The book you keep returning to...

What’s the book you keep returning to in your brewing life? For me, it’s “Radical Brewing” by Randy Mosher. I find it’s the perfect combination of history and info. Somehow he keeps it light enough to not weigh you down, but packs a lot of good info and ideas in there. Honorable mention: Homebrew Allstars

While I really love technical texts, especially Kunze, I always go back to either Belgian Ale by Pierre Rajotte or Brew like a Monk by Stan Hieronymus.

For references on extraction values for various malts and malt extracts, I consult Steve Snyder’s Brewmaster’s Bible.  It’s an older publication but has some good tables in it that I use to confirm the values that the BeerSmith software gives me.

Brewing Classic styles.

I second Radical Brewing.  I keep coming back to this book time and time again for information and inspiration.

Daniels, Designing Great Beers – keeps you on point

Mosher, Radical Brewing – raises the freak flag

I have a couple and they’re all by Ron Pattinson…

  • Let’s Brew
  • 1909 Beer Style Guide
  • Homebrewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer

Close behind is Randy Mosher’s Mastering Homebrew

Brewing Classic Styles - solid starting point for any, well, classic style.

Radical Brewing - great for brainstorming ideas for less traditional styles

BCS.  But I read a lot of the technical journal stuff to see what the pro brewers are doing.  Sometimes a tip can be applied to homebrewing, like the nested Hochkurz mash regimen.  I gotta give that a try when I have the time…it’s like lower temperature decoction, but produces highly fermentable wort.

Without a doubt, Kunze.

Tasting Beer, by Randy Mosher.

First beer book I bought, and it’s still a go-to.

I enjoyed The Beer Bible by Jeff Alworth. Reading about a style for inspiration before coming up with a recipe is fun. It has a lot of great information in it from a historical context. Brewing Better Beer by Gordon Strong was very interesting. Some of it was admittedly over my head, but still a great read. It actually gave me some confidence to see I shared some similar thoughts as I read it. How To Brew Like A Monk was also great. I find that reading about the hobby is a learning and inspiring part of it all. Good luck with staying away from a pint or three while doing it though. I haven’t figured that part out.

The Everything Homebrewing Book
The Everything Hard Cider Book
Experimental Homebrewing
Homebrew All-Stars
Simple Homebrewing

:slight_smile:

(And in reality, I have a giant library of books that are spread across the spectrum of technical and historical sophistication. I regularly trawl through them for different takes and ideas.

Just considered my books.

I have a whole lot of books.  I’ve lost or tossed even more over the decades, some of which would now be prized nuggets of homebrew history.  As would all the discarded, early Zymurgy issues.  Some are stored away, either obsolete or of limited interest.  Some historic stuff like The London and Country Brewer, and a lot of technical papers,  are in cloud storage.

The bookshelf I actually access holds technical works, both current and historic:  Thausing, Die Theorie und Praxis der Malzbereitung und Bierfabrikation, 6th ed. 1907; Wahl and Henius, American Handy Book of the Brewing, Malting, and Auxiliary Trades, 1st ed. 1901; DeClerck, A Textbook of Brewing,  1957 English edition; The Practical Brewer, MBAA, 1977 ed.; Noonan, New Brewing Lager Beer; Briggs, Boulton, Brookes and Stevens,  Brewing:  Science and Practice; Kunze, Technology Brewing and Malting; and the BA Elements series is still on the shelf until space is needed.

But if I could only have one book, it would be Briggs, et al.

I think I might be a geek.  [emoji851]