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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8199 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 404 pages

Amazon.com
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

Midwest Book Review
Designing 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.

Customer Reviews

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.

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...

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.