8 Best Homebrewing Books to Learn From Expert Homebrewers

One of the greatest things that you can do if you are trying to expand your homebrewing knowledge and produce better beer, is start educating yourself. With the help of a good quality homebrew book, you can start to produce much better beer as well as learn from some of the mistakes of more experienced brewers.

Maintaining the quality of your beer or finding a gift for your favorite homebrewer could be as simple as picking up one of the following top-rated homebrewing books.

1) How to Brew

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John J. Palmer looks into exactly what it takes to brew beer correctly the first time. Within an easy step-by-step guide in a fairly lighthearted style, this book can help any beginner homebrewer push through the process of brewing their first batch. John J Palmer continues to help homebrewers through his website and with this third edition publication which has become one of the best resources for beginner homebrewers.

Over 400 pages, how to brew details almost any type of brewing process as well as how you can zero in on the types of flavors that you are trying to capture with your beer. Many beginner homebrewers preferred this book because the first chapter is ideal for helping you pick the right brew kit, the second chapter helps you to look into the right type of materials and the rest of the book will help you through the entire brewing process.

2) The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

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The complete joy of homebrewing showcases everything you might first need to know about actually brewing your own beer. With a massive range of revised and updated recipes, this is a book that makes re-creating world-class recipes in homebrewing much easier. The book was written by a master brewer and it comes with lore and history behind beer as well as the science of brewing.

You can learn more about hop varieties, improving fermentation as well as tips on buying the best beer kits. Having access to this huge array of knowledge as you are brewing your first batch of homebrew or as you are picking out brew kits can really make a difference. You might even be able to pick up a number of interesting facts about beer itself that you can use as trivia or for impressing friends and family.

This is great reading if you are a beginner homebrewer or you are simply interested in sharing the joy of home brewing with an absolute legend in the world of homebrewing.
With tools on how to brew 53 different traditional beers as well as charts on 68 varieties of hops, you can learn about brewing as well as designing your own unique beer. This is a very valuable book or a great gift for homebrewers.

3) Home Brewing: A Complete Guide On How To Brew Beer

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This 350-page book goes through the details of brewing your own beer. As well as including a step-by-step guide to make your first homebrewing experience easier, there are some reviews on homebrew improvements as well as recipes to make the flavors of your homebrew much better.

With recommendations on some of the best gear, websites, forums, applications, calculators and more you can have access to some of the finest troubleshooting tips and options for improvement.

This book is written by James Houston who is a three-time winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the year for Children award. In his spare time he enjoys homebrewing as well as sharing some of his best-known recipes in blogs and through novels.

Most suggested this is an extremely informative book even for intermediate-level homebrewers. Whether you are interested in trying out all grain brewing and moving away from extract brewing, it can help you to get the most out of your beer by following some simple steps. There are some great recipes shared in here as well as some tidbits about beer history, ingredients and troubleshooting.

4) Homebrewing For Dummies

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The For Dummies guides have long been a staple for picking up almost any new skill. If you are trying to break into homebrewing for the very first time this second edition book which was released in 2008 gives you a detailed reference for how to make any batch from scratch.

The nice part about these books is that they are a quick reference guide. If you ever have any troubles with storing, boiling, bottling or kegging, this can act as a perfect reference guide for handling all of these questions and more. Homebrewing for dummies is a resource guide that is produced by a certified beer judge as well as an award-winning writer. This means you get the best of both worlds using an experienced homebrewing judge as well as a qualified writer.

Marty Nachel makes the steps of homebrewing much easier and you will find it much simpler to start using additives in your homebrew for more distinct flavors as well. Once you have followed the simple beginner guide for your first homebrew in this, there are offshoot guides that you can use to enhance the flavor of your beer, produce on a grander scale, put it into kegs, and more.

5) Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles

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If you are interested in brewing classical beer styles that you might normally buy at your local store, this book can help you to unlock some of the secrets of producing popular beer-making varieties. With a wide range of brewing tables and formulas, you can take your homebrew to the next level by producing some familiar flavors that you can find in some of the most popular types of beer in the world.

Designing your own great homebrew is usually something that you start to look into after producing your first batch. As you start to narrow down some of the flavor profiles that you love in beer, you will want to start to add some of these profiles into every beer that you produce. This book can help any homebrewer to narrow down what they are looking for in any beer and then actually re-create it with their own homebrewing experience.

This book contains over three chapters on hops alone giving homebrewer’s a distinct look into the world of what brewers need to do with every new batch of beer to balance their flavors. It can take time to zero in on some of the flavors that you are trying to capture and with designing great beers you can take advantage of over 200 different tables which can help you to formulate what makes a great beer for you.

6) Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew

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This book also written by John J Palmer and Jamil Zainasheff looks into some of the classic style brewing recipes. These are some of the top 80 brewing varieties from across the world with recipes of exactly how you can produce them. The first edition of this book came out in the year 2007 and since then the 317 page book details some of the best homebrew competition winners that Palmer has produced as well as some of the most popular varieties of beer.

With award-winning recipes from both authors, you can find recipes which have been fine tuned to create some of the highest quality craft beer you may have ever tasted. By keeping some of these recipes close at hand you can enjoy trying out competition beer in the comfort of your own home.
Many say that this is a super resource that’s very easy to follow for trying out new homebrewing recipes.

7) IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale

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This IPA brewing techniques book is an IPA home brew lovers ultimate resource. Written by Mitch Steele this book includes 48 different recipes including historical brewery IPAs from dogfish head, Russian River, Deschutes, Stone and Firestone walker. Getting a hold of some of these recipes can help you to re-create these beautiful IPAs and many other recipes so that you can get more flavor out of your IPA beer.

As well as a massive collection of recipes this book goes through some of the evolution of IPA in popular brewers. There are also some tips and strategies that you can use to improve your own recipes with some unique brewing techniques. If you regularly grew IPAs for your homebrew projects or only brew IPA’s in your homebrew, you should strongly consider picking this up or potentially picking it up for a friend.

8) The Homebrewer’s Companion

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Charlie Papazian completed this book as a homebrew master and the goal of this was to create a improved procedural guide for brewing homebrew. The information included in this is tried-and-true tactics from an experienced master brewer. You can see improved results whether you are using malt extract or potentially even brewing from grains at scratch.

What makes this book so great is the useful charts, the data and the procedures. The author of this book still continues to produce around 20 batches of homebrew every year and has placed at least 10 years worth of experience and questions into one volume.

With troubleshooting techniques, a great FAQ section, massive amounts of charts and data as well as 60 different recipes to try, you can really get your moneys worth with this book.

Overall each one of these books would be an excellent asset to your own homebrewing experience or as a gift for a friend into homebrewing. We especially love the dummies guide for beginners and the homebrewer’s companion for learning a super system that you can use for consistently producing great beer.

Last update on 2024-04-09 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API