A Sip Through Time, by Cindy Renfrow

This book was a gift from my father, who I turned onto brewing after he inadvertently turned me onto brewing (this must feel like there has to be some sort of temporal anomaly, but I can assure you, it was all linear - when I was growing up we went on a scotch distillery tour of Scotland, so when I read about homebrewing I was already ripe for suggestion, and it was only after I started brewing that I reciprocated with some forced homebrewing lessons (all clear now?)). For a little more context, I have been obsessed with the history of brewing since I found out that it was womens' work, and my father volunteers at the UPenn historical archives, so we are both on the same page about history. And now back to the book...

This book is chock full of incomprehensible recipes that use antiquated systems of measurement or ingredients that I am pretty sure are considered schedule I or II controlled substances at this point. Once you can figure out what a "peck" of wheat is, it is incredible to think that you can brew a beer that was brewed by someone 200 years ago. This book does not stop at 200 years or at beer recipes for that matter. The recipes goes back as far as Ancient Sumerian beer/mead/wine, so classed because it is a little bit of them all, and just up to the point when people started to use hops instead of other herbs to flavor and preserve their beer. Beyond ales and beers, there are extensive recipes for meads, wine, and distilled beverages, as well as caudles, possets, and syllabubs. It would take a lifetime to make all of these recipes, just as it has taken millennia for humans to come up with them. Definitely a book for the adventurous (i.e. anyone who might want to try turnip wine)!

Note: I am calling this a "must-have", but this really only applies to history buffs and other special people.

Radical Brewing, by Randy Mosher

While entitled "radical" it is more like a gateway to radical brewing. Each chapter covers some variation on brewing, such as spicing beers, adding fruits, experimenting with sugars, historical recipes, Belgian beers etc. Each opening the doors to a much larger realm of experimentation that just requires you to take the next step. For instance, there are a large number of books dedicated to Belgian beers, or for historical recipes I would more likely recommend A Sip Through Time. But this book is really not meant to be a comprehensive guide to all brewing that falls out of the norm, but rather sketch out the areas for further investigation.

Enough with the qualifying and onto the beers! The book has a ton of tasty looking recipes -- all of them are all-grain, and about half of them have extract equivalents, which is kind a bummer for us extract brewers. But there are also a ton of ideas you can take from these all-grain recipes even if you cannot make them exactly. Mosher also provides even more ideas for recipes that are ways to enhance your favorite recipes, for instance taking your favorite IPA recipe and adding honey and candied ginger to the secondary (p.169), something I am going to do asap. For chapters like adding spices or fruits, there are tables of potential additives and notes on their use or if they should be avoided -- all with a note of humor, for instance pineapple is good for hats but not so good for beer. And recipes all have a historical placement, which gives you a story to tell when you serve up your brew to friends.

At the beginning you will find the requisite "how to brew" at the beginning as well as an introduction to styles. While I would not use it as a set of instructions for my first time, it has a very nice explanation of ingredients and processes that other books seem to lack. Towards the end there are tips for fabricating equipment and things to do to expand your beer knowledge, including brew club activities.

I would highly recommend this book for intermediate brewers who are looking for new ways to spice up (literally) their brewing and anyone who wants to know about the potential of the regular styles and get a taste for beers that do not fit within the BHCP styles. All and all an excellent gateway to a much wider world of brewing!

Brewing Up a Business, by Sam Calagione

As someone with a strong entrepreneurial bent, anything I try I want to make into a business. I learned how to brew so suddenly I wanted my own brewery or brewpub or meadery. Prudence dictated that I look into what that might entail before I went berzerkers, which is pretty much what I do when I get some idea or other. This book was a good reality check for me - while it is the telling of the inspirational tale of the birth of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware it is also a cautionary tale of how a business will not work unless you put your heart, soul, and money into it. As someone living in a locale with the highest standard of living in the nation, on a salary that barely covered rent, I could not really afford ingredients much less the property and government certifications. Someday I will have a brewery, but it is not going to be in Santa Monica, so it will have to wait, for now.

This book is an inspiring tale for anyone interested in starting a business, as well as providing sage advice about setting goals, creating a team that acts like a family, celebrating your little triumphs, and overcoming your setbacks. For the brewer, this is a particularly inspiring tale of one man's zen-like approach to brewing beer, where there are no rules, and he has the extreme, style-bending beers to prove it!

Porter, by Terry Foster

Brown beers have always been a favorite of me and mine, so I went ahead and got this book from my local homebrew supply shop to see if I could unlock the secrets of the Porter. Little did I realize how steeped in history this style of beer has become over the ages. The first 50 pages are what interested me the most - including an account of the development, disappearance, and subsequent revival of this tasty style, as well as notes on what makes a beer a porter in brewers terms. The next 50 pages will give you the standard "how to brew" chapter, and this is probably not the book to introduce you to homebrewing, but if you need a refresher it will work in a pinch. At the end you will find a 7 very tasty looking extract and all-grain recipes, with scaling up to a barrel-sized grain batch if that is the volume you are into. Finally there are some reviews of commercially available porters, and references for further readings on the style.

All-in-all an interesting read and just about any brewer could find a recipe to suit them or one that they could easily tweak into something that suited them within its pages.

How to Brew, by John Palmer

This is the book that inspired me to brew! I was reading a slashdot post about open source brewing, and this book was linked to as a source for learning to homebrew, largely because the book is available for free on John's website. I started reading and the next day ordered equipment and a couple of brewkits from Midwest Supplies. The first few chapters about how to brew your first kit gave me the confidence I needed to get on this train without another brewer to guide my hand. As someone who learns from watching others do, learning skills from a book does not come easily, but this book lays it out so simply that there is no way you can go wrong (except for not sanitizing - that will go wrong, horribly wrong). The big takeaway from this book is that beer is a very forgiving substance (as long as you sanitize and maintain your sanitary conditions (a lacto bacteria breakout is not fun!)) so if you let it cook a little less than 60 minutes or you leave it in your primary fermentor for 3 weeks instead of 2 it will all work out in the end. It might require a little more bottle-aging to get rid of that weird taste, but it will go away eventually, or if it won't, and you can use the beer for stew. You get the idea.

For those of you who want more depth this book has alot of technical detail about the brewing process, equipment, terminology, developing recipes, and troubleshooting. From your first extract brew to a full mash, this book has you covered. And it is so good that you will want to buy it to read offline.