Yankee Brew News Archive

Book review: Brewing Made Easy

Originally Published: 02/97

By: Brett Peruzzi

Brewing Made Easy

By Joe Fisher and Dennis Fisher

1996; Storey Communications, Pownal, Vermont

89 pages; $9.95

The Fisher brothers of Belfast, Maine are back, with another homebrewing book that follows last year's Great Beer from Kits. What the Fishers have turned out is more or less an ultra-primer for a beginning brewer.

A slim 89 pages, with only the first 54 pages dedicated to narrative, and the remaining pages a compendium of recipes and appendices, this book is about as bare bones a homebrewing guide as you can get. The text is set in a large type size, and there are numerous illustrations of common homebrewing equipment and processes.

In the now time-honored fashion of homebrewing texts, the book has chapters on equipment, ingredients and recipe formulation, simple brewing with malt extracts, and a short collection of brewing tips. The information is presently clearly and the instructions are easy to follow, with key concepts presented as boxed sidebars, and comparative data on hop and grain types is summarized neatly in tables.

All things considered, Brewing Made Easy meets its goal of providing the basic information for a new brewer. What's curious is that with so many simple homebrewing books already on the market, why Storey Communications would publish yet another, when the trend seems to be moving toward hombrewing books that occupy a niche category like specific beer styles.

It may be a symptom of the general publishing trend to continually simplify complex topics, the way the popular "Dummies" series does for computers and other topics, including beer, by the way. Perhaps Brewing Made Easy will come to occupy its own niche; as its length and presentation would make it an ideal volume for homebrew shop owners to include as part of a beginner's homebrewing kit.