Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 00:12:22 -0500 From: "Steve Alexander" Subject: re: How Did You Start All-Grain?/Overdue note ... (deleted) ===== John Palmer was kind enough to send me a copy of "How to Brew", 2nd ed. a few months ago and I've been too busy to brew, much less read about brewing until this past month. John's book is an expansion of his "How to Brew" eBook at http://www.howtobrew.com/ . If you like the stuff on his website you'll love the 2nd edition hardcopy. I've always liked John's friendly and practical style of writing, both on HBD and in his brewing articles, but the organization of the book is notable. One difficulty when writing about HB is that the audience is at all differing skill and knowledge levels, and it's tempting when writing about the basics to start explaining the background information - and suddenly your in deep technical issues with many open questions. It's a mistake I regularly make. John has somehow avoided this pitfall by presenting details as they are needed but not before. The first section covers the basics through extract brewing, the second section covers partial mash and the third covers all-grain brewing. Any of these first three sections (225 pp total) could easily stand alone as a guide on its subject. There is development from basics to the more complex, but there isn't a lot of cross-referencing between. Section 4 covers style, recipe design and troubleshooting. A 58 page appendix covers several technical topics and home-built hardware issues in great detail. When he sent the book, John asked me if I considered it a beginners' book. It is in the sense that I wouldn't hesitate to hand this book to someone considering a first brew, a first partial mash or a first all-grain and expect a good outcome. It is complete and direct and detailed enough for use by beginners. OTOH this book also covers more advanced topics. Some methods, like decoction, are given short tho' competent coverage, while others more current topics like no-sparge, first wort hopping and hopping calculation are given substantial coverage. It seems to strike the right balance between "too basic" and "too complex" topics and attacks the issues that arise repeatedly on HBD headlong with a practical approach. As regular HBDers would expect of John, the appendix on brewing metallurgy is excellent, covering everything from welding to yeast metallic ion reqs in the same breath. The other unparalleled appendix topic is lauter design and construction. There is a detailed practical manifold design that would make an excellent cooler/lauter unit. This is integrated with a nicely graphical coverage of John's original fluid flow grainbed work and experiments (these were presented on HBD some months ago). This is absolutely the best coverage I've seen in print on lauter design/fluid-flow issues, far beyond what you'll find in M&BS and Kunze's presentations, yet tailored to the practical issues of HB level hardware design. John has a book with almost encyclopedic coverage of HB issues yet it gives sufficient detail of the majority of topics for direct practical application. A great practical resource for HBing IMO. -Steve