Simple Homebrewing

Have you ever found yourself doing less and less homebrewing, or being too intimidated to take up the brewing to begin with? Let Drew Beechum and Denny Conn help you brew the best possible beer with less work and more fun! Simple Homebrewing simplifies the complicated steps for making beer and returns brewing to its fundamentals. Explore easy techniques for harnessing water, malted barley, hops, and yeast (along with a few odd co-stars) to create beer. Pick up tips and tricks for a range of brewing challenges like adjusting your brewing liquor, working with adjunct ingredients, controlling fermentation, and brewing wild beers. The authors guide you from extract brewing to all-grain batches and explain the simple philosophy of recipe design and small-batch brewing. Learn how to evaluate different types of malt and hops by tasting, crushing, and steeping them, and use this to build your flavor vocabulary. Denny and Drew also share ideas on how to make technology work for you by taking a look at brewing gadgets, from fancy fermentation jackets and expensive (but convenient) all-in-one “robot” brewing systems, to bucket heaters, swamp coolers and do-it-yourself PID controllers made from inexpensive and commonly available microprocessors. Drew and Denny's mantra is “Brew the best beer possible, with the least effort possible, while having the most fun possible.” Throughout, the focus is on helping you develop a simple, thoughtful process to make homebrewing more accessible and enjoyable. Wisdom is imparted in tones both reassuring and amusing, and the basics are broken down into easily remembered chunks. The authors also feature interviews with an eclectic group of brewers from the Americas, who add their own take on the brewing process and how they have made it work for them. Get a feel for recipe design by looking at a few handy templates for Pilsner, pale ale, IPA, double IPA, stout, tripel, and saison; or try your own bottom-up or top-down approach after reading Denny and Drew's advice. Along the way you will find over 40 recipes, ranging from the simplest of pale ales, American lagers, tried and tested altbier recipes, and delicious rye IPAs, to Old and New World barleywine, quick tripels, Scotch ale mashed overnight, king cake ale, purple corn beer, and Catherina sour. Marvel at how mushrooms can be used in beer and tremble at the thought of a bourbon barrel–aged barleywine made with ghost pepper. Even experienced homebrewers can learn from this dynamic duo, as Simple Homebrewing features expert advice for brewers of all levels.

An accessible guide to making your own beer, for beginning & advanced brewers, with thirty recipes and tips for choosing ingredients, equipment, and more. Mastering Homebrew will have you thinking like a scientist, brewing like an artist, and enjoying your very own unbelievably great handcrafted beer in record time. Internationally known brewing instructor, beer competition judge, author, and brew master himself, Randy Mosher covers everything that beginning to advanced brewers want to know, all in this easy-to-follow, fun-to-read handbook, including: · The anatomy of a beer · Brewing with both halves of your brain · Gear and the brewing process · Care and feeding of yeast · Hops (the spice of beer) · Brewing your first beer · Beer styles and beyond · The Amazing Shape-Shifting Beer Recipe · And more “Randy is a walking encyclopedia of beer and brewing, and his palate and taste are impeccable.” —from the foreword by Jim Koch, chairman and cofounder, the Boston Beer Company

Fully revised and expanded, How to Brew is the definitive guide to making quality beers at home. Whether you want simple, sure-fire instructions for making your first beer, or you’re a seasoned homebrewer working with all-grain batches, this book has something for you. Palmer adeptly covers the full range of brewing possibilities—accurately, clearly and simply. From ingredients and methods to recipes and equipment, this book is loaded with valuable information for any stage brewer.

Get brewing! This foolproof beginner’s guide to brewing great beer at home includes everything you need to know to make your very first batch. With step-by-step instructions, insightful advice, and simple recipes for a variety of beer styles, you’ll be proudly sipping your own homemade beer in no time. This revised edition covers additional techniques and equipment, as well as new varieties of hops and other ingredients. Ground yourself in the basics of homebrewing and experiment with new tastes and combinations. It’s fun, easy, and oh-so-rewarding!

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

Three-time Ninkasi Award winner, Gordon Strong has been a towering presence in the homebrewing community for many years. Now this Grandmaster Beer Judge invites you on a guided tour through over 100 of his own as-brewed recipes. While discussing the fundamentals of homebrewing, the author also invites you to develop your own style, with tips on recipe formulation and ingredients substitutions. In the initial chapters, Strong cover the basics of brewing, summarizing a variety of processes relating to water adjustment, mashing, and hopping. The author concisely and clearly lays out techniques like infusion mashing, step infusion, decoction, cereal mashes, and hybrid mash schedules. Get the rundown on adding hops in the boil, first wort hopping, hop bursting, whirlpool and steeping, hopbacks, and dry hopping. Learn the basics of recipe design and how to think about style recipe profiles; know the intensity of your ingredients and what contributes to a balanced recipe and how that might differ between styles—do you know what makes a balanced IPA versus a lambic? Make intelligent substitutions with ingredients you have and become comfortable scaling recipes, accounting for volume losses, mash efficiencies, and differences in hop utilization. The recipes themselves are tried and tested, provided by the author as he has brewed them, including specific advice and sensory profiles, plus insights into the creative process behind each recipe. There are myriad IPAs and everyday styles for easy drinking, such as pale ale, blonde ale, wheat beer, altbier, Kolsch, and brown and amber ales. Classic and modern lager recipes include Vienna, dunkel, Maibock, Oktoberfest, bock, and schwarzbier. Dark beers are plentiful, with dark milds, porters, and stouts, making a nod to both American and classic English versions. Stronger fare is on offer with barleywine, strong ales, and winter warmers; lovers of Belgian beer will also find an eclectic selection of traditional recipes, as well as some saisons and biere de garde. For when the creative juices are really flowing, the author includes a collection of experimental and historical recipes that may not find a place in any set style—pale mild or dubbel American brown ale, anyone?—but are delicious nonetheless.

Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book takes brewing out of the basement and into the kitchen. Erica Shea and Stephen Valand show that with a little space, a few tools, and the same ingredients breweries use, you too can make delicious craft beer right on your stovetop. Greenmarket-inspired and seasonally brewed, these 52 recipes include Everyday IPA and Rose Cheeked & Blonde for spring; Grapefruit Honey Ale and S’More Beer for summer; Apple Crisp Ale and Peanut Butter Porter for fall; Chestnut Brown ale and Gingerbread Ale for winter; and even four gluten-free brews. You’ll also find tips for growing hops, suggestions for food pairings, and recipes for cooking with beer. Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book offers a new approach to artisanal brewing and is a must-own for beer lovers, seasonally minded cooks, and anyone who gets a kick out of saying “I made this!”

Join authors Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert as they tell the story of the marriage between wood and beer from Roman times through medieval Europe to modern craft brewing. Cooperage is a long and venerable craft and here the authors give a description combining the evocative and technical. The smells, the heat, choosing the wood, drying, fashioning staves, steaming, firing, and assembling into a perfect container—at least perfect until the bunghole is drilled to accommodate the precious contents. Barrels and foeders have gone from an oddity of traditional breweries to a commonplace feature at the heart of the craft brewing industry. It is estimated that 85% of US breweries now use wood as part of their process. Maintaining wooden vessels requires care and meticulous organization of cellar space. The authors discuss the vagaries of temperature, humidity, seasonal changes, mold, and evaporation, and how breweries new and old deal with these challenges. The basics of selecting, inspecting, cleaning, and maintaining barrels are detailed. Finally, of course, the wood must be united with the beer. The complexity and variations that govern how wood imparts flavors to beer can be overwhelming. The authors guide the reader through wood's characteristic flavor compounds and the nuances of toasting and charring. Oak is the focus, American, French, and Eastern European, but other woods get their due. As well as intrinsic flavors, the microflora that take up residence in a barrel or foeder are the living, beating heart of a barrel-aged beer, able to create sour and unique beers of fascinating complexity. The authors pepper the text with stories and experiences from some of the giants of the craft brewing scene, discussing how they monitor their barrel programs and taste and blend their beers to create something truly special. All this will inspire professional and amateur brewers alike. At the end of the book the authors give some helpful advice on wood aging for homebrewers, including the uses for chips, cubes, spirals, staves, powders ... and the odd chair leg. Get ready to embrace the mystical complexity of flavors and aromas derived from wood.

Ancient brewing traditions and techniques have been passed generation to generation on farms throughout remote areas of northern Europe. With these traditions facing near extinction, author Lars Marius Garshol set out to explore and document the lost art of brewing using traditional local methods. Equal parts history, cultural anthropology, social science, and travelogue, this book describes brewing and fermentation techniques that are vastly different from modern craft brewing and preserves them for posterity and exploration. Learn about uncovering an unusual strain of yeast, called kveik, which can ferment a batch to completion in just 36 hours. Discover how to make keptinis by baking the mash in the oven. Explore using juniper boughs for various stages of the brewing process. Test your own hand by brewing recipes gleaned from years of travel and research in the farmlands of northern Europe. Meet the brewers and delve into the ingredients that have kept these traditional methods alive. Discover the regional and stylistic differences between farmhouse brewers today and throughout history.