Simple Homebrewing: Great Beer, Less Work, More Fun

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Have you ever found yourself doing less and less homebrewing, or being too intimidated to take up the brewing to begin with? Let Drew Beechum and Denny Conn help you brew the best possible beer with less work and more fun!

Simple Homebrewing simplifies the complicated steps for making beer and returns brewing to its fundamentals. Explore easy techniques for harnessing water, malted barley, hops, and yeast (along with a few odd co-stars) to create beer. Pick up tips and tricks for a range of brewing challenges like adjusting your brewing liquor, working with adjunct ingredients, controlling fermentation, and brewing wild beers. The authors guide you from extract brewing to all-grain batches and explain the simple philosophy of recipe design and small-batch brewing. Learn how to evaluate different types of malt and hops by tasting, crushing, and steeping them, and use this to build your flavor vocabulary. Denny and Drew also share ideas on how to make technology work for you by taking a look at brewing gadgets, from fancy fermentation jackets and expensive (but convenient) all-in-one “robot” brewing systems, to bucket heaters, swamp coolers and do-it-yourself PID controllers made from inexpensive and commonly available microprocessors.

Drew and Denny’s mantra is “Brew the best beer possible, with the least effort possible, while having the most fun possible.” Throughout, the focus is on helping you develop a simple, thoughtful process to make homebrewing more accessible and enjoyable. Wisdom is imparted in tones both reassuring and amusing, and the basics are broken down into easily remembered chunks. The authors also feature interviews with an eclectic group of brewers from the Americas, who add their own take on the brewing process and how they have made it work for them.

Get a feel for recipe design by looking at a few handy templates for Pilsner, pale ale, IPA, double IPA, stout, tripel, and saison; or try your own bottom-up or top-down approach after reading Denny and Drew’s advice. Along the way you will find over 40 recipes, ranging from the simplest of pale ales, American lagers, tried and tested altbier recipes, and delicious rye IPAs, to Old and New World barleywine, quick tripels, Scotch ale mashed overnight, king cake ale, purple corn beer, and Catherina sour. Marvel at how mushrooms can be used in beer and tremble at the thought of a bourbon barrel–aged barleywine made with ghost pepper. Even experienced homebrewers can learn from this dynamic duo, as Simple Homebrewing features expert advice for brewers of all levels.

From the Publisher

Have More Fun Brewing Beer!

We want you to relax and make homebrewing work for you. We want you to imbue your brew days with a sense of Denny’s mantra, “If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.” We’re going to explain the working details in an easy way, so you can integrate them into your process and then not have to think about them again. We’ll show you how to save time and money when you brew without sacrificing beer quality. We’ll show you how to avoid the stress that sometimes drives homebrewers out of the hobby. We’re fairly egalitarian, so we won’t just pass off our brewing methods as the only true way to simplify your life.

Completing these tasks the day before will simplify your brew day.

Make your yeast starters ahead of time. Having the yeast on hand puts a ticking freshness clock in your head. You’ll only need to start a day prior to brewing, but it makes a difference. We’ll tell you why and how to make starters in chapter 10. For now, what you need to know is that a starter is like a very small batch of unhopped beer that allows the yeast cells to build up to an amount sufficient to ferment your beer. And yeah, it’s easier than it sounds!Crush your grain ahead of time and seal it in a bucket. We’ve done experiments that show pre-crushed grain works just fine when stored in a bucket, even a month later.Clean your fermentors, chillers, and other equipment.Set up your water the night before.

Every Beer Tells a Story

Other stories come to mind, like remembering how Drew got into college. His institute required an essay on any subject you wanted to write about regarding science. Even at 17 (possibly especially at 17), Drew couldn’t resist being a smartass. He wrote his entrance essay attempting to argue that Marshmallow Fluff was a fundamental element of the universe. It was everything you’d expect from a kid who grew up eating Fluffernutter sandwiches. So, thinking about the classic Massachusetts staple made Drew wonder…what would that look like in beer form? Here we go.

Cameos with Advice from the Authors

We want you to know that Simple Homebrewing is not just for beginners. If you are a beginner reading this book, you will get ideas on how to streamline your process, but we’re not going to teach you homebrewing from scratch. There are other books to get you started, like How to Brew by our

dear friend John Palmer. What we are going to teach you is a different way to brew, how to take the principles outlined in other homebrewing sources and adapt them to your own way of doing things and make brewing fit into your life.

And Now It Gets Weird

All of the adjuncts we’ve talked about up to now are at least passingly common in the brewing world. But, if you’re like Drew, you want to go farther. You want to use stuff that will make Denny go, “What ARE you thinking?” And when it’s that time, you need to have at least some idea of where you’re going and what to expect. Well, we’re just the guys to help you with that. What follows is a list of fruits and veggies you might want to use in your brew, if you’re crazy—OK, make that creative—enough.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brewers Publications; Illustrated edition (June 7, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 250 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1938469593
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1938469596
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.14 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.99 x 0.56 x 10 inches