Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After NEW BREWING LAGER BEER, this has been the most helpful book to get my beer styles just right. It contains hordes of information usually available only in professional works, and doesn't over complicate it. I love this book and always refer to it before I start a new brew. It is the only accurate book that discusses the amount of water retained in your grain, and allows you to calculate the pre brew water quantity more accurately. A must for you home brew library.

Really well built book. Chapters are presented in a manner the theory becomes really clear.
A bible for every homebrewer! Really usefull to brew a beer respecting its particular style.
There are also some really interesting facts.

Easy to follow step by step guide that covers all aspects of designing a beer. Clear easy to follow mathematical examples enhances the learning process. Great, clear details are given on why different styles are brewed in their own fashion. Local brewmasters also agree that it is a good starting book to understand if you considering entering the field of brewing.

"Designing Great Beers" is an excellent reference for any home brewer looking to create their own recipes. Combined with "How to Brew" and "Brewing Classic Styles", "Designing Great Beers" is a great addition to any home brewer's library.

This book is a fantastic help for a homebrewer who wants to create his own recipes. It isn't going to tell you how to clone Newcastle or Sam Adams, but it helps you create your own unique recipe within the framework of a classic beer style, whether a Northern English Brown Ale, an Oktoberfestbier or Sweet Stout. The detail is astounding, ranging from historical references, commercial and homebrewed examples. With a wealth of well-presented information, the two chapters on hops I've reread several times, along with many of my favorite style chapters. Practical advise is given for creating a successful recipe, drawing on the author's own experiences in National Homebrew Competition. One example I think of is from the Brown Ale chapter: he gives the suggestion of choosing just a couple specialty malts to compliment your chosen yeast, rather than the often-employed little-bit-of-everything approach to the malt bill. This book could be valuable to someone who's made a handful of extract brews and wants to create something within a style framework; likewise, it would be of value to someone who's been brewing several years. I'm still doing extract brewing, so I know I'll be going back over a lot of the material pertaining to mashing someday. Not to mention some of the style chapters that I don't have the ability to do yet, like Pilsner or Kolsch. By the way, the author himself recommends Noonan's Scotch Ale (Classic Beer Style Series: 8), and I would too.

I've got several brewing texts, but this is the one I frequent the most. If you're a moderately experienced brewer looking for details on a particular style, or you're trying to get away from just copying other people's recipes and try your hand at it for a change, this is just the book. It tells you the ingredients, mash schedule, yeasts, etc that would be appropriate for a style and what worked for other award winning beers, plus some history on each of the major styles.

Great description for all style of beer , very helpful to understand how beer style are designed, this book have a lots of pages and is cheap! I reccomand it all the way!

As someone relatively new to homebrewing and looking into moving from extract to all grain brewing, this book is excellent.
It really breaks down how to formulate recipes based on your target style, percentages of appropriate malts and adjuncts, yeasts, etc.
This book opened my eyes to hitting target gravity, bitterness ratios and a host of other things. Well worth it!!

This is a good book for those interested in the history of beers, or those with some basic brewing knowledge who want to learn more.

The book is not a recipe book, if that's what you're looking for, but does go into detail about style guides and each styles history. It also covers ingredient trends in the NHC (National Homebrew Competition) in the US, although from a few years back. It would be nice to see a new addition to update that info.

All in all I'm glad I've got this book - and I would definitely recommend it for those brewers who plan to put their beer into competition, or for those who just love a little history and want to know more about the hobby!

Any serious homebrewer, or anyone aspiring to become one, should read this book, and then use it as a reference tool.

It provides an introductory section, which is really a thorough course, in brewing technique, covering malts, water, color, hops and yeast. It is heavy in formulas and theory, but presented in an understandable manner (if you have already brewed).

Then it moves on to a section for each of the classical beer styles, with detailed information on each, and I was pleased with the coverage given to the traditional German ales, my favorite subject. But it is similarly thorough with respect to British ales and pilsners. Unlike other recent books, it does not put emphasis on the Belgian fad.

Since I brew mainly to please myself and not to win competitions, I am not convinced that the statistics on how the NHC runners-up brewed is significant (and there is a lot of it). It may indicate if these brewers hit a style right - but only as tasted and interpreted by the judges. Although it may be useful to take some inspiration and knowledge from these recipes, one should not be a slave to the taste (or lack of) of others or strict interpretations of style. My only other gripe is that some tables use different methods of measurements for the same thing, making it hard to compare values.

The many tables and formulas are mindboggling. Luckily you can buy software that will translate and calculate it all for you (ProMash comes to mind) - but the book is extrememly useful for your understanding of how values are calculated - in short how the beer might turn out.