Customer Reviews

The Brewers' Handbook

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am currently studying to take the GCBP certificate from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling(IBD), and this book is an awesome resource for studying difficult to comprehend sections. The book matches the syllabus very well.........As far as the homebrewer is concerned there are a few useful sections (Beer Spoilage Organisms, Wortboiling, and a few others) but this book is written to mainly cater to the professional (or aspiring to be professional) brewer. This to me is nice because most of the books I have found are written geared to the home (5-15 gal) brewer.

As a member of the brewing industry, I find this book it to be full of inaccuracies, both technical and historical. What remains is muddled by poor writing including imprecise use of language and overly broad generalizations. After reading Papazian, homebrewers (and even beginning commercial brewers) would be well advised to read the classic titles by Gregg Noonan and David Miller. Professional brewers should purchase Kunze, the Hough, Briggs, Stevens & Young volumes and the MBAA titles.

I requested this book for Christmas based on the reviews and that a LHBS said it was at a technical level for someone with a chemistry degree. The book also describes itself a a complete book. Neither of these statements are true. This book should be described as an overview of brewing and the brewing industry.
Homebrewers will get a lot more information from books by John Palmer, Ray Daniels, and Charlie Papazian if you are a beginner. Although I was disappointed to find Greg Noonan's book was not about lager, it provides a lot more detail than this book.

Possibly the biggest problem is that it is out of date and is in desperate need of updating with the latest hops, grains, extracts, yeasts, equipment techniques, and so on.

In my opinion, there are no brewing books that could be considered complete, and this is as far from complete as I feel it could be.

This book covers more about beer than all the other books I have combined. While it appears to be oriented toward the professional brewer, there is a plethora of information to be gleaned from the book. As someone who has been brewing beer at home for over 15 years, it is tough to find this much new and interesting information in one source. The author has the ability to keep the subject matter interesting. While there is a lot of information that is of little value to the home brewer (marketing etc...) there is enough pertinent information to make this a must have book. Even if you know everything about brewing, you will learn from this book.

I have been in the beer business for many years, and have read all the standard texts. This is a good book. It's direct, it's easy reading, and, unlike many of the brewing texts, it's simple to follow.

As someone who has worked in the brewing industry as a microbilogist for over the 30 years I found the book a pleasure to read. It was well-written, thouroughly researched, and contains enough technical information to make it usefull. A real plus is the chapter on the U.S. beer industry.

I really liked this book. Its easy to read and fairly extensive discussing all the major topics, unlike other brewing books.

This book was given to me several months ago as a gift but didn't read it until over the holidays. There is an amazing lot of information in this book. The information is objective, well organized and easy to understand. Goldammer doesn't get bogged down in long technical descriptions. Although the book focuses on commercial beer brewing, I still found the information useful as a homebrewer.

I really enjoyed this book. I have a limited knowledge of brewing beer, yet Goldammer has a way of describing the brewing process that is informative and instructional without trying to be cute or overly simplistic. I found that everything in this book was useful and very informative even though its focus is on commercial brewing.

Whatever your level of involvement in beer or brewing, you'll find something useful in The Brewers' Handbook. The information presented is certaintly exhaustive and the book covers just about every aspect of the brewing process. If I have any complaints with this book is that very little was written about beer evaluation. Nevertheless, it does a good job in discussing the technical aspects of brewing beer at a level that anybody can understand.