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| Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers | 
 enlarge | Authors: Tess Szamatulski, Mark Szamatulski
Publisher: Storey Books
Category: Book
List Price: £10.99
Buy New: £4.53
You Save: £6.46 (59%)
New (21) from £4.53
Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 125440
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.5
ISBN: 1580170773
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.873
UPC: 037038000771
EAN: 9781580170772
ASIN: 1580170773
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW - ***Delivery usually * 4 - 5 * working days - From Aphrohead of SOUTHPORT, Lancs, UK *** . Priority Airmail used Worldwide on International orders. Thanks from all at Aphrohead.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Fantastic book September 18, 2008
Having spent many weeks working in Brussels over the years I have drunk quite a large volume of Belgian beer. I used the recipe in this book to make my own version of Westmalle Tripel which is a great beer and one of the very few true Belgian Trappist ales. I was amazed with the results. Not only did my beer taste the same as the real thing but I also managed to replicate the relatively high 9.5% ABV required. The (low) cost of the book was worth it for this one recipe alone but now I have 149 others to try. This book does exactly what it say on the cover!
 Highly over-rated February 15, 2008
Although it deserves more than one star, I'm trying to compensate for the blatant over-rating this book has received. It is obvious to me that many of the ratings are from friends or clients of their brewshop in Connecticut, USA(my home state)
The recipes seem fine for beginning to intermediate brewers, although I find them ridiculously precise with such beauties as "after 48 minutes of the boil, add so and so, then boil for 13 minutes, then add so and so and boil for 2 minutes, etc". Does boiling for 48 minutes make a different beer than boiling for 50 minutes?
What avid, advanced homebrewer would want to use these recipes for all-grain beers? Who honestly believes that you can "clone" beers using malt-extract recipes? And finally, what all-grain brewer ever goes back to using extracts once they have experienced the FAR SUPERIOR results of cereals?
I won't repeat other reviewers' negative comments, but I wholeheartedly agree. I do regret having bought this book.
My advice for all who find this book excellent: try proper brewing with cereals and not extracts and you will experience a whole new world!
 Pretty Good Intro for Homebrewers with Plenty of Ideas January 21, 2008
This isn't a bad book, it covers a lot of different styles of beer from around the world and opens ones mind up to the various options and possibilities of what can be brewed at home. But it's not a technically perfect book, and if you're an experienced brewer you will quickly be able to find fault, as some of the other reviewers here have already done. However, if you're new to homebrewing and are looking for a book that can stimulate your imagination and guide you through the brewing process, then this book represents an excellent investment. There are so many recipes, that the modest homebrewer will be engaged for years.
Pretty good, but not a 'stand-alone' book October 24, 2007
This book is ok if you are a competent homebrewer, want to copy a particular style of beer and want to know what ingredients to buy. I've found a couple that I may try in the future.
However, you have to remember that this is a recipe book, NOT a homebrewing guide. It doesn't tell you WHY you should proceed in a certain way or give too many finer details. For example, almost every recipe ends with "bottle when fermentation is complete". This is fine if you know what you're doing, but not good if you don't. Also, every recipe calls for the use of a 'secondary fermenter', which I for one never use. (I could go on, but you get the idea.) So a certain amount of prior knowledge and recipe adjustments for issues like that may have to be made to get the best from the recipe.
Also, I don't agree with a previous reviewer that you will necessarily know most of the beers in here - I'm a beer enthusiast and I found a lot of them to be pretty obscure. The authors seem to have tried to give equal coverage to every possible style and region rather than focus on popular beers.
Basically it's a good recipe book. I would couple it with a decent brewing guide such as 'How to Brew' by John Palmer to get the best from your brew. Still, a good one for the brewing collection.
Good but not perfect May 21, 2007
This is great book to use as the basis of any recipe. The recipes are well laid out and for the few that I've tried, give good copies of the beers they claim to be as long as you take into account the points below.
There are 2 problems with the recipes which means that every single one of them requires some work with a calculator to make changes:
Firstly, if you are brewing the All Grain version of the recipe you are told to scale the bittering hops down by a percentage given, but varying for each recipe. Whilst this is not difficult it's just plain annoying to have to take the amount specified and recalculate them to another value. It would not have taken much to print the correct values in the first place.
Secondly, the final gravity of some of the recipes is just too high. Calculating and brewing these beers you will end up with a much lower final gravity and thus a higher amount of alcohol than you want. In some cases this is as much as 1%ABV. You'll need to rescale the recipe to lower the original gravity to compensate.
This by no means that the book is rubbish, it's just that you'll want to take the recipe and run it through some brewing software first to check that you're going to end up with what you wanted.
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