Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book

Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book

Brooklyn Brew Shop's Beer Making Book

Some of you will know that I’m a chef by training.  As in, I trained in French cuisine and did my 5000 hour apprenticeship in a French Bistro.  Among other things, what this means is, I own a lot of cookbooks.  I get a lot given to me, and I have bought a fair few myself.  Despite not really using recipes, per se, I use cookbooks all the time, for general direction, inspiration and guidance.  So when I got an email about a beer “cookbook” for homebrewers, and read some of the opening pages, this quote stuck out for me:

When you first learn how to cook, you follow every instruction in a recipe. You buy full jars of spices, prep all the ingredients, preheat the oven, and then run back to the store to pick up that one item you forgot. And you worry, maybe, that you didn’t add enough salt. What is a “pinch” anyway? But when you take the roasted pork-chops out of the oven or taste your butternut-squash soup and realize that you’ve made a meal that’s not only edible but also delicious, it’s magic. So you do it again. You discover that oil works instead of butter. Or that roasting pine nuts really does make a difference in flavour and that you don’t need to check the thermometre to know when to take a chicken out of the oven. You stop reading the recipes and, instead, make up your own

The Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book is a guide, written for people to learn how to brew in their own kitchen.  There are directions to get set up, tips for small-batch brewing, as well as  a recipe for every week for a year.  But the beauty is, the thrust of the book is to get people to start thinking for themselves when they brew.  And I like that.

Don’t get me wrong; brewing beer is a highly scientific pursuit.  Or perhaps I should say, can be a highly scientific pursuit.  I’ve brewed beer with brewers who use math formulas to determine all sorts of things. Most breweries I know have a chemist, wearing a white jacket and everything, on staff.  Details of each batch are meticulously noted.  Volumes and temperatures are measured to very precise levels.  It’s quite an operation.  And I know homebrewers who are this technical.  They are contest winners and producers of very fine beers.  In a different vein, while I was in school and working in the restaurant industry, I knew bakers.  Many of them would have been physicists in another life.  Highly technical, to the point of mania.  People from all walks of life will tell you that baking is some ferociously difficult process, where deviating from the recipe by even a gram of ingredients will not only cause your bread to spontaneously combust, but will tilt the earth on its axis and cause God to kill a kitten.  But baking doesn’t have to be that way.  Long before the days of having graduated measuring cups, let alone scales, people were making bread and cakes and all sorts of good things.  And brewing was the same, and still is.  Sure, you can’t just chuck random stuff into a pot and expect beer to come out, but with an understanding of the fundamentals, you can easily make a nice batch of beer (or loaf of bread).

Incidentally, did you know both bread and beer have a common element to their history?  They were magical, or more specifically, God-blessed.  Long before yeast was discovered, bakers and brewers (which in that time meant “people”) knew that sometimes batches of bread didn’t rise, and sometimes beer didn’t ferment.  But they couldn’t tell you scientifically why.  It was mystical.  And it was a blessing.  Good beer and good bread were a sign of a blessing on your house. Mediocre products meant you were probably a witch.

So, in the event that we see further social regression, being a good beer maker could be the difference between being burned at the stake, or being the guy with the torch.  In that case, Brooklyn Brew Shop’s Beer Making Book is a great starting point.  There are plenty of tomes out there that will teach you all that highly technical stuff, but start here.  Get your hands wet (literally) making a few batches of simple hands-on (or in) beer, then worry about calculating gravity later (and whether you want to be an SG or Plato kind of brewer).

Check out the link below for a preview of the book, and also info on where to buy it.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/69161206/Recipes-From-Brooklyn-Brew-Shop-s-Beer-Making-Book

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