Customer Reviews

The Homebrewer's Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Homebrewer's Garden is an expertly written guide which will teach you how to take your homebrewing to a whole new level. Whether you are a newcomer to the hobby or a seasoned veteran brewer, Homebrewer's Garden will be a book that you'll go back to again and again. The book repeats little if any information found in a homebrewing primer, so advance knowledge of the brewing process and terminology will be helpful. However, little (if any) experience is needed in actual brewing to take advantage of this book.

The book is broken up into four main sections. The first teaches you everything you need to know about how to grow your own hops, the differences between the varieties, and how to use them. Included in this section are instructions that will take you from planting your first hops plants to drying and storing your hops with your home-built oast, or hops dryer.

The second section is a comprehensive list of herbs that can be used in brewing. This section includes information on which varieties to use, how to grow them, which parts of the plant to use, when to add them, how much to use, and expected resulting flavors and aromas. Also includes a section on herbs that are poisonous or should otherwise not be used.

The third section covers growing, harvesting, malting, and using your own grains. There's far more than just barley covered in this section! Also covered are amaranth, corn, oat, quinoa, rye, sorghum, spelt, and wheat. Each grain has a breakdown of different varieties and how to grow and use them.

The fourth section is the obligatory recipes section. Many traditional herbal beers are here, as well as some more innovative beverages that I'd never heard of--Gotlandsdrika, anyone? Where applicable, both extract and all-grain recipes are listed.

Even if you never expect to grow your own hops, grains, or herbs, The Homebrewer's Garden will make you a better brewer. Also recommended is the book Clone Brews, which feature recipes adapted from popular beers of different styles from around the world.

The Fisher brothers have done home brewer's a great service with this book. As a life long brewer and author of The Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible I give them my highest compliments and thanks for their research into ancient herbal brewing and their presentation of their material without a lot of technical jargon.

Wether you're a complete novice or a veteran brewer there's a lot to learn here from almost forgotten techniques and ingredients to growing and malting your own grains.

Well done

Great book for the beginner. Even if you have never planted a simple garden, you cannot go wrong with this book. Very timely and explanatory - covers a range of subjects, including where to order hops, trelis construction, diseases, soil nutrients, and drying/using. Also includes techniques to grow herbs to use in brewing. A must read.

I bought this book to learn how to grow my own hops. It was very clear on different techniques and also has addresses of where to get some starter plants.

The first section on growing hops is decent, but it's nothing you can't find online.

But the section on herbs is great. Not only does it give a list of brewing herbs but, more importantly, how much to use and how. I've researched gruits and know what types of herbs were used, but I never knew how much to add.

There's also a section on grain. While I'd like to grow some grain, I'm not keen on malting. I may stick with unmalted wheat as that seems the easiest. Rye and Oats would have been nice, but they strongly advise against malting those items.

Overall, a good book- mainly if you have the land and time to grow your own ingredients. With the large amounts and quantities I brew, it doesn't make sense for me to go this route. Especially when I can get grain delivered for about 30 cents a pound.

Chances are that if you are buying this book, you are trying to grow your own hops.

If that's the case, I suggest you save your cash and just go to listen to a podcast by The Brewing Network. I bought this book wanting to plant hops and everything in the book about hops was covered by a few different podcasts available on The BN.

If you want to grow and malt barley, in addition to growing hops, this book is what you are looking for.

A good book with lots of information and some history. Some very interesting recipes and information on how to grow and use herbs and spices and malt and roast your own grain. Unfortunately this book unnecessarily errs on the side of caution regarding some of the more potent and historically used brewing herbs that make great additions to a brewers herbal repertoire. This book also unfortunately has few recipes without the addition of hops which can make for an even more unique brewing experience. If your looking to grow and use herbs and hops, and to malt and use unusual grains this book can definitely point you in the right direction.

I hadn't tried making home made beer or wine in years - this book rekindled the interest (plus emigrating from the UK to the US, where the beers, to put it nicely, are fairly bland -although local micro breweries are helping to address this).

I am also a very keen herb gardener, and learnt alot from the plant descriptions that have some great suggestions for additives. I planted some hop runners, but my back yard is too small for a decent crop.

The cautions in the book are important - it is best not to take a chance with some plants. I have some old recipes that will result in the production of wood alcohol, if followed to the letter (e.g. potato - fermented for wine, distilled into Poteen and some ciders will make you understand the term blind drunk. OK, they aren't the herbs in the book, but the old ways aren't always the best). That said, I'm all in favor of experimentation - nettle is a great additive.

Excellent interesting book.

This was a "whim" buy and wow am I glad I bought it! After reading the first chapters about growing your own hops I went on line and bought 6 hop rhizomes, made a special row in my garden and am waiting for the harvest!! It totally inspired me...why? Because it told me how to plant the rhizome, how to prune the vines, support them, the dirt and food they need and how to harvest and dry them...I already know how to use them! I had planted 2 hop rhizomes 4 years ago, 1 died and the other never did much...well I transplanted that one and am following the basic growing procedures; pruning of all but 2 vines, using coarse twine for support and they are taking off!!! This book gave me lots of information about the different hop plants, storage, growth, cold, damp, dry weather, etc. so I was able to decide which hop variety might do best in my area, and by following their suggestions I bought 5 different varietys to try, and see which does well for my garden. Yeah I would reccomend this book for a good all around book with easy to follow instructions and diagrams for starting your own brewers garden.

Might be o.k. to check out from the library, but if you already know how to grow stuff, it may not be that useful.

I checked this book out from the library because I have been interested in malting my own barley and wheat. Unfortunately, the author's devote six pages to the ENTIRE process of growing, harvesting, sprouting, couching, and drying/kilning the barley. The rest of the section is devoted to other grains such as corn and quinoa, and cover varieties rather than how to process them. I had already done my first batch of barley using a home food dehydrator and the oven set on low, and I found that their information was actually less complete than what I found on-line through a simple search on malting grain. In fact, for building a home kiln, they suggest that you reference the "1985 Special Grain Brewing Issue" of Zymurgy, a popular homebrewing magazine (Volume 8, No. 4, 1985), and provide no information themselves. This is unfortunate, as sprouting grain can be fairly simple and straightforward, while drying it out again is when you encounter problems. Granted, there were about 3 pages of useful information, but I wouldn't call that worth an entire book.

It does have a section on other herbs used in brewing, but I much prefer "Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers" by Buhner for the number of recipes and types of plants covered (i.e. nettle beer, dandelion beer using the plant and roots, ginger beer, spruce beer, etc). The hop-growing section does cover how to make a hop-dryer, a "oast."