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

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Author: Ray Daniels
Publisher: Brewers Publications
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$24.95~~
Buy New: $14.99
You Save: $9.96 (40%)

New (32) Used (9) from $14.99

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

64 reviews
Sales Rank: 3834

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 404
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 7 x 1

ISBN: 0937381500
Dewey Decimal Number: 663.42
EAN: 9780937381502
ASIN: 0937381500

Publication Date: January 25, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
Part 1 of Designing Great Beers is a complete book in itself, focused solely on home-brewing ingredients and techniques (including three superb chapters on hops alone). Ray Daniels 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 Gehman

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

Customer Reviews: Read 59 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Highly recommend this book. December 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I am getting started in all-grain brewing, and was looking for information regarding how to make each beer style. This book provides just that. It is a great resource and met my needs. I recommend this book for anyone wishing to brew all-grain beers and especially those wishing to enter competitions.

5 out of 5 stars

Excellent, Solid Resource September 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

This book is an excellent, in-depth resource on the subject of homebrewing. It is an incredibly detailed and well-researched book, and doesn't shy away from simple math, as many others on the subject do. For those brewers that aren't as mathematically inclined, the equations presented are tabulated, so that they never HAVE to be used. Daniels carefully explains the factors that affect important brewing parameters, such as OG, IBUs, extraction efficiency and water quantities and chemistry, and describes how to quantify them for your particular system. Many may argue that this level of detail is not required. Why worry about the effect that already-dissolved iso-alpha acids have on the solubility of more? Well, as Daniels explains early in the book, his goal is to help you predict as precisely as possible the character of your finished beer, so you won't be disappointed. If you are thinking about brewing your first batch of beer, this book is NOT for you. However, if you have a couple of batches under you belt, and want to dabble in partial- or all-grain brewing, a copy of this book belongs on your shelf.

5 out of 5 stars

One of the classics on the subject September 12, 2008
Ray Daniels' Designing Great Beers was my second book - after John Palmer's How To Brew. Though I have since read many more brewing books, this is by far my favorite. I read it in a week - and three more times in the following months. It is well written, well organized, and an overall joy to read. Being a bit of a beer history and styles buff, I very much enjoyed well-referenced sections on classic beer styles. One could build a complete library from the references in this book. Well done, Mr. Daniels.

4 out of 5 stars

Beer Math September 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Actually, I bought this book when it originally came out. The pages are in tattered now, but I can't live without it and all the notes placed in the margins. It's a superb guidebook for brewing.

I recently purchased a new copy for a friend, a fellow homebrewer. Why? Because, if you are a serious homebrewer, this is the best reference I know of. It takes a while to get the formulas cross-referenced and the graphical choices for what you are brewing in line, but the math works. I really think you will live by these rules for all your brewing. The second plus is the reference to award winning recipes in the last half of the book. They are all excellent brews.

If you want consistant results, hit target recipes, be on the marks, you have to buy this book. Extract the formulas and adjust the graphs for the grain bill available to you and you can get the perfect brew. If you experiment with brewing, this is how to know what you're doing. Daniel's book is the best gift you can give to a brewer outside of a hops farm in Moravia.

A Dark and Stormy Knight, Harmonics, Orphan Records

5 out of 5 stars

Aimed at the competitive brewer August 20, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

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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