Customer Reviews

New Brewing Lager Beer: The Most Comprehensive Book for Home and Microbrewers

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This classic book has recently emerged from the land of the out-of-print books in a new edition, and I bought one as soon as I found out it was available. As an experienced homebrewer, I found it fascinating and informative. Noonan gets down to the hardcore chemical and technical foundations of brewing. And if you are interested in decoction mashing, Noonan provides what is probably the best description of the process that is available in print. This book is perfect for the professional brewer or advanced all-grain homebrewer.

However, the sheer volume of detail would bore a newcomer to brewing, or worse yet, scare him or her off. The beginner simply doesn't need this much highly-technical information. However, after that beginner gets a few batches under his belt, this book would be a good addition to his or her brewing library.

Noonan's text is simply superb. It is well organized, extremely detailed, and concise. This is a book about how and why you use each part of the brewing process. Noonan champions and explains the decoction mash, and even explains how to figure out if the malt you're using needs a decoction or an infusion mash. Appendices address both the infusion mash and the step mash, concisely, yet in detail.

The first third of the book, dedicated to ingredients, is alone worth the price. The detail on malt, brewing water, and yeast instantly imparts a greater understanding of and appreciation for the brewing process.

Read this book and begin to make informed decisions about your ingredients and the processes you use to brew beer from them.

This book is required reading for any serious brewer. After reading it, you will know how to choose your ingredients, the correct process for your ingredients and the proper equipment to make high quality beers. There is a lot of good advice for setting up your brewery (at home or otherwise) and the general guidelines for getting the most out of your brews. Even though I have been an all-grain brewer for some time, I find that I still go back to Noonan's book for practical information rather frequently. The only downside to this book is that the theoretical sections can be rather confusing. I am an engineer by education and I had a difficult time of understanding the enzyme reactions that occur in a mash or way hop resins combine with ions in the wort. A good deal of this in-depth theory made this book read like a college text, instead of like a book for the hobbyist.

Still, once you can distinguish the practical aspects from the theoretical information, this book is a must-have.

This is without question the best book for homebrewing available. It is the only one that covers decoction mashing in detail. Most German brewers and even Anheuser-Busch use this efficient method to get maximum flavor and yield for your beer. Noonan covers a broad area of topics in great detail. From brewing chemistry to practical procedures outlined for the intermediate to advanced brewer, Noonan hits the bullseye. If you have brewed a little and really want to get into it, get this book!

This is the best written of all the brewing books I've read. Noonan is concise and informative about every aspect of brewing lagers. The chapters are organized well ('Water', 'Hops', 'Malt') and he is easy to follow when he lays out the procedures for brewing an all-grain beer. Two minor complaints: Noonan trumpets the primacy of the decoction mash and derides infusion mashing, which may give the novice homebrewer some confusion as to the 'proper' way to proceed; the book is also very scanty with recipes, though it never promises any and indeed its technical side is so superior to Papazian or Miller or anyone else out there, it belongs on the shelf of every homebrewer anyway.

In January I was lucky to be stuck in Berlin with Salmonella...because it gave me a month to go through this book chapter by chapter, reading, and re-reading with highlighter. And after 2 reads and a well worn and hi-lit version of the book, I have to admit, it is a potent and nearly perfect book for understanding how brewing works on a variety of levels. Best of all, it follows through all methods of all grain brewing for lager beer in the traditional Germanic style.

Thought the book tends to repeat itself a little as it describes the process, then re-describes the brewing process for practical use, it is well descriptive with paragraphs making perfect sense on a variety of levels of information. Once read by a beginner, he then has a great source for a step into higher understanding of the chemistry and biology behind brewing.

I put this book as THE BEST brewing book on my ever expanding beer book shelf.

...this is /the/ book for those who wish to enter all-grain (as opposed to extract or partial mash) brewing. The title specifically references lager beers, but the information, techniques and theory described apply to the production of ales as well. Don't buy this book first if you are just entering brewing as a hobby, but do buy it second or third if you move on to all-grain methods.

Cheers to beers.

If you are thinking about getting started homebrewing, stop reading now and search for "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing," by Charlie Papazian, or "How to Brew," by John Palmer. If your goal is just to make "drinkable" beer every time, then this book is probably also more information than you need. I think the easiest way to write about it may be in a pros-and-cons format.

PROS: This book has more information about decoction mashing than any other source I've ever seen, book or not. I believe that any other book that has more information on the subject of decoction mashing may be a college textbook. Noonan describes in detail how your brewing procedure should be altered to accommodate different modification levels of malt, based on quantitative parameters such as SNR, and what advantages decoction mashing provides over infusion- or step-mashing. This book also has detailed information about how to read a typical analysis for malt, and how to gauge the quality of malt without an analysis. The appendices have equations and conversion factors for all kinds of parameters and units. Noonan even gives a 3rd-order polynomial curve fit for converting specific gravity to degrees Plato for a beer wort. Water chemistry is described in startling detail in this book (although the reader without some basic chemistry background may be somewhat lost).

CONS: The reason that I only give it three stars is not what I described above. My goal is to make the best beer possible every time - something I would rather drink than anything else in my fridge. Even then, this book comes up somewhat short. It claims to be "the most comprehensive book for home and microbrewers." In my humble opinion, it is not. In the guise of being an advanced book, it skips on vital background information that the reader probably needs, such as a description of the anatomy of barley. Instead, Noonan simply writes about it without ever having described the terms fully. In addition, it is a very dry read; out of the several brewing books that I have, this one has the hardest time keeping my attention. Most of the important quantitative information is presented as worksheets instead of equations, with the intention of being easier for mathematically-challenged readers. But using worksheets instead of equations, the reader may not know what parameters affect the calculation of a certain quantity. Rather, the reader will be sure that Line G and H affect Line K, and that Line E is the same as Line G, and that Line C divided by Line D is Line E, and that Lines A and B sum to give you Line C... etc. Obviously not as descriptive as equations, unless you want to sit down and make a list for yourself about what each line represents. Other than the subject of decoction mashing, this book doesn't cover MOST subjects in greater detail than some other books. For instance, John Palmer's "How to Brew" covers all the material about malt analyses and mash starches and sugars, while providing more background information and being easier to read.

In conclusion, if you're looking for a book with detailed information on decoction mashing (which I personally was), and would like to make sure you do it right, get this book. [Searching for "decoction mashing" on YouTube and watching the three-part video by BrauKaiser may help you too]. If you're just looking for a book with advanced homebrewing information, then I would recommend John Palmer's instead. If it's a book about brewing lagers that you're after, you may find that the information Palmer puts forth in his book is more concise than in this book.

Although this book has a lot of useful information in it, I was disappointed to find it was not about lager at all. It is simply a general purpose brewing book with a lot of emphasis on all grain brewing. This makes it hard to rate because as a lager book it gets zero stars, which is why it was on my Christmas wish list.

Greg Noonan is probably one of the best authors on brewing books. This book is a great reference for brewing lagers, if not just brewing alltogether. This book is backed by true data, not anecdotes. Whether brewing lagers or ales, this book should be on your brew library shelf!!