Reddit reviews Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse (Brewing Elements)

I've read Designing Great Beers and it's a great resource as a style guide, but it leans much more towards the empirical side when it comes to explaining things. If you're looking for something a little more scientific and data-driven there are some other really good options.

Suggestions:

• The Brewing Elements series: Water
  / Yeast
  / Malt
  / Hops - Very specific and science driven focus on each element.
  
• American Sour Beers - Mostly focused on sour beers, but gets really deep into the scientific aspects of it all (bonus: written by /u/oldsock).
  
• Vintage Beer - Data-driven resource on the science behind long-term aging.

The Brewing Elements series is great.

Throw hops at it.

Like absurd amounts.

Think of ludicrous amounts and triple that. Then every single addition but a small bit of clean bitterness FWA, is made at the flame out or later. Your fermenation hop schedule is three times what your flame out schedule was, and you dry hop it twice.

I'm being sarcastic. But hop usage these days are insane on certain styles.

This series:

Water

Hops

Malt

Yeast

Oh, remember to enjoy it.

The malt book comes out soon as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1938469127?pc_redir=1410690504&robot_redir=1

Designing Great Beers
Water
Hops
Malt
Yeast

This is my full list of books from /r/homebrewing but it includes pro level books:

New Brewers:

• How to Brew - John Palmer
  
• Brewing classic styles- Jamil Zainasheff
  
• Designing Great Beers - Ray Daniels
  
• The Complete Joy of Homebrewing - Charlie Papazian
  
  Continued Learning:
  
  
• Water - Palmer and Kaminsky
  
• Yeast - Zainicheff and White
  
• Malt - Mallet
  
• Hops - Hieronymous
  
• Experimental Brewing - Drew Beechum and Denny Conn
  
• Radical Brewing - Randy Mosher
  
• Brewing Better Beer - Gordon Strong
  
  Specialty/Advanced/Other:
  
  
• American Sour Beers - Michael Tonsmeire (/u/oldsock)
  
• Brewing with Wheat - Stan Hieronymus
  
• IPA: Brewing Techniques - Mitch Steele
  
• Farmhouse Ales - Phil Markowski
  
• Brew Like a Monk - Stan Hieronymus
  
• New Brewing Lager Beers - Gregory J. Noonan
  
• Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers- Stephen Harrod Buhner
  
• Drink: a cultural history of alcohol - Iain gately
  
• Principals of Brewing Science - George Fix
  
  Business Books:
  
  
• Brewing Up a Business - Sam Calagione
  
• Brewers association Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery - Cantwell, among others
  
• SO you want to start a brewery - Tony magee
  
• Beyond the Pale: The Story of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co - Ken Grossman
  
• Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery Paperback –Steve Hindy & Tom Potter
  
  Technical Readings (Textbooks might be expensive):
  
  
• Brewery Operations Manual - Tom Hennessy
  
• Beer Packaging - Master Brewers Association
  
• Technology Brewing and Malting - W. Kunze, 5th Edition
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 1 - Many Authors
  
• Malting and Brewing Science, Volume 2 - Many Authors
  
• Brewing yeast and fermentation - Boulton and Quain

I have this yet haven't got the chance to read it yet, but have heard it is excellent. There is a whole series of books, each one on a particular subject of yeast, water, hops, and Malt

Ah.

For that, I was using a calculator. Even though BeerSmith is relatively cheap, I'm not crazy about its interface and, having used it in the past, I'm just not a fan of it.

I actually use the calculator from Brewer's Friend, but anything like BrewToad or whatever will work.

Outside of that, the grains themselves have specific yields they can offer. How to Brew has a rough table of the theoretical yields you can get out of the specific grains. Granted, this is a guarantee, it's pretty much averages and taking into account perfect scenarios.

Calculators will do almost all of the work for you, unless you really want to do it by hand, then all the math is in Malt.

Otherwise, the calculator can give you a rough estimate of what you'll get if you just start doing a little plug and play. It never seems to get super low, as I'll typically mash low and ferment high, as to get my saisons down to as close to ~1.000 as possible, but it's not usually too bad for guesstimating extraction, color, and the like.

I read this book called Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse by John Mallett. It got me really interested in brewing. I was unaware of malt extract kits before I started looking at how to brew. I already knew I wanted to create recipes based on the taste, smell, mouthfeel, and degrees Lovibond of a grain.

I use Fedora Linux as my primary desktop, and someone pointed me to BrewTarget. This software has an inbuilt database of several all grain recipes. I set up the brewing equipment section with my kettle size and evaporation rate (volume/hour), MLT volume, thermal mass, and dead space. I used the BrewTarget Saison as a base, then substituted the default grains with the equivalents available at the local brewing store. I also modified the hops additions a bit because the original recipe called for Hallertau AA 4.7% and all I could get were Hallertau AA 2.7%.

Once all this was entered into the BrewTarget software, I ran the mash wizard and it calculated my strike water and batch sparge volumes and temperatures for a goal post boil volume of 5.5 gallons.

The mash was 4.1 gallons heated to 166.9° for target of 147° for 60 min. It was locked down at 148° for the whole hour. The batch sparge was 4.6 gallons heated to 183° for target of 165° for 15 min. I hit 167°.

The first brew I did was a Brown Ale. I did not have my equipment properly set up in BrewTarget and my mash and sparge temperatures were both low by 5-8°. It turned out ok, but I think that the lower mash temp extracted way more sugar. OG was supposed to be 1.046 but I ended up with 1.056. It hit the expected FG of 1.013 and has a bit more EtOH than would be expected for a brown ale.

In addition Malt and Hops are useful resources.

http://www.amazon.com/Water-Comprehensive-Brewers-Brewing-Elements/dp/0937381993

http://www.amazon.com/For-The-Love-Hops-Bitterness/dp/1938469011/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

http://www.amazon.com/Yeast-Practical-Fermentation-Brewing-Elements/dp/0937381969/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z

http://www.amazon.com/Malt-Practical-Guide-Field-Brewhouse/dp/1938469127/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=0WQ72HEQ20V3E7C82R98

Maybe a note that Malt is coming out in September to complete the series.

Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse (Brewing Elements)

One of the Brewing Elements series written by John Mallett and published by Brewers Publications.

The other 3 books in this series; Hops, Water and Yeast are also great.