Extreme Brewing – By Sam Calagione

Extreme Brewing – By Sam Calagione
An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home

This book contains 25 fun and ‘extreme’ beer recipes. The introduction surrounding the makeup of ingredients is well done and more detailed than most books. This book contains a lot of photography and the images are excellent. The intro to brewing chapter is a good review, but there are other books out there that go into more detail. Get this book for the information about using fruits and spices in your beer, or the best beer and food pairings. The recipes are extract based, which makes them accessible to beginners, but some of the recipes are also quite complex.

Topics unique to this book

• Brewing with fruit: (apricots, arctic cloud berries, black currants, blueberries, white muscat grape concentrate, raisins, raspberries, sour cherries, strawberries, sweet cherries)
• Brewing with spices: (allspice, anise, cardamom seed, chicory, coriander, cinnamon sticks, coffee, ginger, grains of paradise, juniper berries, licorice root, rosemary, saffron threads, spruce tips, st. john’s wort, valerian).
• Brewing with other ingredients: (pumpkin, pepper corns, molasses, wood chips, etc)
• Adding sugar during fermentation to boost ABV
• High gravity beers

I love the passion of this author and the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, and highly recommend both of his books.