Which books would be best to supplement brewing software?

I find 'Designing Great Beers' to be a great resource. For each beer style in the book, Ray Daniels goes through the history, traditional ingredients and techniques. He also analyzes the ingredients used in the beers that made it to the AHA National's Second Round one year (1992 IIRC). Sounds like it's very much what you're looking for.

Another possibility could be any of the books in the 'Classic Beer Style' series. I don't have any, so I can't really comment on the content.

-Vlad

Designing Great Beers is a good book; the notable problem is that he has no real information on Belgian styles, and some other substyles styles are completely absent as well (Euro Dark Lager, for example).

He goes into some detail into the "whys" of ingredients, how ingredients were used historically (to the extent that that data is available), and presents a lot of information on incidence and amounts of ingredients per style based on historical NHC second round winners. This is useful, although I think the data naturally shows a build-in "contest" bias.

Overall highly recommended with the caveat that it's useless for Belgian styles.

Other good books include some books from the AHA Style series -- some are better than others. If you're into lagers, Noonan's "New Brewing Lager Beer" is quite useful. I also like Fix's "Analysis of Brewing Techniques", although some information may be more pertinent to small professional brewers than homebrewers.

I haven't cared for the "Clone Brews" book, personally. The AG recipes in particular seem poorly thought out, and in some cases just plain wrong.

Bill Velek :

I second the "Designing Great Beers" recommendation. Along with recipe history and analysis, there are good explanation of how to determine water usage, grainbill, and hop additions. Even if using brewing software, this stuff is good to know just for general edification.

cheers, Scott S

Yes, I also think it's a very worthwhile book. In addition to the style chapters, the whole first part of the book covers ingredients, hitting mash temperature, calculating water needs, etc. I don't have any other single resource that has all that information gathered in one place and organized so well.

That's moderately useful, but is one aspect I think has not aged quite so well. In the last ten or so years we homebrewers have gotten access to a lot more and accurate information about about how beer styles are brewed in their native countries, and (at least in the US) have gotten much better access to grains from those places. I think we can do a much better job these days designing beers the way they are meant to be, rather than approximating them using the ingredients we had back then. Granted, the historical section of the style chapters are still very useful, but the AHA winners data is a bit, um, suspect.

I have most of them. Some are quite dated, some are written poorly, some are more up to date and more well- written. There are good (mild ale, barleywine), bad (stout), outdated (Vienna/Maerzen/Oktoberfest), and a few others that I think now have better information available elsewhere (Belgian Ale: see _Brew Like a Monk_, Lambic: see "Wild Brews").

All the above is my opinion, of course.

Yep, I have three of those books (not Fix's book) and I would have to agrree

I would consider the new Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer. Jamil Zainasheff is an expert on styles and would not steer you wrong on ingredients and John Palmer is pretty solid technically.