Yeah I love radical brewing - It's a great entertaining read with great info. I like his philosophy of brewing.
Designing great beers is full of useful information but I find it quite dry and academic...
My main go to book is still the Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papasian. It has loads of info on all sorts of ingredients and everything else to do with brewing...
"freedgull":eq9rmw9y wrote: Designing great beers is full of useful information but I find it quite dry and academic...[/quote:eq9rmw9y]Definitely. More a reference book that a can't-put-down read.
I have two american books "clonebrews" and "Beer captured" both by Tess and Mark Szamatulski each has 150 recipies for cloning commercial beers. I think they are very good, espically the Beer Captured that has great information and even food guides to go with the beer. Each recipe is presented in Extract, mini mash and all grain versions.
The Dave Line books "The big book of brewing" and "Brewing beers like those you buy" are very dated.
I enjoy both Designing Great Beers and Radical Brewing. Designing Great Beers doesn't contain any recipes but it does tell you what the building blocks of various styles are and gives great background. In a way I prefer that it doesn't include recipes as it allows you to build your own beer. Radical Brewing is a great read but I wonder if all the recipes have been tested. I brewed a variation of the Jaggery Pale Ale and the Jaggery completely overpowered the beer making it undrinkable.
Beer Captured was the first brewing book I bought and I think it's good for extract & partial mashing. It's a bit lacking for all grain brewers as the info included seems to be a bit of an afterthought. For example nearly every beer seems to include the same mash temperature.
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