TimT
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Here's my brew library at the moment.
The Complete Guide to Beer and Brewing, Laurie Strachan - good guide to both all grain and kit brewing. It's my go-to book since the recipes are simple and allow for a great deal of variation.
Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, Stephen Harrod Buhner - different perspectives from a naturalist.
Understanding Beer Making, Grant Sampson - picked this one up at a local store. It seems a bit redundant for me (it's essentially a guide to kit brewing) but I picked up one or two useful tips from it.
Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, transcribed by Karen Hess - some very interesting old recipes for beer, mead and cheese are included within. Insight into both early US cookery and 17th/18th century English cookery.
Country Wines & Cordials: Wild Plant & Herbal Recipes for Drinks Old & New, Wilma Paterson - that's the ticket! Now we're getting into that time when brewing was mostly in charge of batty old cat ladies who lived in hovels (hey, I mean that in a nice way! (Okay, full disclosure: the book was printed in 1980)). Few beer recipes, but there is a very interesting recipe for 'barley posset'.
Old-time recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials and LIquers, Helen S. Wright - lots of folky recipes here, stuff like 'Tomato Beer' and 'Pea Beer' and, a lovely idea, 'Ebulum' - strong ale with elderberries, juniper, and spices. Also the inevitable spruce beer and molasses beer and root beer.
The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz - Katz is an all-round enthusiast about fermentation but there is some good stuff in here about wild-fermented beers, lambics, and meads.
True Brews: How to craft fermented cider, beer, wine, sake, soda, mead, kefir, and kombucha at home, Emma Christensen - not a book aimed at the purist brewer as such, but Christensen has some creative suggestions about using kefir to make lemonades, chai-spiced mead, etc. There's a gluten-free beer recipe in there too. I like it because I think it's been quite succesfully targeted at an audience other than the traditional brewing crowd - ie, obsessive chaps like myself.
The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart - this one was a library borrowing but it gave me plenty of ideas. The focus is mainly on plants in spirits.
From the Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight, Sir Kenelm Digby - I use the online Gutenberg version. Aside from his voluminous section on meads, there's a fabulous slipcoat cheese recipe in there, and plenty of other stuff too. Also ale and cider recipes.
Cider: Making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider, Annie Proulx & Lew Nichols - of interest not just as a brew book but as the first book by a Pulitzer prize winning novelist! It seems to have been very cannily written at the start of the homebrew boom. From this book I learned that one of the scales for measuring the sugar in must is the 'Twaddel' scale. Tee hee.
(And that's not even venturing into my cheese making library....)
Your turn folks! What's in your library? Any additions you think should be made to mine? (I'd love to get Charlie Papaizon's book, for instance).
The Complete Guide to Beer and Brewing, Laurie Strachan - good guide to both all grain and kit brewing. It's my go-to book since the recipes are simple and allow for a great deal of variation.
Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, Stephen Harrod Buhner - different perspectives from a naturalist.
Understanding Beer Making, Grant Sampson - picked this one up at a local store. It seems a bit redundant for me (it's essentially a guide to kit brewing) but I picked up one or two useful tips from it.
Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, transcribed by Karen Hess - some very interesting old recipes for beer, mead and cheese are included within. Insight into both early US cookery and 17th/18th century English cookery.
Country Wines & Cordials: Wild Plant & Herbal Recipes for Drinks Old & New, Wilma Paterson - that's the ticket! Now we're getting into that time when brewing was mostly in charge of batty old cat ladies who lived in hovels (hey, I mean that in a nice way! (Okay, full disclosure: the book was printed in 1980)). Few beer recipes, but there is a very interesting recipe for 'barley posset'.
Old-time recipes for Home Made Wines, Cordials and LIquers, Helen S. Wright - lots of folky recipes here, stuff like 'Tomato Beer' and 'Pea Beer' and, a lovely idea, 'Ebulum' - strong ale with elderberries, juniper, and spices. Also the inevitable spruce beer and molasses beer and root beer.
The Art of Fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz - Katz is an all-round enthusiast about fermentation but there is some good stuff in here about wild-fermented beers, lambics, and meads.
True Brews: How to craft fermented cider, beer, wine, sake, soda, mead, kefir, and kombucha at home, Emma Christensen - not a book aimed at the purist brewer as such, but Christensen has some creative suggestions about using kefir to make lemonades, chai-spiced mead, etc. There's a gluten-free beer recipe in there too. I like it because I think it's been quite succesfully targeted at an audience other than the traditional brewing crowd - ie, obsessive chaps like myself.
The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart - this one was a library borrowing but it gave me plenty of ideas. The focus is mainly on plants in spirits.
From the Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight, Sir Kenelm Digby - I use the online Gutenberg version. Aside from his voluminous section on meads, there's a fabulous slipcoat cheese recipe in there, and plenty of other stuff too. Also ale and cider recipes.
Cider: Making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider, Annie Proulx & Lew Nichols - of interest not just as a brew book but as the first book by a Pulitzer prize winning novelist! It seems to have been very cannily written at the start of the homebrew boom. From this book I learned that one of the scales for measuring the sugar in must is the 'Twaddel' scale. Tee hee.
(And that's not even venturing into my cheese making library....)
Your turn folks! What's in your library? Any additions you think should be made to mine? (I'd love to get Charlie Papaizon's book, for instance).
