beer books | Literature and Libation

Title: Gardening for the Homebrewer
Author(s): Wendy Tweten and Debbie Teashon
ISBN: 978-0760345634
Pages: 208
Release date: September 15, 2015
Publisher: Voyageur Press
Genre: Nonfiction/How to
Format: Softcover
Source: Review copy

As I watch my attempt to grow barley wither into brown shrivels of failure, I prepare for next Spring. Winter means reading, research, and learning from my mistakes. I took a ton of notes and wrote quite a lot about my experience growing my own beer ingredients this year, but as much as I’ve learned, I’m still seeking something more comprehensive.

There’s not a lot out there for the intrepid homebrewing soilophile.

There’s a 1998 book, The Homebrewer’s Garden, by Dennis Fisher, which includes solid information, but spreads itself thin, trying to cover too many grains, herbs, and other sundry ingredients. It’s also 17 years old; a lot has changed in beer and brewing (hop and barley varieties, just as a start, never mind technology), making this guide feel a bit sepia tone when read by a member of the internet generation.

Then come the Brewing Elements series from Brewer’s Publications. These four are a must read for any brewer (home or otherwise) who has even the tiniest inkling of interest in the science behind the beverage. But for the wealth of knowledge contained therein, these books are still fundamentally informational; For the Love of Hops contains a brief section on growing your own hops, but is moreso dedicated to the history and scientific workings of the cultivar. The same goes for the other three; excellent books, but lacking practical lessons.

Anyone looking to (successfully) grow any beer ingredient at home likely has to turn to the internet (or, for you AHA members, old copies of Zymurgy Magazine). That’s not the worse thing ever, but correlating loose content from various websites can be as tedious as weeding an overgrown carrot patch.

Fellow blogger Ed from The Dogs of Beer was kind enough to CC me on an offer for a review copy of Gardening for the Homebrewer. I happily wrapped my dirty little hands around the book, hoping for a spiritual update to Fisher’s work.

Physically, the book is gorgeous: full-color macro photographs that look good enough to scratch and sniff, color-coded text boxes with faux-decoupage flair, near-perfect formatting that organizes the content brilliantly. It’s really a pleasure to read, and the visuals don’t detract from the writing itself. While written by two people, it reads in one coherent voice, offering direct explanation and guidance with little pomp or fluff.

It’s broken into distinct sections over seven chapters, starting with a basic primer on gardening that’s simple enough for a total rookie, but also contains just enough for the journeyman. Chapter 2 covers beer, but only spans 25 pages. The malting process is described across two pages, with no images or sundry information to guide the reader. If you are looking for a book on the basics of beer before it’s even near the kettle, this has some good information. If you were looking for a more comprehensive guide to barley, malting, or troubleshooting the latter, keep on searching.

More than half of the book is dedicated to “other” which in this case means grapes, berries, herbs, apples, pears, and more. Much like Fisher’s book, Gardening for the Homebrewer reads an inch deep and a mile long. Trying to cover all these plants and ingredients is an admirable goal, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and readers like me wanting more.

From their bios on the last page and a quick Google, it’s clear that both Tweten and Teashon are very accomplished gardeners. What is unclear is if they are homebrewers (or have ever homebrewed). While all of the information presented is factually correct, there’s a sort of disconnect in the exposition, as if they are more focused on the plants than their role as an ingredient in the brewing process. That could be my beerish romanticism pontificating and not an actual flaw, but it’s worth noting there’s next to no brewing-related content in this book. Suggestions for what beverage the plant might go best in, but not a lot about when or how to include it in a typical brewing/fermentation process.

Regardless of their identity as brewers, the co-authors do a fantastic job of outlining some of the most practical (and sometimes hard to find, even with a black belt in Google-fu) details of growing. Simple but integral details like appropriate USDA growing zone, spacing, and pruning are included for every plant. Most even have a picture of the mature plant, a surprisingly helpful addition for someone who starts with a handful of seeds and isn’t entire sure what elderberry is actually supposed to look like.

Despite not having what I was looking for, I enjoyed this book, and will continue to use it as a reference. The overview of growing conditions are worth the price alone (there are 52 total, ranging from mint to plums), and the rather thorough section of cider apples taught me a lot I though I already knew (but apparently didn’t).

More a book for gardeners who like brewing-related plants than brewers turned gardners, but well written, edited, and presented nonetheless.

Title: The Craft Beer Revolution
Author: Steve Hindy
ISBN: 978-1137278760
Pages: 272
Release date: April 22, 2014
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Genre: Nonfiction/History
Format: Hardcover
Source: Review copy

Growing up in a British expatriate household full of Oxford English Dictionaries and Encyclopedia Britannica, we playfully joked about our public school’s approach to teaching American history. My parents, products of northern England’s primary schools, found the way children were introduced to the political and social pedigree of early America both funny and fascinating. They’d look over homework assignments, amazed at how much detail was afforded to every battle, every colony, every document revision (as compared to British history), impressed at how thorough a retelling of events could be when it only had to cover a few hundred years, not a few thousand. But despite the depth they felt it often lacked applicability, that some of the history seemed forced, bloated to fill time and text book pages, with emphasis put on certain events to artificially inflate, not because of their influence of the founding of the nation.

They may have had similar concerns about Steve Hindy’s fresh release, The Craft Beer Revolution, which chronicles the rise of craft beer (defined as not the stuff from Miller or Coors or Budweiser) starting in 1965 and running up to present day. Forty-nine years isn’t an excessively long period of time to cover in 272 pages. The good news: their concern would have been misplaced. Although faced with the daunting task of sifting through pretty much all of modern America’s brewery, brewer, and beer-soaked history, Hindy manages to use his experience cofounding Brooklyn Brewing to condense and highlight many of the important aspects that led us to our fermented future. This is the journey of craft beer, told by one of its pioneers.

Those into beer know names like Jack McAuliffe, Fritz Maytag, and Ken Grossman, recognize that these men are the spiritual hop-wielding grandfathers of modern brewing. But to the layman, beyond a few photos, and a few too-often-used quotes, these men might seem two dimensional, spectres of a time when small brewing was as rare as organic labels in the grocery store. To the new beer enthusiast, these names might be completely alien.

While there are several other good reads that fall like wild yeast into the open fermentation vessel of “craft beer history” (namely, Ken Grossman’s Beyond the Pale, and Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops), Hindy gives a strong voice to the people who masterminded our current surge, connects the reader to them with quotes and anecdotes that color them as the decorated, dedicated brewers they were (or are). The strength of the narrative springs from the deep, insider knowledge of someone who was on the front lines of the transition from homebrewing and brewpubs to full-fledged breweries. Through Hindy’s research and interviews, a reader can feel like she’s standing right next to Charlie Papazian as he went from nuclear engineer to the head of the Brewer’s Association, and looking over Sam Calagione’s shoulder as he brewed the first of the beers that would eventually lead to Dogfish Head.

There are moments when my parents fears are realized, and Hindy’s content seems at odds with his structure; like a paragraph shoe-horned into the heel of a chapter solely because it was bristling with such potent information. At times, this gives a feeling of too much foot in too little shoe, description or notes inserted with little introduction or transition, just to round out a chapter. These sections, despite being clunky, do tend to add certain character to the narrative. It’s hard to fault Hindy for having too much good content, but it wouldn’t be a BJCP certified review to suggest I didn’t notice some defects in the body of the narrative.

These issues smooth themselves out by the middle of the book, just in time for the second act to dance onto the revolution stage: the politics of distribution and some infighting between regional competitors who should have, in a perfect beer-filled world, been allies. Some ire seems directed at Jim Koch of Samuel Adams; at one point Hindy calls him the “Harvard MBA-type” who seemed more concerned with marketing than establishing a local brewery, opting to contract brew in his early years, rather than establish physical roots. Later, he offers some admiration for Koch’s rise to commercial fame, but I’d venture that Hindy won’t be sharing a Utopias with Koch any time soon.

Ultimately, Hindy does an admirable job of writing a story that walks delicately between esoteric and approachable, telling the complex story of politics and law in beer in a way that wouldn’t completely turn off someone who didn’t already have a propensity for the bubbly stuff. The closing is cautiously optimistic, with Hindy suggesting (hoping) that Big Beer’s attempts to sneak in and snag market share with things like Blue Moon and Shock Top might actually lead to more business for smaller breweries, once the average consumer’s tastes evolve a bit more. Several jargon laden, industry heavy chapters might be harder reads for people who aren’t into beer, but by the epilogue, the book has done a fine job of capturing the inundation of American beer onto fertile consumer soil, and provides a deep, probing look at just how the river gained enough momentum over the past 50 years to successfully overflow its banks.

Browsing Tags beer books

Beer n’ Books: Gardening for the Homebrewer

Beer n’ Books – The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy