Book review

<editor's note>
Following is Steve Alexander's review of the newly printed update of 
John Palmer's book "How to Brew". John's book has been online for 
some time  Read the review and then check out the online version to 
see if you'd be interested in a hard-cover copy. John has a very 
accessible and understandable style. This might be a good book for 
our club Libeery. 
</editor's note>

"How to Brew", by John Palmer
Reviewed by Steve Alexander



Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 00:12:22 -0500
From: "Steve Alexander" 

John Palmer was kind enough to send me a copy of "How to Brew", 2nd ed.
a few months ago and I've been too busy  to brew,  much less read
about brewing until this past month.  John's book is an expansion of his
"How to Brew" eBook at http://www.howtobrew.com/ .  If you like the
stuff on his website you'll love the 2nd edition hardcopy.

I've always liked John's friendly and practical style of writing, both on
HBD and in his brewing articles, but the organization of the book is
notable. One difficulty when writing about HB is that the audience is at all
differing skill and knowledge levels, and it's tempting when writing about
the basics to start explaining the background information - and suddenly
your in deep technical issues with many open questions.  It's a mistake I
regularly make.    John has somehow avoided this pitfall by presenting
details as they are needed but not before.  The first section covers the
basics through extract brewing, the second section covers partial mash and
the third covers all-grain brewing.  Any of these first three sections (225
pp total) could easily stand alone as a guide on its subject.  There is
development from basics to the more complex, but there isn't a lot of
cross-referencing between.  Section 4 covers style, recipe design and
troubleshooting.  A 58 page appendix covers several technical topics and
home-built hardware issues in great detail.

When he sent the book, John asked me if I considered it a beginners' book.
It is in the sense that I wouldn't hesitate to hand this book to someone
considering a first brew, a first partial mash or a first all-grain and
expect
a good outcome.  It is complete and direct and detailed enough for use by
beginners.   OTOH this book also covers more advanced topics.  Some
methods, like decoction, are given short tho' competent coverage, while
others more current topics like no-sparge, first wort hopping and hopping
calculation are given substantial coverage.   It seems to strike the right
balance between "too basic" and "too complex" topics and attacks the issues
that arise repeatedly on HBD headlong with a practical approach.

As regular HBDers would expect of John, the appendix on brewing metallurgy
is excellent, covering everything from welding to yeast metallic
ion reqs in the same breath.  The other unparalleled appendix topic is
lauter design and construction.   There is a detailed practical manifold
design that would make an excellent cooler/lauter unit.  This is integrated
with a nicely graphical coverage of John's original fluid flow grainbed work
and experiments (these were presented on HBD some months ago).  This is
absolutely the best coverage I've seen in print on lauter design/fluid-flow
issues, far beyond what you'll find in M&BS and Kunze's presentations, yet
tailored to the practical issues of HB level hardware design.

John has a book with almost encyclopedic coverage of HB issues yet it gives
sufficient detail of the majority of topics for direct practical
application.  A great practical resource for HBing IMO.

 -Steve

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