Does anybody know of any old brewing texts that are available to the general public? I don’t can’t read the German language so preferably the texts are translated, but I wont let that stop me 
Thanks!
I got “Yeast” by Thomas Huxley, “A Treatise on the Brewing of Beer” by E. Hughes, and “The Practical Distiller” by Samuel McHarry on my Kindle. Amazon had the electronic versions for free. Worth every penny.
I once requested an old book on malting on inter-library loan. It was amazing (can’t remember the name right now). It was originally published in the late 1800s so some of the info was out of date but still an amazing book.
Eventually I had to return it and when I tried to take it out again the Librarian looked it up and said NO! Turns out it was one of maybe 2 or 3 copies of this book still in existence and should never have left the UC Davis library : ahh well, it was fun while it lasted.
Slightly off-topic, but Ron Pattinson’s new book about historical beers looks pretty interesting:
There’s actually a fair amount of old texts and papers on brewing on Scribd. I’ve downloaded a number of pdf’s from there in the past.
Adding to Alewyfe’s post, you can download Wahl-Henius(1902) from here:
http://books.google.com/books/about/American_Handy_book_of_the_Brewing_Malti.html?id=ppYKAAAAMAAJ
If you can find texts online in other languages through some of the free online libraries, like archive.org, you can run them through Google’s translation service. It won’t create a perfect translation but it will be readable.
There are also some texts available on the Project Gutenberg website - try searching under “brewing” to start (here is the link with based on that search: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=brewing).
Bunch of PDF’s I have collected over the years. Most are historical brewing texts.