I'm jumping around in the book a lot but I made it through 3 chapters yesterday on the plane and so far it's fantastic.
Stan is a great writer and editor and is given access to the right people and places.
There is some very real and practical information in this book with the second-to-last chapter just highlighting some pretty famous brewers, breweries, and beers and digging into their recipes, equipment, and processes. -BUT, be warned that if you're looking for home brew scale recipes of your favorite hoppy beers that this is NOT the book for you. Stan's recipes are NOT at ALL made friendly for the average home brewer - he includes the recipes in the terms and units that they were provided to him in; you'll see gravity ratings in degrees Plato sometimes, hops as percentages sometimes, home brew ammounts, grams per liters other times, and even pounds per barrel other times. -You'll need to do some homework to convert these but, personally for the advanced brewer this is a better way of doing it and not "losing something in translation".
I'm pretty confident already stating that this is a MUST HAVE book for the small microbrewer who wants to make great hoppy beers.
You can see that Stan is very much concerned about "getting it right" and really agonizes over the details; he's not just writing the book to put it on his beer resume and it shows. It's good stuff.
I can easily recommend this way before Mitch Steele's IPA book, which I also got for Christmas. (New Brewing Lager, the guide to starting your own Nanobrewery, and the 3 Volume MBAA Practical Handbook for the Specialty Brewer are all in my reading pipeline now; I'll post opinions as I get through them.)
Adam
