The Everything Homebrewing Book: All you need to brew the best beer at home!

449 Pages·2009·2.66 MB·English

by  Drew Beechum

THE
EVERTHING
®
HOMEBREWING
BOOK
Dear Reader,
For most of the 5,000-plus-year saga of people and beer, the beer you drank was
the beer you brewed. Everyone drank beer. Everyone was a homebrewer.
Over the last several hundred years we’ve handed off our beer to companies
with their own thoughts on what we’d like to drink. Driven by profit over taste
and tradition, they reduced beer to a narrow commodity, differentiated more by
mascots and ad slogans than taste.
In the 1970s intrepid men and women woke up to the idea that beer wasn’t
just the pale yellow sparkling soda foisted on them by a handful of brewers. Beer
could, they found, have substance and taste. Scouring old brewing texts,
traveling to beer culture capitals, cozying up to brewers, and experimenting
endlessly, they unraveled the lost art of making real beer at home.
Today, if you can make a pot of soup, you can make beer. I started on my
kitchen stove with my stockpot and within three weeks cracked open my very
first bottle of beer. Ten years later, I still get the same thrill pouring my late st.
So how about it? Are you ready to take back your suds?
Welcome to the EVERTHING Series!
®
These handy, accessible books give you all you need to tackle a difficult project,
gain a new hobby, comprehend a fascinating topic, prepare for an exam, or even
brush up on something you learned back in school but have since forgotten.
®
You can choose to read an Everything book from cover to cover or just pick
out the information you want from our four useful boxes: e-questions, e-facts, e-
alerts, and e-ssentials.
We give you everything you need to know on the subject, but throw in a lot of
fun stuff along the way, too.
®
We now have more than 400 Everything books in print, spanning such wide-
ranging categories as weddings, pregnancy, cooking, music instruction, foreign
language, crafts, pets, New Age, and so much more. When you’re done reading
®
them all, you can finally say you know Everything !
PUBLISHER Karen Cooper
DIRECTOR OF ACQUISITIONS AND INNOVATION Paula
Munier MANAGING EDITOR, EVERYTHING SERIES Lisa
Laing COPY CHIEF Casey Ebert
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Katrina Schroeder
DEVELOPMENT EDITOR Brett Palana-Shanahan EDITORIAL
ASSISTANT Hillary Thompson
®
Visit the entire Everything series at www.everything.com
THE
EVERTHING
®
HOMEBREWING
BOOK
All you need to brew the best beer at home!
Drew Beechum
Copyright © 2009 by F+W Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions
are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
®
An Everything Series Book.
® ®
Everything and everything.com are registered trademarks of F+W Media, Inc.
Published by Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc.
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322 U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN 10: 1-60550-122-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-60550-122-2
eISBN: 978-1-60550-730-9
Printed in the United States of America.
J I H G F E D C B A
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available from the publisher.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject
matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal,
accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services
of a competent professional person should be sought.
—From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the
American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as
trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Adams Media was aware of a trademark
claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.
For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.
This book is dedicated:
To my lovely Amy, who endured the endless beer facts, simultaneous
move, and book. Now where’s that beer I promised to make you?
To my mom, my sister, and my grandmother, who fostered my bookish
ways and somehow knew I’d end up writing one of my own.
To the fine folks of the American Homebrewers Association
for their encouragement and support.
To the members of the Maltose Falcons Homebrewing Club, for their
mentoring,
advice, years of beer (both good and bad), and being silly enough to
have
elected me president more than once.
To homebrewers and brewers everywhere for being generous and
inquisitive.
There are no “secrets” in brewing; only truths we haven’t shared yet.
And finally, to you, the reader for taking a step to better brew days for
you.
(To your significant others, I apologize for leading you down the
primrose path.)
Contents
Top Ten Tips for Homebrewers: Novice to Pro
Introduction
1 Beer Basics: Your Primer to a Sudsy World
2 Your First Batch
3 Malt, Extract, and Grains
4 Hops: Putting the Bitter In
5 Water: Ninety-Five Percent of Your Beer
6 Yeast: The True Beer Makers
7 Ingredients Beyond the Basic Four
8 Brew Gear
9 Beyond the Basics: Extract Brewing
10 Cleaning: Keeping Your Beer Squeaky Clean
11 Fermentation
12 Serving Your Beer
13 What Went Wrong?
14 Your First All-Grain Batch
15 Joining with and Competing Against Your Fellow Brewers
16 Recipes from Great Britain and Ireland
17 Recipes from Germany and Eastern Europe
18 Recipes from Belgium
19 Recipes from America
20 Experiments: Recipes from the Laboratory
Appendix A Recipe Acknowledgments
Appendix B Additional Resources
Appendix C Calculations
Appendix D Standard Brewing Processes
Appendix E Extract Brewing Checklist
Appendix F All-Grain Brewing Checklist
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the following folks for reviewing and making this book better:
Derreck Bourdon, Rob Coffey, Matt Crill, Mike Dietz, Charlie Essers, Bill
Herlicka, S’ven Kinsey, Jonny Lieberman, Alex Macy, George Mahoney, John
Palmer, MB Raines, Paul Schultz, and Jamil Zainasheff.
Extra pints to Derreck for helping review, tweak, and enter a number of recipes,
and John for his tremendous help with water chemistry.
On the recipe front, thank you so much to my fellow brewers for lending their
recipes. Without their help, the book would be far more one-sided. Great brewers
share and help others learn from their successes and failures.
Thank you to Gina and Katrina for sheparding this book from a jumbled mess of
stuff upstairs to a real book.
And lastly, a big thank you to John Daume, owner of the Home Beer Wine and
Cheesemaking Shop in Woodland Hills, California, for starting my brewing
career.