5 Best Homebrewing Books

Hey everybody, it’s Billy Broas from BillyBrew.com. I want to go through my top five favorite homebrewing books. We’ll kick it off with the first one here. This is The Complete Joy Of Homebrewing, by Charlie Papazian. If you don’t know who Charlie is, he’s pretty much the man in the beer world. He founded the Brewer’s Association, the American Homebrewing Association, and pretty much kicked off the whole movement in the early ’80s with this book.

This is great; it’s the first one that I read. It’s great for the beginner doing extract, or for the advanced brewer doing all grain. I wouldn’t say it’s the best book on homebrewing; the organization’s a little bit funny. It’s kind of confusing, and the pictures are really weird. They’re almost psychedelic. It’s actually pretty funny.

Some of the recipes people swear by, though. I’ve made a couple and they are really good. So he has good recipes in here. One of them is called “Toad Spit Stout.” He’s got some really funny names for them. But this one is such a cultural icon, you really have to read it if you want to be a homebrewer. It’s kind of a rite of passage. So I highly recommend it.

This next book is How To Brew by John Palmer, and this, in my opinion, is the best, most complete book on how to brew. And I emphasize the how-to part of it. Where Charlie’s had gaps, this one really fills it in. Some of Charlie’s techniques are a little bit out of date, but this one is spot-on. It’s great for the beginner or for the expert.

It covers really everything, and it’s one of those reference books that you’re always going to go back to and find something new. There are no recipes in here, but you can learn how to make your own from this book. This one is fantastic. You must have it. It’s also online for free, too, but I like to have the hardcover so I can have it right there when I’m brewing. So another great book. How To Brew by John Palmer.

So the next one up is Brewing Classic Styles, by John Palmer, who wrote How To Brew and Jamil Zainasheff. John’s really the more scientific, technical, how-to guy, and Jamil is known for being creative and having great recipies, more artistic. He’s a really well-known and accomplished home brewer. So they teamed up and gave birth to this fantastic book. Like the title says, it’s about brewing classic styles.

So each chapter, they describe a style, tell you the keys to making it, and then give you a recipe, both all-grain and extract. So it’s really great if you’re a more advanced brewer, if you already know how to brew, this is a great second book. If it’s a goal of yours to brew every style out there, I know it’s a goal of mine. So you could really knock them out with this book. Very concise, to the point, and well-written. So great one.

So number four on the list is Designing Great Beers, by Ray Daniels. Ray is another very well-known and respected guy in the beer world. This one is similar to Brewing Classic Styles, and that is organized by beer styloe, and it’s all about recipe formulation. So if you want to expand your knowledge, get better at brewing, design your own recipes, design great beers, this is the one.

This is different than that one in that it doesn’t have the actual recipes. But it’s much, much more thorough on the how-to part, about the key characteristics, the malts, the hops, the yeast that goes into making certain styles. This one is really cool because he brings in actual data from homebrewing competitions, from the National Homebrewing Competition.

So it will show you what the gold-medal winners did, and he’ll say something like, the best barley line had this amount of hops in it. Or the IPAs had this proportion of specialty grains. So you can look at the ones that worked and kind of base your recipes upon that. He has lots of cool graphs and charts in here too. Very thorough book. It’s like How To Brew, it’s a reference book. You’ll always go back to this and learn something new, so you should get it.

Last but not least, we have Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. Whereas the other ones really were about conforming to style guidelines, this one teaches you how to brew outside the box. So for the first third, it’s more of an intro to brewing, sort of like the others. So that part you can really skip over, because this is a more advanced book, and if you’re reading it, you probably already know that stuff.

But once you get past that, there’s some great stuff in here. There’s one section called “Twelve Ways To Improve Your Stout.” He talks about weird ingredients, weird malts, about barrel aging, about herbs and spices you can use, and it’s really about making your beer different, unique, and more extreme.

So it’s a great complement to the rest of these, and what I really like about this one is that there’s lots of colors and pictures and charts and graphs in here. It’s really easy to read. I know it sounds funny, it has pictures, but honestly, if I’m falling asleep during the book then I’m not going to get a whole lot out of it. So that goes a long way for me.

So this is another great one, and really, all five of these are fantastic. There are a lot of great books out there besides these two. So I’d love to hear from you if you’ve read these before, or if you have other suggestions for the best homebrewing books. So leave a comment down at the bottom, and cheers!