Designing Great Beers * Ray Daniels

The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles. A practical, exceptionally thorough brewing manual engineered to move passionate homebrewers beyond basic recipe kits, providing the mathematical formulas, ingredients, and historic style details for to formulate award-winning craft beer recipes from scratch.

The Story: Written by prominent craft beer authority, veteran brewer, and Cicerone Certification Program founder Ray Daniels, this masterpiece transforms homebrewing into a precise, science-first workspace. Daniels shatters the trial-and-error guesswork often associated with amateur fermentation. Instead, he establishes data-dense technical ledger that treats recipe design down to its exact chemical parameters, historical traditions, and raw material logistics.

The handbook guides brewers step-by-step through a versatile landscape of zymurgy tracking, dividing its massive wealth of information into two logical operational segments. Part One unpeels the parameters of basic brewing calculations, giving makers an instructional tool to master grain bills, hop utilization rates, water chemistry profiles, and yeast attenuation metrics. This rigorous formatting helps against missed target gravities, unbalanced bitterness ratios, or stalled fermentations.

Part Two pushes directly into the fourteen classic beer style categories, spanning traditional Continental styles like Pilsners and Bocks to heavy British stouts, porters, and high-IBU American India Pale Ales. Daniels uses a unique data-mining diagnostic toolkit, evaluating the exact brewing logs of dozens of medal-winning beers from the Great American Beer Festival to reveal the common mathematical threads that produce world-class flavor profiles. It teaches professionals and hobbyists alike the logistics of recipe scaling, helping craft enthusiasts turn their home setups into a confident personal sanctuary of commercial-grade brewing excellence.

Perfect For: Advanced homebrewers and aspiring commercial craft brewers looking for a definitive, formula-driven textbook on recipe formulation; beer judges (BJCP) seeking an exhaustive historical analysis of classic style parameters; and beverage book collectors archiving the core, bestselling publications issued by Brewers Publications.

Published 1998 by Brewers Publications.

Food & Drink / Homebrewing & Fermentation / Beer Styles & Tasting / Beverage Chemistry & Calculus / Craft Brewing Reference / Culinary Arts History