Beer Books

How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time

John J. Palmer

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 By: Brewers Publications Amazon Marketplace: 25 new & used starting at $12.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Highly recommended 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have to say this is the best book for anyone interested in brewing. Great for the novice and more advanced home brewer.

Well Written 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have made two batches since I bought this book, and they have both come out excellent. I have the "homebrew bible" and while it is a good book, How to Brew just explained things in a way that made me relax about the beer I was brewing. It explains in a more consice way when TO worry about sanitation, and when NOT TO. Overall this is an excellent purchase!

One of the half-dozen best brewing books 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I love this book. It manages to be one of the best basic (in this case inclusive of both extract as well as main-line all-grain techniques) brewing books while still touching on a number of advanced subjects. Like another reviewer, I also like Dave Miller's book (Dave Miller's Homebrewing Guide) and regard Palmer's and Miller's books as very complementary and both essential reading for all-grain brewers. I read both again last weekend and value both for different reasons. I also highly recommend the Fixes' book (An Analysis of Brewing Techniques) for its topical coverage. Narrow (few topics), but very detailed and informative.

This is an updated version of Palmer's book. I have the earlier version but recently leafed through the new version and intend to buy it. It has updated and more complete information on a number of topics, notably batch sparging, that make it worthwhile buying the newer edition.

Editorial Review:

Everything needed to brew beer right the first time. Presented in a light-hearted style without frivolous interruptions, this authoritative text introduces brewing in a easy step-by-step review.

Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

Sandor Ellix Katz

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Chelsea Green Publishing Company Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $14.59

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Canning & Preserving
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Spirits

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bread. Cheese. Wine. Beer. Coffee. Chocolate. Most people consume fermented foods and drinks every day. For thousands of years, humans have enjoyed the distinctive flavors and nutrition resulting from the transformative power of microscopic bacteria and fungi. Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods is the first cookbook to widely explore the culinary magic of fermentation. "Fermentation has been an important journey of discovery for me," writes author Sandor Ellix Katz. "I invite you to join me along this effervescent path, well trodden for thousands of years yet largely forgotten in our time and place, bypassed by the superhighway of industrial food production." The flavors of fermentation are compelling and complex, quite literally alive. This book takes readers on a whirlwind trip through the wide world of fermentation, providing readers with basic and delicious recipes-some familiar, others exotic-that are easy to make at home. The book covers vegetable ferments such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and sour pickles; bean ferments including miso, tempeh, dosas, and idli; dairy ferments including yogurt, kefir, and basic cheesemaking (as well as vegan alternatives); sourdough bread-making; other grain fermentations from Cherokee, African, Japanese, and Russian traditions; extremely simple wine- and beer-making (as well as cider-, mead-, and champagne-making) techniques; and vinegar-making. With nearly 100 recipes, this is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging fermentation cookbook ever published.

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing Third Edition (Harperresource Book)

Charles Papazian

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Collins Living Amazon Marketplace: 45 new & used starting at $8.35

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Engineering -> Bioengineering -> Biotechnology

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Charlie Papazian, master brewer and founder and president of the American Homebrewer's Association and Association of Brewers, presents a fully revised edition of his essential guide to homebrewing. This third edition of the best-selling and most trusted homebrewing guide includes a complete update of all instructions, recipes, charts, and guidelines. Everything you need to get started is here, including classic and new recipes for brewing stouts, ales, lagers, pilseners, porters, specialty beers, and honey meads.

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, third edition, includes:

• Getting your home brewery together: the basics -- malt, hops, yeast, and water
• Ten easy lessons for making your first batch of beer
• Creating world-class styles of beer (IPA, Belgian wheat, German Kölsch and Bock, barley wine, American lagers, to name a few)
• Using fruit, honey, and herbs for a spicier, more festive brew
• Brewing with malt extracts for an unlimited range of strengths and flavors
• Advanced brewing techniques using specialty hops or the all-grain method or mash extracts
• A complete homebrewer's glossary, troubleshooting tips, and an up-to-date resource section
• And much, much more

Be sure to check out Charlie's The Homebrewer's Companion for over 60 additional recipes and more detailed charts and tables, techniques, and equipment information for the advanced brewer.

Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles

Ray Daniels

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Brewers Publications Amazon Marketplace: 42 new & used starting at $13.94

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 60 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Part 1 of Designing Great Beers is a complete book in itself, focused solely on home-brewing ingredients and techniques (including three superb chapters on hops alone). Ray Daniels proves himself the "techie" type, infusing his introductory chapters with as much brewing math as brewing lore. Yet, Daniels never hops off the deep end of beer geekdom. Instead, he complements this emphasis on data with the creative use of graphics; where one could get bogged down in the stats, there is usually a clear visual depiction to instantly summarize their meaning.

This focus on facts continues into part 2 of Daniels's guide, where it backs an admirably pragmatic take on beer styles and their importance in home-brewing. Daniels devotes a chapter to each of 14 major style categories, detailing historical origins and modern brewing techniques. He lays a contemporary groundwork by compiling and analyzing the recipes of the National Homebrew Competition's most successful beers. The assumption is that beers deemed representative of particular beer styles in modern competitions serve as ideal models for recipe creation. Among the information provided for each style is a chart showing the percentage of brewers using each type of grain and in what proportions the grains were added. Similar data are supplied for hop varieties, yeast strains, and water treatment. This reverse engineering of award-winning beers naturally benefits experienced brewers seeking to wow judges at the next competition. Yet, even brewers taking their first shy steps into creating their own recipes have much to gain from this kind of practical analysis. Daniels provides the basic tools a brewer of any level can use to formulate recipes with confidence and creativity. --Todd Gehman

Radical Brewing: Recipes, Tales and World-Altering Meditations in a Glass

Randy Mosher

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 1 to 4 weeks By: Brewers Publications Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $11.31

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great read, great ideas! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I'm enjoying this book immensely. This is my second home brewing book (Papazian was the first, about 15 years ago). Like Papazian, "Radical Brewing" includes plenty of lore in addition to hard core brewing info. And like Papazian this book has lots of humor in it. But Mosher's book is much more current, in terms of both information and viewpoint. And the humor is sardonic where Papazian's humor tends to be more goofy and quaint.
If anything "Radical Brewing" is slightly less practical than "The Joy of Homebrewing." It seems like Mosher focuses on giving the reader inspiration rather than step-by-step instructions, which is very wise considering how individualized each batch of homebrew is. Papazian has a certain recipe mentality, where Mosher is instead setting forth ideas and techniques. Good stuff, particularly for the intermediate or advanced brewer. Highly recommended.

Editorial Review:

Radical Brewing takes a hip and creative look at beer brewing, presented with a graphically appealing two-color layout.

The Homebrewer's Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs

Joe Fisher, Dennis Fisher

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Storey Publishing, LLC Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $8.74

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Baking -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Clear and Inspiring How-To 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book looking for a guide to grow hops... It is certainly that, and more. It covers varieties and where they grow, how to treat the soil, where to plant, what how to build an effective trellis etc... AND it covers how to dry the fresh hops in preparation for use in a brew... how to build an oast (which is the drying structure)... And it does all of this in a very approachable way.

Bonus for me - was that it covers the same for the cultivation, harvest, and treatment (malting and drying) of barley ... And has a nice run-down of brewing herbs and their uses (how much of what herb to use in the brew - and when to add it)...

Just noticed - the cover says:

How to easily grow prepare, and use your own Hops, Malts, and Brewing Herbs

yeah ... that's about right. ;)
Inspiring.

Editorial Review:

Grow Your Own...Brew Your Own! If you have a backyard, or even a sun-facing porch, you can greatly enhance the flavor, aroma, and uniqueness of your homebrew by growing your own hops, brewing herbs, and malt grains. Easy instructions will help you put the "home" into your homebrew from setting up your first hop trellis, to malting grain at home, to brewing recipes specially formulated for homegrown ingredients. When you grow your own organic ingredients, you can be sure they are the freshest and purest available. "The Homebrewer's Garden is a natural marriage of two great hobbies..." (Craig Bystrynski, Editor of Brew Your Own magazine)

The Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible

Leon W. Kania

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Happy Mountain Publications Amazon Marketplace: 25 new & used starting at $13.53

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Baking -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Spirits

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Book Description How to make beer, wine, liqueurs, cider and moonshine whiskey. The author dusts off over 30 years of experience to tell you how it's done. He not only tells how to make darned near any kind of beer, wine, liqueur and whiskey you can imagine, he also tells you how to make the equipment to do it with. Ever wondered how a still is made? There are 8 types illustrated in this book and though it's illegal to build or possess a still, the illustrations are so complete, you could easily do it! This book includes plans and operating instructions from underground moonshiner manuals used in Mid East oil fields. Some are built with components found in most home kitchens. From moonshine, homebrew, wine and liqueur recipes, to stills, make your own cappers, kegs, scales and even a malt factory from an old freezer, it's all here!

Easy to read and humorous, this book entertains you with Alaskan tales and bootlegger's lore while you learn to make everything from beer and blossom wines, to horse turd whiskey and bathtub gin. If you could buy only one "make your own" book for the rest of your life, this is it. It's like getting a whole shelf of books for the price of one!

Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery

Steve Hindy, Tom Potter

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Wiley Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $9.03

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Biography & History -> Company Profiles
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Management & Leadership -> Strategy & Competition
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Popular Economics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

What do you get when you cross a journalist and a banker? A brewery, of course.

"A great city should have great beer. New York finally has, thanks to Brooklyn. Steve Hindy and Tom Potter provided it. Beer School explains how they did it: their mistakes as well as their triumphs. Steve writes with a journalist's skepticism-as though he has forgotten that he is reporting on himself. Tom is even less forgiving-he's a banker, after all. The inside story reads at times like a cautionary tale, but it is an account of a great and welcome achievement."
—Michael Jackson, The Beer Hunter(r)

"An accessible and insightful case study with terrific insight for aspiring entrepreneurs. And if that's not enough, it is all about beer!"
—Professor Murray Low, Executive Director, Lang Center for Entrepreneurship, Columbia Business School

"Great lessons on what every first-time entrepreneur will experience. Being down the block from the Brooklyn Brewery, I had firsthand witness to their positive impact on our community. I give Steve and Tom's book an A++!"
—Norm Brodsky, Senior Contributing Editor, Inc. magazine

"Beer School is a useful and entertaining book. In essence, this is the story of starting a beer business from scratch in New York City. The product is one readers can relate to, and the market is as tough as they get. What a fun challenge! The book can help not only those entrepreneurs who are starting a business but also those trying to grow one once it is established. Steve and Tom write with enthusiasm and insight about building their business. It is clear that they learned a lot along the way. Readers can learn from these lessons too."
—Michael Preston, Adjunct Professor, Lang Center for Entrepreneurship, Columbia Business School, and coauthor, The Road to Success: How to Manage Growth

"Although we (thankfully!) never had to deal with the Mob, being held up at gunpoint, or having our beer and equipment ripped off, we definitely identified with the challenges faced in those early days of cobbling a brewery together. The revealing story Steve and Tom tell about two partners entering a business out of passion, in an industry they knew little about, being seriously undercapitalized, with an overly naive business plan, and their ultimate success, is an inspiring tale."
—Ken Grossman, founder, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers

Tess Szamatulski, Mark Szamatulski

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Storey Publishing, LLC Amazon Marketplace: 37 new & used starting at $7.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Baking -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 52 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

a good Idea with some limitations 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

After you're done with your introductory beer book and you've made a few batches, you may find that you want to brew something that reminds you of your favorite commercial beer.
This is almost the book for you.

The selection of recipes is heavily slanted toward beer that many homebrewers may find unexciting. But the authors have a very good point: by brewing imitations (maybe we should say tributes) of commercial beers, you learn how beer tastes are built. You get to refine your own sensibilities and taste. And you can't help but end up a better brewer.

Lynn Hoffman, authorNew Short Course in Wine,The

One down, hundred or so to go 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I've only tried one recipe so far and was very happy with it. I partial mash and I modified their recipe to include more grain and less extract. So many brews . . . so little time!

Good Clone Book 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Although this book is slightly dated now (some of the ingredient manufacturers needing an update), I found it very useful & informative for using tried and tested recipes & formulating recipes simular to the types of brews I like to drink. I would recommend it to any novice seeking to replicate their favourite beers at home.

Editorial Review:

Re-creations of brands such as Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, Guinness, Foster's, and more.

Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew

Jamil Zainasheff, John Palmer

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Brewers Publications Amazon Marketplace: 28 new & used starting at $11.45

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Drinks & Beverages -> Beer
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Culinary Arts & Techniques

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best recipe book out there 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I have already brewed several of the beers from this book and have had outstanding results. You will need a primary book for the beginner, but if have brewed before and want to get away from kits this is definitely the way to go. You can get most of the recipes free via podcast, but there is other information included in the book that the podcasts miss. I would definitely recommend adding this book to your brewing repertoire.

Buy this book!!! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew

This book is less than the price of an extract kit ... but contains recipes and advice that are worth so much more. I've brewed the Kolsch, the Belgian Wit, and just received my grain for the British Bitter.

I brew the all-grain versions but John and Jamil include extract and partial-mash versions of each recipe. They give you great pointers for each style and give you the exact fermentation temperatures for each recipe.

Beautiful Beer 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a fantastic book, I've been brewing every week since I got the book 7 months ago. Fantastic recipes, brilliant advice.