Book Review: Mild Ale - David Sutula

Brewers Publications has a Classic Beer Style Series of books that include historical details of beer styles, ingredient information, typical flavor profiles, and traditional brewing techniques in a single package designed to appeal to beer enthusiast and home brewers alike. There's a difficult balance to strike between readability, and robust technical detail. Admittedly, I worried that the goal of readability would kill the technical usefulness of the books. The balance seems just about right (on average) there are some technical gaps and excessive readability.

David Sutula's Mild Ale is the first of the series that I've read. the history was interesting, and the general technical info quite competent. I will admit that the author's credibility was diminished by the 1999 copyright date, and his continual reference to Cleveland area breweries that were not in existence or operation during my time in Cleveland (98-03). There was a lot of turnover in the flats during that time, so it and at least one other place failed to keep business open at the same address.

Of course, Cleveland's role in the history of the mild is limited. In fact all of the history is in England, where it belongs. Sutula makes a strong effort to show the evolution of traditional brewing in England, and explain the relative fogginess about the specifics of the mild style. He even addresses the curious line between the Mild and Brown, and complains about the marketing jerks that label their milds browns because they lack the stones to stand by the traditional style.

From a technical standpoint, it was very interesting to read a book that took an application specific approach to techniques an unit operations that I've read so much about in general home brewing texts, and on websites. While those resources have dragged a bit, and felt like text books minus key equations, the style specific focus made that reading fluid. I would have enjoyed a bit more detail about home brew scale equivalents for hop backs, and small volume casks/firkins. It also would have been nice to see some alternatives to sugar priming, unless of course the Brits always sugar primed.

I can't complain too loudly. There are carbonation tables and a few recipes (all grain, and extract) and in the back. I would have liked a few more recipes, as he includes ingredients lists for a number of commercial milds. A clone recipe would be nice - if only to provide insight when crafting my own recipes. In all fairness, the specialty grain bill attached to some of the extract batches borders on mini-mash scale. It's cool for me, but might intimidate some brewers.

There was also a table of "statistics" didn't understand. The author tabulated starting gravities and ABV for a large number of British and micro milds. It would have been excellent if he was kind enough to provide an average and standard deviation on this data. Then, perhaps we could define the style as the mean +/- 3 standard deviations. It would be extra cool if they could do the same thing with IBUs and color. I'm a geek.