Vladimir <glad@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>I find 'Designing Great Beers' to be a great resource. For each beer
>style in the book, Ray Daniels goes through the history, traditional
>ingredients and techniques.
Yes, I also think it's a very worthwhile book. In addition
to the style chapters, the whole first part of the book covers
ingredients, hitting mash temperature, calculating water needs,
etc. I don't have any other single resource that has all that
information gathered in one place and organized so well.
>He also analyzes the ingredients used in the beers that made it
>to the AHA National's Second Round one year (1992 IIRC).
That's moderately useful, but is one aspect I think has
not aged quite so well. In the last ten or so years we
homebrewers have gotten access to a lot more and accurate
information about about how beer styles are brewed in their
native countries, and (at least in the US) have gotten much
better access to grains from those places. I think we can do
a much better job these days designing beers the way they
are meant to be, rather than approximating them using the
ingredients we had back then. Granted, the historical section
of the style chapters are still very useful, but the AHA
winners data is a bit, um, suspect.
>Another possibility could be any of the books in the 'Classic Beer
>Style' series. I don't have any, so I can't really comment on the
>content.
I have most of them. Some are quite dated, some are
written poorly, some are more up to date and more well-
written. There are good (mild ale, barleywine), bad (stout),
outdated (Vienna/Maerzen/Oktoberfest), and a few others
that I think now have better information available elsewhere
(Belgian Ale: see _Brew Like a Monk_, Lambic: see "Wild
Brews").
All the above is my opinion, of course.
--
Joel Plutchak "They're not people, they're HIPPIES!"
$LASTNAME at VERYWARMmail.com - Eric Cartman
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