Beer

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

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

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)

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

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

Author Ray Daniels provides the brewing formulas, tables, and information to take your brewing to the next level in this detailed technical manual.

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

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)

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

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

Brew Like a Monk: Trappist, Abbey, and Strong Belgian Ales and How to Brew Them

Brew Like a Monk delves into monastic brewing, detailing this rich-flavored region of the beer world. It also examines methods for brewing these unique ales suited to commercial and amateur brewers.

Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew

He Said Beer, She Said Wine: Impassioned Food Pairings to Debate and Enjoy -- From Burgers to Brie and Beyond

He Said Beer, She Said Wine is the first fully illustrated book on the market to give in-depth instruction on how to successfully pair both beer and wine with a wide variety of foods. Co-authored by Marnie Old, an esteemed sommelier, and Sam Calagione, a successful brewmaster, He Said Beer, She Said Wine teaches you everything you need to know to get the best out of your beverages, with food or without. Each author divulges the secrets of their respective trades, using clear, easy-to-understand language and, of course, a little good-natured banter to keep things lively. The book is full of fantastic tips and tricks, specific beer and wine recommendations, and interactive elements to help you identify your preferences along the way. So, from cheese to dessert, you'll always know what drinks to serve for sublime flavor combinations.

Conversation with Sam Calagione & Marnie Old
Authors of He Said Beer, She Said Wine

In your book, it seems like this beer vs. wine battle has been going on between you for quite some time. How did it all begin?

MARNIE: Sam and I first met when we were doing trade tastings. We got to talking and found we didn't quite see eye-to-eye about which beverage was the best choice to partner with great food. We started playing around with arguing about which was better, and at a certain point decided we needed to take it to the public to settle the question. We began a series of dinners where our guests would enjoy a wine and a beer with the same course and cast a ballot to decide which partnered better. We called these dinners "Beer is from Mars, Wine is from Venus," and they were tremendously popular.

SAM: I think it's indicative of how close the worlds of beer and wine really are in the context of food, because every single night the winner was decided by a single course. And in every situation we had beer people voting for wine, and wine people voting for beer. We're passionate about championing our respective beverage of choice, but one of our main goals is to make beer people more comfortable choosing wines, and wine people more comfortable understanding beer. And, to get both sides more comfortable understanding the breadth of choices within the two worlds.

In He Said Beer, She Said Wine, you give great tips for making beer and wine choices to go with everything from pizza to crème brulee. Can you offer some foolproof advice for choosing a bottle at our next meal?

MARNIE: The first tip is that if you're enjoying it, it's good. There's a lot of discomfort, especially with wine, about ordering the "right" thing. That's really not so important. It's about doing what you enjoy. I couldn't tell you whether you prefer key lime pie over chocolate cake, and yet people think that there's a right choice and a wrong choice with wine. It's more about what's happening that day. What's your mood? Is it summer or winter? Is it a special occasion, or is it a relaxed barbeque in the back yard? It's better to think about wine as sauce on the side. We'd never put the same sauce on everything we eat, everyday. The same is true with beverages.

Sam, you mentioned that at the outset you were surprised to discover how much beer and wine actually have in common. How does beer compare to wine?

SAM: The major difference, of course, is that beer is better than wine. But, the simplest comparison would be to say that lagers are more like white wines, in that they're more mellow and refined, and ales are more like red wines, in that they're more robust and intense.

Does the rule of drinking white wine with seafood and red wine with red meat still apply?

MARNIE: Something we all have tremendously good instincts for is the idea of putting lighter, more delicate and more subtly flavored beverages with lighter, more delicate food. It's also the first decision that any sommelier makes in pairing for a particular dinner. To say that as a hard and fast rule white wine should be paired with white meat and red wine with red meats is something that I think needs to be revisited. It's a sound guideline, based in science and experience; however, it is possible to drink very well pairing white wines with red meats and red wines with fish. That said, there is a fundamental difference in the fermentation process that leads this pattern to be more or less true most of the time. Tannin, a property found in red wine, is something we feel on the palate as a tacky, drying sensation. That can lead to a bit of a challenge when pairing with low-fat dishes and seafood.

What makes cheese such a great beverage partner?

MARNIE: Most wines aren't designed to impress you on the first sip. They're designed to be food partners, to have their acidity softened by salt, and to have their intensity and tannin softened by fat. Cheese is dominated flavor-wise by fat and salt, the exact two properties that are needed to balance out wine.

SAM: As Marnie said, many wines weren't designed to taste good on their first sip. On the other hand, beer is meant to taste great on the first sip, the second sip and the third pint. But, that doesn't mean that it's any less food-friendly. And, cheese is a great place to start. The carbonation in beer acts as an exfoliant. It clears the palate between bites, whereas wine without carbonation tends to bounce off the cheese and go down your throat without intermingling. The overlap in the world of cheese and beer is also really obvious. Wonderful beer producers like Chimay in Belgium make their own in-house cheese, and Maytag blue cheese is made by the Maytag family, who own the pioneering microbrewery Anchor in San Francisco.

Are there any foods that are notoriously difficult to pair with beverages?

MARNIE: Artichokes are challenging vegetables for the sommelier to work with. They're also the darling of every chef from here to Hawaii. There's a compound in artichokes that confuses taste buds into perceiving all flavor sensations as sweet. After you eat them, everything else tastes saccharine. There's no question that wines don't taste true to their real flavors when dealing with artichokes in high quantities. Certain wine styles can handle this better than others, though. Light-bodied, un-oaked white wines like Grüner Veltliner from Austria work particularly well.

SAM: I think it's ironic that wine has all these Achilles heels, like artichokes and asparagus. There's really no problem with these foods when it comes to beer. I'd pair artichokes with a dark, malt beer like a milk stout or porter. While artichokes don't tend to work very well with the vegetal components of hoppy beers like pilsners or I.P.A.s, those beers would work well with asparagus.

Clone Brews: Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers

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