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

Customer Reviews

Truly fantastic book

2008-01-22
This book is great! This book is for anyone who has learned the brewing basics and take their skills to the next level.

If you've moved to all-grain brewing, get this book.

2008-01-11
This book is more valuable than all the other brewing books I've either bought or borrowed combined. It's the new companion to my trusty Brewmaster's Bible, and so far the only book on recipe formulation I need. It's increased my knowledge of brewing tenfold.

Buy it!

Great Technical Info

2007-12-24
This book contains great technical knowledge on how to brew various styles of beer, however for the casual brewer, it may be a little too technical. The title tells all. If you're into the nitty gritty of brewing various styles of beer, this is a good book for you.

Great book.

2007-10-25
Excellent book for taking your homebrewing skills to the next level. This book is definitely not for beginners and is mainly geared toward All Grain brewers, although it does cover extract w/grains. Rather than just giving you specific recipes, it teaches you how to formulate and tweak your own recipes for common styles. Definitely recommended reading if you want to transition from mainly brewing from recipes to creating your own recipes.

Great book for advanced homebrewers

2007-08-10
Truly great book, I taught I knew all about craft-beer-making, but in this book I've found many useful tips & tricks for adanced homebrewers.
But - this book is not for beginers.

Good for reference

2008-07-13
It is a very technical book with lots of graphs and charts. If I ever have any technical homebrew questions, I will pull out this book. I might need to go back to college and get a masters degree to understand it, but I do now own it. Until I need it, it will just collect dust as part of my homebrew book collection.

Missing a few key things

2008-05-13
This is a really great book overall that gets down and dirty into tons of info on specific styles. The beginning goes over the basic ingredients and techniques, but it's the style chapters that really shine. Daniels has done a ton of research and complied a ton of data to break down exactly what goes into different styles of beer and gives a fantastic building block for designing your own version of the style.
I dock one star for what is missing. There are no mentions at all of the fantastic beers of Belgium, or the American "hybrid" styles like cream ale or amber ale. I love his methodical style of breaking down the beers, and I would really like to see this applied to these styles, especially the Belgians! Also there are a lot of simple grammar errors that any copy editor should have caught that get a bit distracting. I'd say time for a second edition with more beer styles!

Excellent Reference Book

2008-05-08
When I first got this book I didn't like it much. Why would I need all of this "data" when my BeerSmith program does all of the calculations for me? But as you perfect your style and technique--you find that you want to know "why" as much as "how". This book is GREAT for that. It is almost compulsively detailed and falls somewhere between a casual brewers how-to book and a full blown textbook of beer. Especially cool are the comparisons of the evolution of different styles; the grain bill comparisons for contest winning examples of styles; and the various graphs and charts which illustrate many of the intricacies of bringing beer within your BJCP guidelines.

I would say that this book is nearly indispensible for the intermediate homebrewer. Once you have figured out how to keep your equipment clean and the basics of brewing, this book is the next logical step. It does not replace a good brewing software program (like ProMash or BeerSmith) but it does let you know what is going on "behind the scenes" in those programs (how is it calculating my lovibond? how is it getting an ABV? why is that a style paramater?).

Get. This. Book.

All these... numbers

2008-04-22
Admittedly, I've not finished reading this yet. The book is broken out into two sections: The first gives a rather thorough and dense description of each ingredient and its effect on the final product: beer. The second is a recipe section of sorts, that outlines many popular beer styles and how to make a representative of the style.

I got into homebrewing to be creative, and make some "great beers". Then I found out about all of these... numbers. If you're looking for a book to read in bed, the first half will certainly assist in slumber. All of these... formulas, numbers, and science. It's dizzying, and I want to skip it altogether, but I'm sure there's great information in here.

I bought this book to find out what hops go well together, what hops to use in each style, and other fill-in-the-blanks kind of information that new homebrewers don't quite have their head around. I've skimmed the second section, which looks more to what I'm looking for.

tons of info on styles - great for somebody beginning to design their own beers!

2008-02-08
The book is similar to "how to brew like a monk" in it's mission to describe the styles and to give you an idea of how to create that style while stopping short of providing any specific recipes. I think that's the best part about this book. Daniels actually teaches you something about brewing a particular style and why you should add each ingredient instead of what you should add. That knowledge gives you the freedom to design your own brew that will stay within the intended style while giving you the chance to be creative. It's a great book and one that i'll be referring to many times as I attempt to create my own signature beers.