Building Your Beer Bookshelf – Homebrewing Guides

Now that you’re primed on the world of craft beer and it’s inhabitants, isn’t it about time you brew some beer of your own?

I’ll be honest – this column is going to be a bit shorter than the last two (and the final column next week).  I haven’t been brewing for a terribly long time, so I can only really recommend books on the amateur end of the homebrewing book spectrum.  I’ve still got quite a few recommendations to get you started, but if you’ve been brewing for a while these might skew a bit below your skill level.

While I was originally going to suggest some expert-level books about making beer, I don’t feel super comfortable listing books I haven’t used myself – even if they come with high marks from more experienced brewers.  This is the one HopPress article where I really hope some of you wonderful RateBeer homebrewers come forward and recommend some killer books.

This list of books is going to be a bit shorter than my others, but I could have made it even shorter – Charlie Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing and Homebrewer’s Companion are two books that offer more than enough information to keep you brewing for years and take you from simple extract brews all the way to a brewing expert.

While there are many other brewing books that claim to be the best introduction to the hobby, don’t be fooled – you can’t do any better than Charlie’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. You will not find a guide to brewing your own beer that is better written, more informative, more entertaining, easier to follow, or more packed with recipes. Thankfully, the guide assumes no prior experience with brewing and takes you from the science, art and history of the craft, through your first batch of beer, all the way to scores of intermediate and advanced techniques and recipes. Throughout, Papazian has an uncanny knack for anticipating and answering the questions that the reader (this reader, at least) comes up with.

With The Homebrewer’s Companion, Charlie builds on the foundation laid in Complete Joy.  The book tends to be aimed a bit more at the experienced homebrewer that is moving towards all-grain brewing, but there’s plenty of information for folks like me that are still in the world of malt extract and mini-mashes.  The book offers a plethora of recipes – with over five dozen in styles from common to exotic, there’s at least as many here as in Complete Joy.  And if you’re a chart nerd like me, you’ll be in heaven, as The Homebrewers Companion has tons of charts and tables describing malts, water, beer styles, hops and everything else that goes into your beer.

Extreme Brewing is yet another title from Dogfish’s Sam Calagione (the last one, I promise).  Sam, considered by many to be one of the instigators of the “extreme beer” movement here in the US, offers an introduction to brewing big, funky, ass-kicking beers at home.  This book is definitely just that – an introduction.  During the first half of Extreme Brewing, Calagione covers a lot of the same introductory material about equipment and technique that Papazian does in his books.  If you’re already a homebrewer and you expect a book solely about making your beers more extreme, you’ll probably find most of this book lacking.  However, if you’re interested in getting started with brewing and want to jump right into the world of extreme beers, this is a great, readable book to start with.  The second half of the book – a collection of recipes, suggested ingredients to punch up your beers, and techniques like continual hopping and multiple primary fermentations – is much more useful for experienced brewers.  The extract-based clone recipes for Dogfish, Avery and Allagash beers alone go a long way towards justifying the purchase of the book for any homebrewer.

Speaking of clone recipes, brewing duo Tess and Mark Szamatulski offer a chance to serve up some of your favorite beers in Clone Brews.  Clone Brews collects a whopping 150 recipes from commercial breweries around the world, approximating everything from macro lagers to craft ales.  The recipes are easy to follow (the writers kindly include extract, partial-mash and all-grain versions of each recipe) and have proven to be stunningly accurate approximations of the real thing.  The book is a bit out of date (some of the malt manufacturers suggested aren’t in business anymore) and lacking some of the popular breweries in North American Clone Brews, but is still tough to beat in the straight-up recipe book department.

Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher (another guy that shows up on my lists a few times) is the book to buy if you want to move from brewing other people’s recipes to creating your own.  Mosher somewhat refreshingly tends to talk about brewing more as a creative endeavor than a hard science, and lovingly writes about making beers that big breweries just can’t – or won’t – make.  A lot of Radical Brewing is about where the characteristics in beer come from, offering recipes to brewers with suggestions about how to tweak them to make your ideal brew.  This book isn’t aimed squarely at first-timers, but pair it with Extreme Brewing or The Complete Joy of Homebrewing and you’ll have enough info on your shelf to make almost any beer you want.

So, this should be more than enough books to get you started brewing your own beer.  In the comments, I’d love to hear what the best “next step” books are, and what you need to have on your shelf to really kick your brewing to the next level.  I know more than a little about beer, but I’m happy to admit places where my knowledge comes up a little short – and advanced brewing is definitely one of them.

Now, get to brewing!  I’ll see you all next week for the final part of Building Your Beer Bookshelf, a mish-mash of history, cookbooks and other topics from the beer world I haven’t quite hit yet.