Good books or youtube channel?

How To Brew book by John Palmer.
You can read a free and condensed online version by clicking HERE but I'd suggest getting the print copy, which is available on Amazon for less than $20. If you go the print route, get the 2017 version.

 

Welcome to this great hobby. I agree with the How To Brew recommendation If you have questions after reading that book, then YouTube has many good videos to see how to do it. Charlie Papazian's book, The Complete Joy of Homebrewing is another source that gets many recommendations.

 

both books are worth a read.

personally i loved the brewing tv from years ago. lots of fun and you can get some fun ideas. the lastest ones are pretty dry compared to the first couple years.
If your really into brewing by the numbers skip videos and read.

 

Brewing Classic Styles is a recipe book that will serve you well as an extract or all grain brewer. Perhaps it is a little out of date, because it lacks some of the innovations of the last 10 years (those NEIPAs aren't hear to stay, are they?), but I think this is an excellent place to start for brewing just about anything else.

Basic Brewing Video is a video podcast that can be found on YouTube. You'll get lots of how-to tips while absorbing James Spencer's relaxed approach to exploring the hobby. Lots there for extract or all grain brewers. Spencer has an audio podcast, Basic Brewing Radio, that shares the same experiential learning approach to homebrew.

If you find yourself with lots of time to engage your brain while your body is on autopilot, like commuting to work, walking the dog, raking leaves, or washing bottles, audio podcasts might be just the thing for you. Check out the aforementioned BBR, the various shows on the Brewing Network (The Jamil Show was big for me when I was inexperienced), Experimental Brewing (my favorite for the last several years), Brulosophy (love it or hate it?), the Homebrew Happy Hour (a recent add-on to my play list), the Beersmith podcast, and probably many more.

 

I agree with pweis909's points above. However, I just want to caution that Brewing Classic Styles is specifically geared toward winning homebrew competitions like 10 years ago. This is not necessarily a bad thing (anyone winning homebrew competitions 10 years ago was brewing really fantastic beer), but the book has some limitations, including (A) being geared toward a previous iteration of the BJCP style guidelines, (B) being aimed straight down the middle of each style as it was understood at the time, and (C) providing recipes that often bear little or no resemblance to the actual recipes that would have been used in the brewing of the styles under discussion.

So in other words, if you view the book as a way to brew very good beer, you won't go wrong. And certainly for a beginner you could do a lot worse than to brew some of these recipes until you've nailed them, and then make whatever experimental variations you like. But if you want to learn about styles as they are/were actually brewed around the world, this book is not the right place to start.

(This is another way of saying: Don't go around criticizing people's recipes or their beer for varying from the Zainasheff approach. He is an authority on homebrewing but not on style authenticity.)

 

I see your point, but will politely offer a counterpoint, one that you almost made for me already. Because this book makes good beers so accessible, it may be precisely the place to start. And if you find yourself dissatisfied that you are not really brewing the beer quite the way that professionals do now or did at one time, you have given yourself a strong foundation for branching out and learning those desired details and applying them to your brewing.

 

It's been a while since I've looked at "Brewing Classic Styles." Are there some styles you feel are particularly inaccurate?

 

Here's the malt bill for Zainasheff's dark mild from Brewing Classic Styles:

7 lbs British pale ale malt
0.5 lb crystal 60°L
6 oz crystal 120°L
0.25 lb pale chocolate malt
2 oz black patent malt

For the rest of this post I'll assume that Ron Pattinson is correct when he states (in reference to a similar but not identical Zainasheff recipe):

... that's not the way the vast majority of real examples of the style were brewed. Most Milds got their colour from sugar, usuall a combination of No. 3 invert and caramel. It's rare to find any malt darker than crystal in Mild.

(If Pattinson is wrong, and Zainasheff is right, then my whole point is based on a fallacy, and you can disregard it.)

In the same post, Pattinson makes the following remark:

I'm not having a go at Jamil Zainasheff. This is how people were told Mild was brewed/.

And I think this is what it comes down to. As far as I can tell Brewing Classic Styles was published in 2007, meaning it was based on the 2004 BJCP style guidelines. And here's what those guidelines have to say about brewing mild ale (emphasis added):

Ingredients: Pale English base malts (often fairly dextrinous), crystal and darker malts should comprise the grist. May use sugar adjuncts. English hop varieties would be most suitable, though their character is muted. Characterful English ale yeast.

Reading those guidelines, I don't see how you could criticize Zainasheff's recipe. Remember, his recipes were designed to win competitions, meaning they were designed to please judges whose mandate was to penalize recipes for straying too far from the guidelines. On its own terms the book is undoubtedly a success.

But for someone trying to brew a mild ale in the same way that a British brewer would, Zainasheff's recipe misses the mark. And the same thing would apply to pretty much any other inaccuracy in the 2004 style guidelines, because those guidelines form the backbone of the book. (Just by way of example, skimming Zainasheff's recipes for Scottish ales, I see dark malts, but I don't see any corn.) It is presumably due to the misleading nature of the old BJCP guidelines that Pattinson used the "BJCP wankers" tag on some of his old blog posts.

I think the newer BJCP guidelines are much better (I get the sense Kristen England played a big role in this development), although even the most recent iteration calls for dark malt in English dark mild ales. But the BJCP is a different discussion. My point is just that you can learn a lot from Brewing Classic Styles, but you can also learn some highly misleading things about how certain styles are brewed, and it's good to know the limitations of the book.

 

I wonder if Ron was talking about only "historical" brewers or also about modern brewers, assuming dark milds are still being brewed in England? @patto1ro

 

Discussion of ‘accurate’ beer styles is often very spirited on the BA main forums (e.g., Beer Talk) and a wise person would avoid discussing this but since I am in an ‘unwise’ mood today…

A continuing challenge of discussing beer styles is that it is a multidimensional topic with the two dimensions of geography (exactly where a given beer brand was/is brewed) and time (how a beer was brewed 100 years ago, 50 years ago, today) being critical to the discussion. One person’s view of a ‘traditional’ beer style x beer is very different from another’s.

Terry Foster (see short bio below) wrote an article about brewing Mild Ales in BYO (see link at the bottom).

“Terry Foster was born and educated in London and holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from London University; he moved to the U.S. in 1977.”

“He initiated the Association of Brewers Classic Beer Styles Series with Pale Ale in 1990. This was followed by Porter, another in the series, and in 1999 by a revised and much enlarged second edition of Pale Ale.”

Below are some extracts from his BYO article:

“Dark mild originated in the London area, but is now more common in Wales and the Midlands of England, while pale mild is more likely to be found in the North of England. This makes for some difference in brewing them, in that a lot of the taste in mild comes from roasted malts, and the color puts a restriction on how much of these you can use in pale mild.”

And:

“Crystal malt is a common mild ingredient, at rates of about 10–15% of the total grist, or up to about one half pound (0.23 kg) for a 5-gallon (19-L) brew. Use the more highly-colored crystals, 60 or 80 °L, for dark mild ale, as these give a nice nutty flavor and ruby red color.”

And in the recipe presented:

“6 lb. 10 oz. (3 kg) mild ale malt

3/4 lb. (0.34 kg) crystal malt (60 °L)

2.0 oz. (57 g) chocolate malt

5.3 AAU Fuggles hops (90 mins)

(1.33 oz./38 g at 4% alpha acids)

Wyeast 1098 (Whitbread) yeast

1/2 cup dried malt extract (for priming)”

From the article about Mild in the Oxford Companion to Beer (by Brian Glover):

“But pockets of demand remain, notably in the northwest of England and the West Midlands, where Banks’s of Wolverhampton produce Britain’s best-selling mild, Banks’s Original.”

So, what are the fermentables of Britain’s best-selling mild (Banks’s Original)?

Well Graham Wheeler wrote a book (Brew Your Own British Real Ale) which addresses this topic:

“OG 1.035

88.2% Pale Malt

9.9% Medium Crystal

1.9% Black Malt



12.5 IBU Fuggles at start of boil

12.5 IBU Goldings at start of boil”

It sure seems like it is acceptable (e.g., Bank’s Brewery/Marston) to brew a Dark Mild Ale using crystal malt (and zero inverted sugar).

Cheers!

https://byo.com/article/mild-ale-its-not-dead-yet/

 

Podcasts.

Brulosophy, Basic Brewing Radio, Experimental Brewing, Beer Smith, Craft Beer & Brewing, Master Brewers.

It’s what I listen to. Current episodes dropped regularly. Very informational. Books and classes is how I started but I’ve been very great full for these and this format.

 

The Milds I grew up with in the 1970s is what I'm tthinking of. Those brewed by people like Harveys or Timothy Taylor are still made this way.

 

I don't believe that Banks recipe for a minute. I'd be amazed if they ever brewed it that way.

None of the recipes quoted are taken from brewing records and should be treated with suspicion.

 

Does anyone have a list of good youtube channels for especially IPAs? I really love IPAs and would love to see some more advanced guides in the form of videos(I'm a very visual guy).

 

The identification of mild is an interesting example for several reasons.

(1) One barrier homebrewers have to producing English style beers in the manner that English brewers might brew them is that specific ingredients mentioned above, colored invert sugar and brewers caramel, are unavailable for homebrewers to purchase. As a consequence, the only homebrew recipes that utilize them are the ones that require you to make them yourself. Instead of calling for these unavailable ingredients, recipes for milds, like the Zainasheff recipes and like the recipes Jack posted above, try to capture the style as best they can using commonly available ingredients.

Side note: This is not really different from the way US homebrewers attempted Belgian beers before the revelation of the frequent use of commercial candi syrups by Belgian brewers. A key difference in the evolution of homebrewed Belgian ale recipes is that these commercial syrups did become available to homebrewers, and the recipes changed. Brewing Classic Styles in fact came out during this period of change. The Belgian dubbel recipe includes dark candi syrup, but the Belgian Dark Strong recipe is one Zainasheff developed prior to the advent of candi syrup, when homebrewers relied on various crystal malts and darker kilned malts to achieve the color and flavor of Belgian beers.

(2) Commercial English milds are not widely available in the US, if at all. I suspect not many US homebrewers have had these beers (pretty sure I didn't have one when I was in the UK, as I was fascinated by the more mundane selections of Bass Ale, Whitbread, and Guinness back then). Speaking more broadly, we have not had many opportunities to taste beers made with commercial colored invert syrups, which could help us develop a palate that might discern the difference between what we are brewing and the commercial examples. A good question might be "Then what business do you have of making a recipe for mild ale?" The only defense I can offer is that I have brewed the Zainasheff mild nearly to spec and thought it was delicious.

(3) Ron and Kristin Englund have showed us how to make invert syrups and brewers caramel at home. Instructions can be found at unholymess.com and I think at Ron's Barclay Perkins blog, too. This includes a simple approach involving blending of blackstrap molasses and white sugar or Lyles Golden Syrup, and also more complex approaches involving boiling sugar on stovetops. I have brewed with homemade invert syrup for the Averagely Perfect ESB and, if I remember right, the porter I submitted to the Averagely spinoff competition. I enjoyed those beers. Per my second point, I have not developed a palate that allows me to say whether they were better than English style beers I have brewed without invert syrups. I would very much like to do some side by side tastings of homebrewed English beers, made with invert and without, to get a better feel for what the differences are. A visit to the UK again also might help to shape my palate.

Side note: Did a sugar boilover give the website its name? How aptly named it would be, because a 240 degree F sugar splatter would be really hellish and quite messy. I call this out, because it is not something I would recommend someone go through as a beginner learning how to brew beer. I would say start with the off the shelf ingredients as described by Zainasheff and the BYO recipes.

 

I agree with your thoughts pweis909. I certainly don't think there's anything the matter with substituting ingredients that are easy to get for ones that are hard or impossible to get. Of course ideally the recipe would indicate the substitution so brewers can decide for themselves, and so as to prevent confusion about the way the beer is actually brewed.

I have some more thoughts that I will probably try to add later. For now I'll just say, there are a lot of different ways to think about brewing beer, and there's no need to say that one way is better or worse than another. But on the other hand, if you're not clear about which approach you are taking, people can get confused, with some detrimental effects. This has been my point all along: If all you want to do is brew a tasty beer that a BJCP-trained judge would consider representative of the "mild" style, then Zainasheff is your man. But if you care to know how the beer is brewed in Britain, then Ron Pattinson's blog has dozens of recipes and a wealth of other information.

 

And there are other sources of information for brewing Milds. I already made mention of two in posts above: Terry Foster and Graham Wheeler.

Another source is the book The Secrets of Master Brewers by Jeff Alworth. On pages 29 - 35 he discusses Mild Ale and on page 31 is a recipe for a Mild Ale by John Boyce of Mighty Oak Brewing Co. located in Essex, England. Below are the fermentables of that 5 gallon recipe:

"6 pounds Maris Otter pale malt (89%)
0.4 pound UK 60L crystal malt
0.3 pound UK black malt"

Cheers!

 

This brings up tricky questions about what we mean by authenticity and style.

I'll start by embedding a video featuring Roger Protz interviewing John Boyce (owner) and Dr. Alex Rutter (brewer) about Mighty Oak's "Oscar Wilde" mild ale (if the video doesn't embed properly I'm going to edit this post to add a link instead):



The video is consistent with the recipe reported by Jeff Alworth. And you can see that the ale is inky black. ("The black malt gives it the colour and the roastiness," says the brewer.) It is also described as a hoppy, bitter interpretation of the style.

The ale is also a conscious re-introduction of a style that has largely disappeared. (Mild ale made up about 0.3% of the UK beer market in 2016.) Dr. Alex Rutter, the brewer, describes himself as a paleontologist who got into the brewing profession via homebrewing.

Now I have absolutely no interest in criticizing Mighty Oak or its Oscar Wilde ale. It's obviously a very good mild ale. But it may not be one that is particularly faithful to the style. It is black, roasty, and hoppy. It is an attempt to re-create a moribund style made by a brewer whose background is in homebrewing. I don't think we can rule out the possibility that its recipe was derived from Brewing Classic Styles or a similar source. [Edited to add: It appears we can rule out Brewing Classic Styles itself, based on when Oscar Wilde was first brewed, but we can't rule out a similar homebrewing source.]

None of that changes the fact that Oscar Wilde is currently being brewed in England and sold as a mild. That is a kind of authenticity, and if enough breweries were doing the same, modern English mild would by definition be a hoppy, roasty beer.

So this brings us to the question: What makes a recipe authentic or inauthentic? What beers are elevated as definitive examples of a style and what beers do not?

I don't know! In life we generally don't have time to slow down and ask which sense people are using these words in. We have a general sense that "English IPA" doesn't just mean "the set of IPAs that are brewed in England," so that for instance this beer is English and it is an IPA but it isn't an English IPA:

Aromas And Flavours is a new addition to our recent showcase of Crop Year '18 hops we selected in Yakima. Citra, Centennial and Chinook are lending citrus fruit, earthy and resinous notes to this juicy IPA that's been double dry hopped for an impactful, full-flavoured beer.

But when it comes to these questions our standards are tacit and inexact. All I can say is that to me Ron Pattinson's conception of mild has a lot to recommend it and Jamil Zainasheff's has less. That's my subjective judgment. It's necessarily limited by my own experiences (I've never set foot in England and probably never will) and knowledge (most of what I know about historical beer styles I've learned from Pattinson one way or another).

To me the list of breweries here outweighs Mighty Oak, partly because of the sheer amount of mild they brewed and partly because Mighty Oak seems to me to have developed its recipe with relatively little regard for the style's traditional parameters. Oscar Wilde may be a mild but it might not be recognizable as such to the vast majority of people who have ever drunk mild ale. To me that counts against it, not as a beer, but as an exemplar of the style.

There is no need to be dogmatic about this. I'm not going to go to Mighty Oak and tell them how to do their jobs. If anything I would love to check out their interpretation of the style. But when discussing brewing a beer in the style of an English mild, Whitbread and Fullers and Tetley are normative and Mighty Oak is aberrant, to me at least, and I think to most people upon reflection.

(At this point honesty compels me to acknowledge that in researching this post, I did come across a Courage recipe with black malt, although it represented a considerably smaller percentage of the malt bill than it does in Mighty Oak's version. This is also the only one of several dozen recipes I looked at to contain any dark malt, other than dark crystal malt, which is not uncommon. This brings me to another point, which is that styles should probably be understood in a more fluid, less rule-bound way in the first place. And on that score maybe Zainasheff can sail through, although I still wouldn't use his recipe if I were trying to make a mainstream mild.)

 

As I have already discussed above by my post #11 (with emphasis in bold this time) :

Discussion of ‘accurate’ beer styles is often very spirited on the BA main forums (e.g., Beer Talk) and a wise person would avoid discussing this but since I am in an ‘unwise’ mood today…

A continuing challenge of discussing beer styles is that it is a multidimensional topic with the two dimensions of geography (exactly where a given beer brand was/is brewed) and time (how a beer was brewed 100 years ago, 50 years ago, today) being critical to the discussion. One person’s view of a ‘traditional’ beer style x beer is very different from another’s."

Again this is a matter of perspective/opinion. Based upon my numerous readings (and I provided some of this in this thread) the Mild Ale being produced by Mighty Oak is as 'authentic' as any other.

I agree with the above except that I would not have stated "kind of" in the above verbiage since that reads as a disparaging qualifier.

Permit me to suggest that perhaps a 'better' way to approach this is via a more broad minded manner. I am of the perspective that Mild Ale can be brewed via a variety of recipes and all of those recipes could be "authentic". I am of the opinion that a brewery could brew a Mild Ale using invert sugar and that beer could be an "authentic" Mild Ale. Another brewery could brew a Mild Ale using specialty malts (crystal and roasted malts) and that beer could be an "authentic" Mild Ale.

And I will respectfully disagree here. I am a fan and friend of Ron (I spoke to him for an extended period of time at HomebrewCon last month) and while I appreciate the efforts he makes for the brewing community he is one voice and there are a plethora of others (as I detailed in above posts). In post #13 Ron posted: "The Milds I grew up with in the 1970s is what I'm thinking of.". I would not argue that the Mild Ales that Ron consumed in the 1970's were not "authentic" Mild Ales but from my perspective this is too limiting. I would argue that a contemporary Mild Ale such as the one(s) being brewed by Mighty Oak has as much claim (if not more) to being an "authentic" Mild Ale.

Again you seem to have a viewpoint which is firmly an either/or mindset. All of those breweries mentioned (Whitbread, Fullers, Tetley and Mighty Oak) could be brewing "authentic" Mild Ales.

You have finally made a statement that I can agree with 100% with no qualifiers.

Cheers!