Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles | Ray Daniels

Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles | Ray Daniels | Aimed at the competitive brewer

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Designing Great Be...

	Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles Ray Daniels Brewers Publications, 2000 - 404 pages average customer review:based on 60 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Author Ray Daniels provides the brewing formulas, tables, and information to take your brewing to the next level in this detailed technical manual.

just what i was looking for

gives a great base to create your own recipes based on the style you are looking for. should be easy to adjust your second and third batches if need be

Aimed at the competitive brewer

This book is best regarded as a recipe guide for the competitive brewer. While the styles presented are regrettably limited, the styles that are presented are wonderful. Each style section presents the ingredient incidence and range of ingredient percentages for both commercial examples as well as 2nd round National Homebrew Competition entries. There are very helpful comments on each style as well - mash approaches, comments on the different malt bills, etc. I have to stress the notion that this is a recipe guide - no actual recipes are presented. Rather, the focus is on the different approaches commercial brewers and homebrewers use to brew to style as well as how they are perceived in judging.

As an example, for Scottish Ale, you'll find comments on the use of smoked malts - right down to rauch vs. peat-smoked, roast malt vs crystal, residual sugar levels in different style sub-types, etc. What you won't find is a suggested malt and hops bill along with a mash schedule. Thus the audience is the competitive brewer looking to divine what his competitors are doing, how, why, and how it's being perceived in judging.

The shortcomings of the book are its limited style and sub-style coverage. I also found the upfront chapters (i.e., those preceeding the style sections) of limited value. Finally, I'd like a lot more on mash schedules. The information presented in the style sections is priceless, however. If you are interested in even a single style or two in the book - two primary styles interested me - it's well worth the price. To my knowledge, the comparative recipe information is found nowhere else.

I give it 5 stars for its unique information. I'm tempted to downgrade it for its limitations, particularly since there are some really egregious style omissions, but it's just too valuable in terms of what it does cover.

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Fantastic Reference - waiting for 2nd version

This is my number one reference book for designing my new batches of beer, but I'm looking for a better one. This is the book I pick up when I decide to brew a new batch. It has excellent technical info in the first half of the book (*however, I'd prefer an even more in depth discussion of mathematics, since I like to calculate these things for my beers - I end up struggling with converting the equations to ways that I can use - I wish there were more equations and a more complicated discussion of mathematical things such as calculating hop utilization, controlling mash techniques for sugar profiles, fermentation temperature control, and brew chemistry). The second half has a short, well written history and background for each of beer discussed, and compares many recipes within a given style, providing the reader an adequite understanding of the style so that you can design one for yourself. Useful tables and graphs are available for every type of beer discussed, such as the percentage of beers that used a particular type of grain, and the range of % malt bill for each grain. **I wish the 2nd half of the book would have a seperate section for each of the 20-something beer style categories. I highly recommend this book. I wish he would design a 2nd volume that would delve a little deeper, though.

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Excellent source for creating YOUR brew

This book is concise and broken into two major sections, the science and the styles.

The first part, dealing with the math & science of brewing, goes through all of the critical calculations for creating your own recipes, and provides and excellent reference for hitting a target gravity or a desired hop level.

The second part goes through the major styles of beer (focused on the styles as they are seen in competitive brewing), giving a history and summarizing each style as to major constituents (from a grain & hops perspective) as well as good target gravities, bitterness & characteristics.

This book has helped me to create many batches of excellent beer. At this point, I've forgone recipes not my own...

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