Brew Like A Pro

• By Jules Gray
• •
• 07 Aug, 2018

This is the home brew book I've been waiting for and I don't say that lightly! Andy and Graham's home brewing book, a new 'CAMRA's Essential' release in their pocket book series really pitches the subject well and in a very understandable way.  I've pictured the contents page below so you can have a quick scan to get a feel for how the book is laid out. The two key areas - 'Ingredients' and 'Brewing Process' - are then broken down into appropriate elements and are detailed at just the right level. Even a seasoned home brewer will pick up new information and 'top tips' from this little number. I'm one of those in-between brewers, self taught from reading (books/ online blogs), brewery tours, speaking to fellow home brewers and essentially trial and error. I can happily create my own recipe and turn out a decent classic style like a stout or saison - but when it comes to water treatment or adjunct addition, they are areas I really need to work on. 

There's also some areas I've not managed to join the dots on (or even scratch the surface!) and as this book manages to explain a number in a very factual and simplistic way - such as hop utilisation and recovering yeast from commercial bottled beers. I'm sure I'll get started to tackle these this year now. THANK YOU.  

After talking you through in detail each ingredient (there's 15 pages for water treatment alone!!!) the book naturally moves onto the brewing process. The added checklists for equipment (p78), even breaking it down to essentials for each brewing method (beer kits, malt, full grain) is a good feature. How many of us probably spent way too much money on our first set-up? Just to end up not (initially for a good while) using the equipment  we purchased or even choosing to scale it back! I think the focus on keeping things simple from the start and building up skills, confidence and then buying equipment at the right stages of your home brew learning curve is an excellent highlight. 

Once you've stepped through each component of the brewing process including cleaning and sanitation, a really key area to begin understanding is what and where things have gone wrong - off-flavours. Being able to pick these out in your beer becomes an essential skill, so you can learn and tweak to overcome these. Even commercial breweries get caught out on some areas. There's no brewery out there with 100% on every key performance indicator on their brewing sheet. It's just not realistic. Yeast is a living organism and crops are affected batch to batch and season to season for a start. Obviously they're more likely to have laboratories for testing, regular flavour tasting panels, monitoring at each stage of brew process, control over temperature, cleaning practices in place and so forth. As a home brewer it's your time and money and you can decide to drink the beer or not; but I think your palate will tell you that either way. I think ultimately home brewing really makes you appreciate the skill, effort, hard-work and time that goes in to producing beer and that even after you put your all in, things can go awry. The off-flavours and causes are put in a handy list with just the right amount of explanation and specifics. 

One of the big selling points of this book are the commercial recipes Andy's managed to obtain from a varying mix of breweries. Of course there's Elusive recipes too and as a multi award-winning brewer himself, his take on beers are not to be brushed over. I'm a personal fan of Level Up a great robust, earthy and caramel hinted American red ale. You'll also find big DIPA joose crews like Verdant in the selection, larger stalwarts of the modern craft beer landscape Thornbridge, home brew to commercial brewers Torrside, sour wizards Lost Industry and more - 30 in total (I think from counting the index!). The recipes have been batched sized down to the handy home brew 20 litre size, though you could even chunk that down further depending on your usual brew lengths (I'm a 5Litre batch maker currently - yes I know it's small but it just suits my off-shot kitchen). 

I'm really looking forward to digging into a number of these recipes already and I'm sure this book will be a long-standing success, used by generations of home brew enthusiasts - just like Graham would have wanted. Inspiring people to brew like a pro and challenge themselves to produce superb tasting flavourful beer at home - in a variety of serves from pressure barrels to cornelius kegs and bottle conditioned. It's good to see this consumer organisation that focuses on cask ale be more open-minded in their publication arm and sharing great quality craft beer recipes. I often wonder if all CAMRA national executive and public members worked in a commercial brewery for a day (let alone home brew) how that may feed into their beer viewpoints on critical topics in the beer industry?

(Disclosure: A sample book was gifted from CAMRA. Opinions expressed here are my own).