The Recipe Is Not the Beer

Two brewers follow the same recipe on the same Saturday and get different beer. Nothing in the recipe distinguishes them, because what separated them is not in the recipe.

A recipe specifies what can be weighed. What decides the beer is mostly what cannot: the temperature it ferments at, how much oxygen reaches it and when, what is dissolved in the water, and how long it is left alone. This book argues about those four first, then shows the arithmetic behind the rest, then names the single most common way each of ninety-eight styles gets ruined.

Every figure in the recipes is computed from the ingredients beside it by the same Tinseth and Morey models this site runs, so a recipe cannot disagree with itself. When that check was first applied, seventeen of the thirty-four fell outside the style they claimed. When the style ranges themselves were checked against the published guidelines, twelve figures across nine styles were wrong. Chapter 1 tells that story, because it is the argument.

176 pages. Metric and US customary units throughout, computed rather than converted by hand. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the BJCP.