Are you looking for a book on how to formulate recipes or a book of recipes?
I don’t normally follow recipes completely but a few of my last batches have been straight from Brewing Classic Styles and they were great. From all the books that I have, BCS is probably the only one I would consider a recipe book and would probably be the only one I would ever buy. The recipes are reliable which can’t be said about a lot of other sources. This isnt meant to be a sound like a jerk question but what did you not like about the book?
I have not heard good things about CloneBrews, as others have posted.
“Brew your own” magazine can have some good recipes, but I don’t know anything about the book. I do know some of the recipes in the magazine have errors in them.
For formulating recipes, the books I use most are Designing Great Beers, Brewing Classic Styles, and Radical Brewing. If Daniels updates Designing Great Beers I would buy it instantly. Love that book.
If you don’t like Brewing Classic Styles, the AHA has back issues of Zymurgy that have the Gold Medal winning recipes from NHC every year. I think they’re in the Sept/Oct issues?
+1 to BeerTools. You can also go online and use their recipe generator which includes style guidelines. And there are almost 12,000 recipes posted, some with reviews.
I see a lot of “I haven’t brewed this yet, but it is going to be good” :
Having a lot of recipes to peruse is cool, but it seems like you have to know something about ingredient contribution and style to sift through all the garbage.
Maybe I am just lame at sorting. School me.
I would be more inclined to just search for all the a10t2 contributions…
Years ago that was my biggest frustration with the internet recipe sites like Gambrinus Mug http://brewery.org/gambmug and Cat’s Meow http://brewery.org/brewery/cm3/CatsMeow3.html. The other thing I would run into a lot was “I’m going to brew this next and I’ll report back how it came out” and there never was any follow-up. Now that I"ve got a lot more brews under my belt since then I can better look at those kind of recipes and guess how they’d come out, but back then when I’m just looking for a decent recipe for a certain type of style, I couldn’t afford to waste my time and money gambling on some random person’s guess. That is why I love BCS. There are still styles I haven’t made but want to, and I know I can get a good first beer by using one of those recipes.
I borrowed 80 Classic Brews and discovered most, if not all recipes are written for extract. Some negative reviews said the same things, the AG conversion recipe was not accurate and neither were the hops and yeast selection for the style. I don’t know. It makes me wonder if several people say the same thing. On the other hand the overall rating is positive and two guys from a brew club I just joined recommended it so bought it. Also bought the Scotch Ale, Barley Wine and IPA books from the Classic Beer Style series. Didn’t buy the Stout book as it got bad reviews, too technical and chemistry formula driven. I have read “How To Brew” by Palmer and “Designing Great Beers” by Daniels so figure with all these resources, and this web site, a bad beer can only be attributed to operator error.
Scotch Ale was the first style book I bought and I loved it immediately. I really enjoyed learning a little bit of history of Scottish brewing. I also have Brewing Classic Styles and have used the all-grain recipes. I have always hit the expected preboil gravitates nearly dead-on. The all-grain conversions JZ lists hit the exact OG when entered into the brewing software I use.
There are more recipes on line than you can shake a stick (or stir Paddle at), look, take, tweek and make your own, then refine it this works for me. Also most of the books are good if you dont take them to heart and do the same read, tweek and make your own.
If you’re talking about Brewing Classic Styles, the evolution of the book is that Palmer wanted to write a book for extract brewers and Zainasheff said he could give him a bunch of recipes, which is why the book is split into the (Zainasheff) recipe part and the (Palmer) technical part. The recipes are all-grain recipes converted to extract versions and every recipe is given with the all-grain part at the end. It really is an all-grain book because the all-grain recipes are given. You have to make sure you take the reviews with a grain of salt. Because of the way recipes convert between the two, I remember an Amazon reviewer was complaining that the recipes called for odd amounts of extract, such as needing 2.7 pounds of LME and he was complaining that he could only get LME in set amounts like cans of 3.3 pounds. The reviewer was complaining that it is unreasonable for him to measure out less than 3.3 pounds (which is funny because when I make bread, I don’t ding my recipe book because my recipe isn’t broken down into using only 5 lb sacks of flour). I’d have to see what some of the negative complaints you saw, but if we’re talking about the same book then I would say the bad review missed the mark entirely.
Yup!!! BCS rocks!!! the very first recipe I made from this book tasted so good I entered it into competition and took a silver medal…what more can you ask for from a recipe book?? cheers!!
