Make Beer At Home

Re-creations of brands such as Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Guinness, Foster's, and more. You can now brew beer at home that tastes just like your favorite brands with this collection of 150 "cloned" recipes for premium beers from around the world, such as:

All 150 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!

Clone Brews 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: The complete beginner's guidebook.

Review by Robert Pratte