How to Brew – By John Palmer
Thursday, December 18th, 2008How to Brew – By John Palmer
Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time
This is the book to own for home brewing. I found it especially useful after I had done a few extract batches and was looking to go into the all-grain realm. The book goes into a lot of detail and it can move quickly at times. As I continued to brew I began to rely on it more and more. Other books out there were either too detailed, or too basic in terms of all grain brewing. This book is very detailed about all grain brewing and it gives a really nice chapter on ‘how’ to do it. There are several other chapters on the specifics behind all grain brewing as well. The appendices on building out your own chiller, mash tun, and gravity system present interesting challenges to tackle as you move ahead with brewing.
The entire book is also available online at this url: https://www.howtobrew.com.
Topics unique to this book:
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Best explanation out there on your first all-grain batch
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Covers details on milling mashing, mash pH, lautering.
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Formulating recipes
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Building your own wort chiller
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Building a mash/lauter Tun
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Metallurgy and brewing
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Gravity systems
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RDWHAHB – Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Home Brew
4 Responses to “How to Brew – By John Palmer”
I agree entirely! It is THE book you need for home brewing. Its perfect for the first timer just starting. Its perfect for those wishing to upgrade from kits to extract, or extract to all grain. And its perfect for those old timers who think they’ve seen it all. I recommend this book to anyone interested in home brewing.
Appreciated your posts and various calculators (although here in Australia we’re metric, so some conversions required).
Cheers!
By Grant Noble on Apr 16, 2009
Hi Grant,
We have it on the list to add metric features to all the calculators. Sorry for not building this in from the beginning – that would have been the smartest way, but it would have taken longer to get the site up and running.
The main things are:
Celcius instead Farenheight
Kg instead of pounds for grains
Grams instead of ounces for hops
Liters instead of gallons and quarts
Does that sound good to you?
Oh, and do you use specific gravity or the plato scale?
By Larry on Apr 18, 2009
Hi Larry,
Hey no worries about no metric. Just the fact that you’ve got these tools is great. Will be fantastic when you do put in the metric options though, as we metric folk do struggle a bit with pounds, gallons and ounces!
Yes, you’re spot on:
– Celcius/Farenheight
– Kilograms/Pounds
– Grams/Ounces (and here is the easy part 1000 grams = 1 Kg)
– Litres/Gallons or Quarts (or Pints, I suppose)
– And yes, we use specific gravity, which is kind of funny when you think that sg is measured in points/pound/gallon. Ah well…
As for other home brewing measurements:
– For beer/malt colour we typically use EBC instead of SRM. For all intents and purposes, EBC is very close to twice the SRM value (EBC=1.97*SRM)
– And for bitterness, we also use IBU.
Cheers!
Grant
By Grant Noble on Apr 20, 2009
This is a very informative book. the reading is a little dry but has all the information needed to brew.
By smash on Oct 10, 2023