Book Review: Brewing Classic Styles

If you want to brew great beer, stop reading and order this book right now.

All done? Excellent!

Now that your copy is on it’s way you can read the rest of this post. Brewing Classic Styles, 80 Award Winning Recipes Anyone can Brew is the first, hopefully of many, books from award winning brewer Jamil Zainasheff. He teams up with John Palmer of How to Brew fame to bring you this must read.

The first 4 chapters, written by John, are devoted to things like style information, ingredients and the processes used to brew the recipes in the later sections. If you’re new to brewing these chapters aren’t quite a step by step guide, you’ll probably want How to Brew for that, but they are still very informative. There is quite a bit of information that will help to improve your brews. Intermediate to advanced brewers will also likely glean a few tips to refine their techniques from these award winning brewers. If nothing else the notes on process will help advanced brewers to make the necessary adjustments for brewing on their own systems.

Next are the recipe chapters, which are written by Jamil. They are presented in extract with steeping grains format if possible, and Partial Mash for recipes that require grains to be mashed. There are substitution and mashing instructions for all grain at the end of each recipe. You will find a recipe for each of the BJCP style categories along with some notes on proper technique and things to lookout for when brewing a particular style. These are Jamil’s personal recipes and all 80+ of them have won awards in major competitions (I told you he was an award winning brewer). Many of the recipes also contain personal anecdotes which help to make the reading more personal and entertaining rather than it being a simple recipe or how-to book. If you have read Jamil’s BYO magazine articles or have listened to the Jamil Show on the Brewing Network, then much of the material will be familiar to you. However, the other media types have not covered all of the recipes included in the book yet. I personally enjoy having them all in one condensed, easy to search version.

Brewing Classic Styles finishes with a set of appendices on making a yeast starter, a carbonation level guide and steeping grains for extract brews. The real gem however, is a step by step guide for doing a Partial Mash brew on your stove top with little more than a large grain bag for additional equipment. Many recipes can’t be accurately converted to extract with steeping grains, but with the ability to do a Partial Mash you will be able to replicate any recipe you find.

This book will continue to be a go-to reference for me whenever I attempt to brew new style. The wealth of information contained with in is more than worth the small price of admission. So, support a couple fellow homebrewers and order your copy today.

Tagged as: book, classic styles, jamil, john palmer, review, zainasheff