[.ca] North American Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for Your ... (ISBN 1580172466)

Worth Buying:
I'm glad I read my copy of North American Clone Brews before reading the reviews in this column. Give a guy a break! The book is fine. It does what it purports in a concise and readable manner. So, yes, "White Plains", Mr Russell's book contains a typo. Obviously he did not mean to mash (by my calculations) 16.75 lbs grain in 2.5 gallons of water. Mistakes happen. As to reduce the bittering in a full boil: to many variables affect hop utilization (at best 30%) to worry about this. Keep it simple. Relax, don't worry...."White Plains" and his admirer from Texas clearly have some axe to grind. Odd that with all the "many errors" in the book both 'reviewers' point out the same two-and both got the weight wrong. The variety and scope of this book alone justify its purchase. Having examined the quality of the recipes, I plan to do my brewing this season exclusively from North American Clone Brews.

Not Related!!:
For all you people out there that are reading this review, and think this is the sequel to Clonebrews that was written by Tess and Mark Szamatulski, it is Not. After reading this book and some of the recipes you are able to easily pinpoint many errors in the recipes. ... There is no way to mash 18 pounds of grain in 2.5 gallons of water. Other mistakes include not decreasing your bittering hops when brewing all grain recipes. The list of errors/lack of knowledge of brewing goes on....

Great book. Best I've seen for mini-mash & all-grain clones:
This book is a good reference resource and a good recipe book. This book contains recipes for many beers that are widely available in the US. It is well organized, contains appropriate reference charts and a good index. It does have a few typographical errors. These errors are not difficult to figure out if the reader has a little knowledge of brewing. The author correctly, according to many other authors, does not have the brewer change the hop schedule for the longer boils of the all-grain recipes. He appropriatley instructs the all-grain brewer to use the same schedule as the extract brewer and boil the bittering hops for only 60 minutes. The brewer, rather than trying to reduce the hop amounts by some percentage that is not normally achievable by the homebrewer, follows the simpler hop schedule. The author also uses different sacharification rest temperatures for different beer styles. These changes are a must for desirable outcomes in mini-mashes and all-grain recipes. This book is an excellent resource, particularly for all-grain and mini-mash brewers.

Give the brewer a break:
I bought this book and I am having a hard time with it. I have been an extract brewer for 15 years. I'm responding to "sioux181" when he says "Give a guy a break!", give the brewer a break. I bought the ingredients for two of the recipes in this book and when I started making them, I realized that the conversions he made from mini-mash to extract were incorrect and I had to guess at what to do. How can I give the author a break? I will admit that mistakes happen, but you sound like you must be the author because any homebrewer would be very upset with incorrect information on brewing a beer. Both the errors that were pointed out previously are pretty obvious. However, I don't think the author spent the time to correctly convert to extract. For the Immortale recipe I start with 3 gallons of water for the specialty grains, he tells us to omit some ingredients, then follow the mini-mash recipe. It wasn't until I started that I looked at the mini-mash recipe and it said to sparge with 4 1/2 gallons of water. I have never brewed an extract beer using a 7 1/2 gallon boil (for a 5 gallon batch). The other recipe I made was Whale Tale Brown Ale, with his recipe I would end up with a 5 gallon boil. If I wanted to do a 5 gallon boil, I would switch to all-grain. It is obvious that the conversions are incorrect. Every recipe is like this. I have to guess at how much water to use for the specialty grains and sparging. Also, among various other small but important pieces that are essential to brewing, he has completely forgotten about adding Irish Moss.

Decent book, unfairly reviewed:
While there are mistakes in this book (as there are in Clone Brews and Beer Captured), overall this is a worthwhile book-all the recipes I have made from this book have turned out well. Much of the criticism of this book seems overdone. Beerman11, for instance, says that the extract version of the Immortales recipe asks you to continue the recipe with mini-mash recipe, and that this would require boiling 7.5 gallons. In my copy, the extract recipe asks you to use the mini-mash recipe after the boil--which would result in a boil of 3 gallons. Admittedly, some of the criticism is fair. The book does not suggest lowering the amount of hops for the all-grain recipes, which is odd. I could not find the barleywine error mentioned elsewhere (although I'm not a big barleywine fan); it is possible mistakes in the first edition were corrected. On the other hand, Russell did actually include lagering in his recipes, which the Szamatulski's did not in Clone Brews (and included only in the Helpful Hints section in Beer Captured, their latest book). Frankly, I suspect many of the problems with this book are a result of the publishing format, which applies to both of the Szamatulski's books as well. The short, one-page recipe format doesn't leave enough room to discuss technique and other issues involved with making the beer, and I think a lot of useful information is left out. However, I can get this information elsewhere. Overall, I liked this book better than the original Clone Brews and almost as much as Beer Captured.