Introduction to Homebrewing (Recommended Reading)

I started homebrewing back in 2009, when I was entering a high-priced Master's program at U of T and couldn't get a student loan. I realized that I wanted beer, but had no budget for it. Getting 60+ bottles with a $20 beer kit and a bit of effort seemed like a better deal than a 24 of crap for nearly $40. So I recruited my cousin, my sister, and my dad's winemaking equipment for an experiment in getting cheaper, better beer.

We had a lot of trouble with the siphon.

Just couldn't get it working.

 Our first try turned out surprisingly well, and I was hooked. Not long later I met my future wife, Darrell, who really sent me down the homebrewer's path by buying me my first set of brewing equipment for Christmas and has not yet told me she regrets it. (It's almost incredible how well she tolerates my beer obsession.)

Once I got more into serious craft beer (for which I partly thank a trip to Chicago's Half Acre brewery and my first taste of a seriously good IPA, Daisy Cutter), I knew that kits wouldn't cut it any longer. I wanted to make beer as good as the stuff I had drunk in the States, and the stuff I was now discovering coming out of Ontario. Dogfish Head, Flying Monkeys, Great Lakes, Avery, Goose Island, and all the rest. So I did what comes naturally to me as a librarian... Research.

Brewing Books

I love books (hence the title of this blog), and thus it wasn't long before I started tearing through the homebrewing literature. If you're interested in brewing your own beer, here's a peek at how I got started.

Extreme Brewing - Sam Caligione

I love strongly-flavoured, complex beers, and so do the folks at Dogfish Head. This book is what really inspired me to go beyond the kits, and it led me to venture into partial-mash brewing (using extract as a base, but adding your own specialty grains and hops). Extreme Brewing takes you step-by-step through each recipe, assuming you know nothing about brewing. It was incredibly helpful for me, because that was essentially the case. It teaches you the basics, while at the same time preparing you to make really good brews. It includes a trove of recipes including some of the best offerings from great American craft brewers. Making my own Raison D'Etre at home? Yes please!

My first "real" beer was a modified version of the Imperial IPA recipe from this book. It was a brand-new experience steeping grains and dry-hopping, but the results were fantastic: beautifully balanced, a tempting mix of sweet and bitter with a rich floral aroma from the Cascade dry hopping, and an 8.5% alcohol bite that sneaks up on you. I called it my Femme Fatale Imperial IPA. And thus was the Crooked Goat Brewing Company formed. [Not an actual company.]

My beautiful little beer...
You never forget your first loves.

Designing Great Beers - Ray Daniels

Extreme Brewing taught me how to make tasty beer in a straightforward way, but Designing Great Beers made me a proper homebrewer. This book gives you the details and history on each of the major beer styles, and provides all the science behind gravity, fermentation, flavour, bitterness, colour, even water chemistry. The science bit seems dry, but it's quite exciting to realize that everything you want do get out of a beer can be planned out in advance, without even touching a grain bag.

It's actually a fascinating read if you're into beer. I read it cover to cover, including the science bits, and it has made me a better brewer. Wonderful reference material. Plus it is full of interesting anecdotes about beer styles, such as how the fashion of keeping porter in enormous vats led to the London Beer Flood and the deaths of seven people (some by drowning, some trampled by people stampeding to drink free beer from the streets).

How to Brew - John Palmer

I don't have this one yet, but it's on order. Now that I'm moving on to all-grain brewing (having got myself a mill and a bigger apartment), I want a comprehensive text that takes you through absolutely every step and explains it clearly. This is the one.

How to Brew is the standard reference book for homebrewers, and it's now in its third edition. It covers all the steps for each type of brewing, from extract-only to partial mash to all grain. It's pretty much the home brewer's Bible.

It's also available free online, if you don't mind it as a website instead of a book. I'd actually used it as a reference before without realizing it when I'd Googled some of my brewing questions. It's very useful.

Online

The books are great to have, but once you get to the point of creating your own recipes, calculating by hand gets pretty tiresome. I have a couple of apps for my iPad that help me do the calcuations, but for its big database and social features, I'm a fan of Hopville.com. 

This one's made of leftovers.

Plug in your ingredients and the amounts, and it will tell you your expected gravity, colour contribution for each ingredient, bitterness, expected alcohol, and even the number of calories per bottle. And if you tell it which style you're aiming for, it will tell you whether or not your recipe fits, and what needs to change. It's a great tool.

These are my primary resources for now. There will be more as I get deeper into all this, cultivating hops and culturing yeast. If you're new to brewing or thinking about getting into it, I highly recommend these resources to start you off. There's almost no end to the tools that are out there, but these will give you a firm footing.