In the preface to Clone Brews, the Szamatulskis (try pronouncing that name twice after a few homebrews) state that their object in this collection of recipes is not to introduce homebrewers to the joyless pursuit of reproducing commercial beers but to provide them with one way of discovering beer styles and developing a more discerning palate. The authors even encourage users of the book to tweak recipes to accommodate their own taste preferences. The recipes are organized by geographic origin. The result is (and this may be the books biggest weakness) that there are a relatively large number of recipes for contemporary light lagers (e.g. Tiger, Singha, Foster, Molson Ice, Maccabee, Tsing Tao, etc.). Although more homebrewers are becoming interested in brewing CAPs, I'm not sure how many out there want to brew up a batch of Molson Ice. . . .maybe I'm out of the loop, after all, the Szamatulskis own a homebrew supply shop; I don't even own all of my car. I suspect the authors were simply attempting to be judicious in their representation of beers from around the world. Unfortunately, there aren't many places where one can drink a beer that diverges from the adjuncty, pasteurized, pale lager style that has swept the world after WWII. There are plenty of German, British, Belgian, Dutch and American craft brewery clones, however, to keep classic style purists happy. The book came at just the right time as I'd gotten some yeast ready to brew this weekend and have been lackadaisical about working on a recipe. In looking for something within my yeast's profile, I also noticed another of the book's limitations: quite a few of the beers listed are not readily available to me. I thought about brewing the Shepherd Neame IPA recipe, but I have never tasted that beer nor can I get my hands on it even in the swanky liquor store that stocks lots of swell beers. Now, if your purpose is solely to brew some good beer, who cares if you can't pony up a bottle of the namesake to compare. But then, the book seems to anticipate a bit of competition--you against the defining standard clone--but a potentially educational kind of competition, as I've already mentioned. If you have access to lots of different kinds of beers and/or have tasted many of them near their places of origin, this limitation won't exist. The graphics on the page are modern and user friendly, a bit like frames on a web page or like contemporary magazine graphics. Each recipe is presented with a little blurb describing the flavor profiles of the beer at the top of the page. A partial mash recipe dominates most of the rest of the page with easy to read instructions on mash schedule, hop additions. In two right margin side bars appear "mini-mash" (base malt substituted for some of the extract) and all grain mash recipes. Access to a wide range of ingredients is implicit in all of the recipes. Perhaps the best part of each recipe is a prioritized list of yeast selections. Each recipe has at least two yeast suggestions, all liquid or bottle cultures. The book also contains a short introduction with some crucial technical data--an explanation of their use of HBU figures instead of IBUs and how to calculate HBU, extraction rate (70%) at which all grain recipes are calculated, etc. Several handy flavor profile tables and calculation tables appear in the back of the book. I think this information makes the book attractive to homebrewers with a wide range of technological savvy. All in all a cool book, worth the money. I find myself gravitating more and more to single brewer recipe books. I have several collections of award winning beer recipes, but I've grown a bit tired of calculating each brewer's extraction rate then reinterpreting the recipe into my system's capacities. That's just pure laziness on my part, though. More legitimately, however, I'm always a bit stumped by bizarre and missing information in some of these collections--recipes with strange or no hydrometer readings, no mash or hop schedules, etc. For homebrewers with even an intermediate knowledge of brewing techniques, the absence of this information makes the recipe unappealing. The Szamatulski's book, on the other hand, gives homebrewers a solid base from which to brew their clone beers, a potentially educational premise for any homebrewer.
