Read this before buying a Home Brewing Book
There are are (at the time of writing) 173 books about home brewing listed by Amazon. A lot of these are repeats but clearly you are spoiled for choice when it comes to home brewing.
You can narrow the list by rejecting any title that mixes wine and beer making. Wine making and beer making have nothing in common except yeast and the need for cleanliness, so books that mix them are nearly always unsuccessful.
You can go still further and reject the ones that concentrate on making beer from kits or novelty beers. Some of these are deeply unsatisfactory and you get the impression that many of the recipes have never actually been tried by their author. I’m sorry to say that some of the books by CJJ Berry seem to fall into that category.
For people outside the UK there are also clear dangers in British beer making books. British beer IS different from beers elsewhere and non-Britishers may not want to engage in the British beer tradition. Some of the best English beer is drunk tepid and stagnant (=not bubbly) which is not to everybody’s taste.
So when I looked down Amazon’s list I was greatly drawn to a book about beer brewing for Americans, and also to one exclusively about brewing lager. I already have and use “Brewing Beers Like those you Buy” which is British oriented, and I can vouch for the truth of the title but that would be a personal home brewing choice. You might also care to look at other, more recent, books that make roughly the same claim, such as “Homebrew recipes for 150 commercial beers”. I would also like to buy some of the titles which cover Microbreweries, but as I don’t have a micro brewery set up that would be pure indulgence.
There’s more about home brewing and brews, just here.
0 comments Wednesday 04 Feb 2009 | admin | General

























