math as brewing lore. Yet, Daniels never hops off the deep end of beer geekdom. Instead, he complements this emphasis on data with the creative use of graphics; where one could get bogged down in the stats, there is usually a clear visual depiction to instantly summarize their meaning. This focus on facts continues into part 2 of Daniels's guide, where it backs an admirably pragmatic take on beer styles and their importance in home-brewing. Daniels devotes a chapter to each of 14 major style categories, detailing historical origins and modern brewing techniques. He lays a contemporary groundwork by compiling and analyzing the recipes of the National Homebrew Competition's most successful beers. The assumption is that beers deemed representative of particular beer styles in modern competitions serve as ideal models for recipe creation. Among the information provided for each style is a chart showing the percentage of brewers using each type of grain and in what proportions the grains were added. Similar data are supplied for hop varieties, yeast strains, and water treatment. This reverse engineering of award-winning beers naturally benefits experienced brewers seeking to wow judges at the next competition. Yet, even brewers taking their first shy steps into creating their own recipes have much to gain from this kind of practical analysis. Daniels provides the basic tools a brewer of any level can use to formulate recipes with confidence and creativity. --Todd GehmanReviewDesigning Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide To Brewing Classic Beer Styles is more than just a recipe book or merely another "how-to" manual, it is an indispensable guide intended for brewers interested in formulating their own beers based on classic styles, modern techniques, and their own vision of the perfect beer. With more than 200 tables, Designing Great Beers offers brewers knowledge on the essence of various styles, giving them the needed insight to create their own beers including "Six Steps to Successful Beer", "Hitting Target Gravity", "Pilsener and Other Pale Lagers", "Yellow-Red Proportions of Beers, Malts and Caramels", and "Common Hop Varieties and Their Typical Alpha Acid Levels". Designing Great Beers is must reading for every home brewer, microbrewer, and fun armchair reading for armchair reader contemplating the perfect brew. --Midwest Book Review