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CloneBrews, 2nd Edition: Recipes for 200 Brand-Name Beers

by Tess and Mark Szamatulski

Description
Brewing home versions of popular commercial beers has never been simpler or more fun than it is with the 200 recipes in CloneBrews. Home brewers will find everything they need to brew up a batch of their own clone of Magic Hat #9, Ithaca Brown Ale, Moose Drool, or Samuel Adams Boston Ale. And with 200 possibilities to choose from, home brewers will find the perfect taste for every mood and every season.

Revised, updated, and expanded, the second edition of CloneBrews contains 50 new recipes that reflect the current popularity of strongly hopped India pale ales and American pale ales as well as the growing interest in brown ales, imperial beers, English bitters, porters, stouts, wheat beers, and Belgian ales. The new edition also contains expanded and updated mashing guidelines and a complete review of ingredients and materials. All new to the second edition is a Food Pairing feature that recommends the best foods for every beer an indispensable feature for the brewer who also loves to barbecue or cook!

Tested and retested, tasted and retasted, Tess and Mark Szamatulskis recipes are the product of 20 years spent running a successful homebrew supply shop and working with customers to create perfect beer clones. They deliver the flavors that home brewers want, described in clear recipes that every brewer will want to make.

All 200 recipes come with separate extract, mini-mash, and all-grain instructions. You'll also find tips for replicating any commercial beer so you can make your own clones when you discover a new favorite!

Review
This book is primarily a recipe book, though it does contain some useful information (such as reculturing yeast from bottles) in the ten pages devoted to the brewing process. The recipes comprise the bulk of the book and are divided by region, then country of origin. All of the recipes are approximations of commercial beers (top-notch ones, though), so don't look for micro-brews or THE exact recipe here. That being said, each recipe includes a brief paragraph about the beer, step-by-step brewing instructions (using malt syrup), and a side-bar containing mini-mash and all-grain alternate brewing instructions. Finally, this book contains a useful appendix that includes a chart of beer characteristics, a hop chart describing various hops, charts describing various grains and sugars, and a beer style index. This appendix makes it relatively easy to figure what grains to buy for which beer style, and vice versa.
Overall, I highly recommend this book as a companion to one that covers more of the brewing process and equipment, such as William Moore's Home Beermaking.
Robert Pratte (Amazon.com)