Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer

Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer
80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew

Browsing through the 80 recipes in this book was a great source of inspiration for my next batch of home brew. If you can’t decide what to do next, pick up this book. There is bound to be something you haven’t tried.

The title is misleading, the sub-title would be more accurate. It is primarily recipes. The book contains short introductory chapters on ingredients and brewing that other books have covered in more detail. If you don’t know what terms like lovibond, OG, FG, and IBU are I would read an introductory how to brew book first.

The recipes are primarily setup for all grain brewers. For extract based brewers the recipes are modified to ‘fit’ the style. I get the sense the authors are all grain brewers who wanted to broaden the market for their book by adding the extract formulations.

This is a great book to browse and see what a style has in common in terms of grains, hops and yeast.

Topics unique to this book:

• Recipe categories include: Light Lager, Pilsner, European Amber Lager, Dark Lager, Bock, Light Hybrid, Amber Hybrid , English Pale Ale, Scottish and Irish Ale, American Ale, English Brown Ale, Porter, Stout, Indian Pale Ale, German What and Rye , Belgian and French Ale, Sour Ale, Belgian Strong Ale, Strong Ale, Fruit, Spice Herb or Vegetable, Smoke and Wood Aged, Specialty Beers.
• A nice chart of hops and the various characteristics of each is on page 20.