Brewing Made Easy is a handy-dandy little guide to getting new brewers up and brewing quickly. By following this book’s easy-to-follow instructions, anyone can become a confident homebrewer in short order.

This is the second edition (the first edition dates to 1996). Both editions were written by Joe and Dennis Fisher. The brothers Fisher run an organic farm in Eastern Maine, and they also co-authored the popular The Homebrewer’s Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs (1998).

As the title suggests, this book was written with the beginner brewer in mind. After opening with the supportive exhortation, “You Can Brew It!” the following chapters cover the topics of Brewing with Malt Extracts, The Second Batch, Ingredients and Recipe Formulation, and, finally, Recipes and Styles. This slim paperback also includes a glossary, appendices on Amounts and Conversions and How to Use the Hydrometer, Sources for Supplies and Information, and an index.

First, the good news.

This small-format guide achieves its goal of making it easy and (relatively) painless to brew beer at home. It effectively conveys the simplicity of brewing with malt extracts, and it walks the reader through step-by-step instructions for getting it all right. The 25 recipes are mostly solid—if not a bit redundant—and the plentiful graphs and charts aid in keeping it all easy to understand. Simple line drawings and illustrations show various equipment items and ingredients.

There are also helpful hints that can only come from people with experience in the craft of brewing; I especially liked the idea of using a brand-new paint roller tray for holding small sanitized pieces of equipment, as well as having a spray bottle filled with sanitizing solution always at the ready.

Now for the downside. As an author myself (this reviewer is the author of Homebrewing for Dummies, a competitive book in this field), I can’t help but notice the loose editing of this book. Aside from the niggling things such as typos and incorrect cross references (where is page (00)?), I found the writers’ broad assumptions and overgeneralizations a bit troubling. I know from experience that newbie brewers often sweat and fret over every little point and can be easily misled by careless wording. As is often said, the devil is in the details.

Even more troubling were the handful of technical issues I identified (I couldn’t help noticing that the publisher did not list a technical editor in the front matter of this book); I’m guessing some of these are leftovers from the first edition that were never updated.

For instance:

To my knowledge, and seemingly confirmed by an Internet search, hop plugs are no longer available in the American market and haven’t been for years.

Gelatin is listed along with Irish moss as “finings.” Maybe this is a bit hyper-technical, but gelatin is not a fining agent. And the other true fining, isinglass, was not mentioned at all.

The small section devoted to Adjusting Water Chemistry is somewhat confusing, especially in suggesting substituting “half bottled water” to make tap water softer. Bottled water is available in a wide range of mineral content; I believe the authors meant to suggest using distilled water.

Perhaps most glaring of all was the repeated practice of steeping base grains. Several of the book’s recipes call for small portions of Munich or Vienna malt to be used as one would use a specialty grain. This is not recommended, as these grains are intended for mashing.

All in all, this book is still a good start for new brewers, as it contains the rudimentary instructions for brewing beer at home. But considering the surplus of other more-detailed homebrewing books available, I would suggest spending the extra couple of dollars on those instead. Your money would be wisely invested in your brewing future.

Built like a guide, the book has chapters that are divided by beer styles and offer detailed tasting notes along with examples of beers commonly available in the marketplace. Then Fletcher notes the detailed nuances of cheese that pair well with said beers, and why. The author, a seasoned food journalist, deftly weaves in stories of the brewers and cheesemakers to illustrate her pairing points.

Although she is based in San Francisco, Fletcher doesn’t tend to favor the West Coast when it comes to beer suggestions or specific creameries. Seeing how both beer and cheese are universal, this is a global tour of gastronomical and sensory delights that will have you scouring both the local and import aisles.

All the major beer styles are covered, and even humble workhorses like brown ales and cheddar get their due. But it’s the way that Fletcher tackles complex beers like lambics and Flanders red and brown ales that really helps both educate and explain why they work with triple-cream cheeses, aged Gouda or even chèvre. Here she also acknowledges when pairings just don’t work.

“As for fizzy, highly sweetened fruit lambics, think of them as refreshment, perhaps, but not as good partners for cheese,” she writes.

A solid hardcover, this book deserves to be displayed on a coffee table rather than hidden on a shelf. Also best to keep it close at hand, since the beer and cheese pairing chart at the rear of the book will be getting quite the workout as you explore the world of pairings.

In his newest book, Shakespeare’s Pub, English author Pete Brown takes the seat beside you in the George Inn, buys you a pint, then spins a twisting, heady story that shuttles in time between Roman Britain and today, and in scale between the local shop and the Empire. The cover calls it “a barstool history of London as seen through the windows of its oldest pub.”

Inns large and small once packed the Borough High Street that leads to London Bridge, but the George is the only one left, much reduced from its glory days as a coaching inn. As Brown notes, the George wasn’t the biggest of the inns, nor the most famous—that honor would belong to the Tabard next door, where Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury, or the White Hart, a setting for both Shakespeare and Dickens. But the George is the only survivor, and because today it is the last of its kind, the George is Brown’s vehicle.

In researching Shakespeare’s Pub, the author spent a year exploring libraries, on-line sources, academic theses, museums and public document archives, and compiled an exhaustive 25,000-word document that he calls “the most boring thing that’s ever been written about the George Inn.” Brown is a storyteller, not a reciter of dates and facts, and he proposes to use the dates and facts as the scaffolding for a marvelous narrative.

This is terrific storytelling, but also a smart move: By rejecting the list-maker’s approach to history, Brown gives himself permission to take a more speculative approach to his tale. He has the facts, but there aren’t all that many of them, so the story of the George Inn has to be told at times with facts on loan from other sources.

For example, since the George burned down and was rebuilt in 1676, Brown has no way of knowing what it looked like in its earlier, perhaps original, incarnation. But he visits medieval coaching inns still standing in towns far from London and asks the reader to accept that his findings could apply to the George.

More extrapolation is needed to connect the George to the book’s title character. Fair warning: The name Shakespeare’s Pub is a bit of a bait and switch because there’s no solid evidence that Shakespeare ever drank there. But he lived in Southwark, and the Globe and other theaters were constructed there. It is reasonable to surmise that Shakespeare knew the George and “drank there at least occasionally.”

That kind of guesswork might horrify purists, but it’s a plausible interpretation of the facts Brown is able to marshal, and it launches him on a wonderful chapter on the players, actors and entertainments that thrived south of the Thames.

The George and its neighboring inns entered their heyday during the 18^th and 19th centuries, when the stagecoach dominated travel. “[D]uring that brief period, the stagecoach transformed inns like the George, for a time, into arguably the most important businesses in the country.”

Then, just as quickly, another transformation in the movement of people and goods made the inns obsolete: The railroad arrived, bypassing the George and delivering its cargo to the heart of the city. Though the great inns reinvented themselves again, many failed.

The George survived through a combination of remarkable personalities and national nostalgia, and Pete Brown makes us happy it did. And, despite the good laughs to be found between the covers of Shakespeare’s Pub, there is deep, unaffected love for the places like the George, where Brown finds “a sense of place, a collection of memories that have accumulated in the space over the time it has been used for its unchanging purpose, over the centuries that people have laughed, drunk, argued, eaten, flirted, slept and done business there.”

This is a marvelous tale. Pour yourself a traditional London porter and settle in for a good read.

Thanks to Tom Acitelli, I can scratch number three off that list. He’s done the job and with verve, common sense and the requisite butt-in-the-chair hard work. (That last cannot be underestimated. Here’s an insider secret about books: Each one represents thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours of work on the part of the author.)

Acitelli, a journalist, brought three valuable tools to his project: a reporter’s nose for story, a writer’s ear for pitch-perfect prose, and a historian’s mania for accuracy and context. As impressive, he hacked his own path through the terrain. Rather than rely on the work of other writers, Acitelli started from scratch. He interviewed dozens of people (in most cases drawing from them details that, thus far, no other historian of beer has extracted, presumably because the right questions had not been asked). He tracked down people no one else had thought to talk to. He scoured newspapers, trade papers, magazines and websites. (His documentation of that last is extraordinary: It’s easy to forget how much the visual and technical structure of our online world has changed in 15 years. He reminds us.) As a result, The Audacity of Hops is rich with small but telling details on which historians rely—details that, when stitched together, weave a tapestry that tells us humans who we are and how and why we do what we do, details that make, in other words, what we call “history.”

As important, however, Acitelli pitched his authorial tent outside the craft beer bubble. That outsider’s perch allowed him to fold craft beer’s history into a larger national (and even international) context, and his story is better for it. He recounts the impact of the short-lived but powerful media role played by “yuppies” in the 1980s. The big “shake-out” of the 1990s gets full treatment, but he lays it out against the backdrop of that decade’s startup/dot-com culture, which inhaled every last jot of investment dollars, leaving little for nondigital entrepreneurs and thus stalling craft brewing’s momentum. He details what it’s easy to overlook (because we’re so surrounded by it now): the way in which digital media (a byproduct of the ’90s tech boom) altered craft brewing’s course, pushing it beyond its early infrastructure of Boulder-driven conferences and festivals into a larger arena. The result is a rich, fully fleshed history of the people and ideas that drove (and still drive) the creation of the American craft brewing industry.

If there’s a flaw, it’s the one that haunts every writer who breaks new research ground: the urge (OK, more like a mania) to record and thus preserve every last bit of who-what-where. As a result, at times the book is a bit too inside-baseballish. Make no mistake: As a historian, I stand with Acitelli in erring on the side of excess. His careful work has preserved what might otherwise have been lost: names, dates, crucial connections between and among the founders and the succeeding generations who built the industry.

And, too, while Acitelli gives the dons of beer writing, Michael Jackson and Fred Eckhardt, their due, there are others who’ve slogged in the trenches nearly as long. I would have liked more about them and the way in which, over the years, they, too, helped invent beer writing and not only spread the craft beer gospel but shaped its content, too.

But those are quibbles. Acitelli’s book is a first-rate piece of front-line history, and this is the book that craft beer fans have been waiting for. If you run into Acitelli somewhere, buy the guy a beer. He deserves it. (Hey! There’s a project for collaborative- and theme-crazed craft brewers: Acitelli Ale, anyone? Audacity Amber? Hopped History?)

Ask those who started brewing their own beer at home back in the early ’90s who their go-to source of technical information was, and it’s likely they’ll point to Dave Miller. It was Dave Miller’s Homebrewing Guide that went on to become one of the most influential books on homebrewing ever published.

In the 20 years since writing his seminal work, Miller made the jump to professional brewing: first as brewmaster at the St. Louis Brewery, then at Blackstone Restaurant and Brewery in Nashville, TN. Along the way, his beers were frequently recognized in prestigious competitions such as the Great American Beer Festival (nine awards) and the World Beer Cup (five awards).

In his latest work, Brew Like a Pro, Dave returns to his roots with another book that is destined to inspire a generation of at-home brewers who yearn to follow in his footsteps. Dave’s professional insights and acumen, coupled with his homebrewer’s practicality, make brewing like a pro a very attainable goal for his readers.

This book is not particularly dense at 272 pages, but it packs a lot of good information into every chapter. Best of all, that information is presented in clear, concise and easy-to-digest language. Even in the most technical of passages, Miller breaks down the weighty details into simple explanations.

Looking over the table of contents, there’s an obvious path for the reader to follow. Miller’s plan is to draw on the similarities between brewing professionally at a small-scale commercial brewery and brewing at home for fun.

After a perfunctory review of the beer-making processes at the homebrewing level, Miller transitions in the next chapter to an insider’s view of a pub brewery. Here he does a walk-through of the equipment and components found at typical small brewery and how they function in the beer-making process. From there, he devotes the largest chapter in the book to providing detailed options for building a similar, but smaller, brewery in one’s home.

Add three more chapters on brewing materials (ingredients), homebrewing operations and advanced techniques, and you’re on your way to homebrewing heaven. Throw in “A Handful of Recipes” for a dozen standard beer styles, and you’re good to go.

Of greatest interest to the brewing nerds out there is the chapter on “Projects” for do-it-yourselfers. These six projects include making a lauter tun and hot liquor back, a two-stage heat exchanger and a pump speed control, among others.

All of this information is aided by a smattering of graphs and sidebars, and a lot of nicely rendered line drawings (although I found their faux sepia color a bit unusual). The one and only photo in the book is of the author in his early commercial brewing days.

In first looking this book over, I got only five pages in before concluding that I was going to like the remaining 267. It took only his explanation of why, when getting back into homebrewing after so many years away from the hobby, he didn’t want to just buy a complete pre-made brew system. Miller writes:

“I wanted to do something different. I’ve always had a minimalist streak, which I suppose is a euphemism for being cheap. I blanch at the prices of these ‘ready-to-brew systems.’ I wanted to demonstrate, first of all to myself, that you don’t need all that to make first-class beer.”

I think that pretty neatly sums up Miller’s homebrewing philosophy as well as one of the guiding objectives of his new book. Check it out.

The organization and narrative reflect a solid undercurrent of both writers’ beer passion. They argue that the world of macro brewing is suffering because of changes in the market and that craft brewing represents the future. Furthermore, the authors feel that the reason why regions where craft beer has failed to launch are both poorly made or unimaginative beers from the first generation of craft brewers. Finally, the authors’ love of beer, and all things beer, moves the writing away from rigorous structures and toward embracing the quality of the revolution.

The obligatory opening sections on all aspects of beer go well beyond the typical survey. The yeast section is detailed and extensive, as is worthy of the ingredient. The fermentation chart simplifies without dumbing down a complex process.

The authors have taken a very balanced and realistic approach to beer styles, paying respect to the classics, but leaving extensive room for innovation and experimentation. They have the same attitude toward glassware: defining a few classics, then opting for a preference for stemware. Their food and beer pairing section should hang in every beer lover’s kitchen. Their comments on beer and sweets are simply insightful.

The beer reviews are more than just a roundups of profiles. Webb and Beaumont have gathered highly respected examples from each country/region they cover. A beer lover could die satisfied should he or she sample all of the beers recommended by the co-authors.

The reviews themselves go well beyond a recitation of statistics or an account of sensory experiences. The pair stray into a more personal vision of beer reviews: Tripel Karmeliet is described as a “comfort beer”; Rodenbach, they suggest, might be best served from an ice bucket in the summer. My favorite was the description of a brewery as “possessed of confidence and apparently limitless common sense.”

Each section, region or country, includes two particularly fun features. There are sidebars with references for fantastic beer experiences or recommended cultural behaviors. (In Prague, one is reminded that the man precedes the woman into a bar, watching out for barroom brawls.) The second treat is the maps, displaying the geography of craft beer expansion and potential vacation paths.

As with any tour de force, one can quibble with points of view. Giving the Campaign for Real Ale credit for starting the craft beer revolution could be a stretch. Overlooking the early days of the organization now called the Brewers Association seems a gap. Also, the occasional odd fact: They locate Boulder Brewery outside of Denver, instead of in their hometown of Boulder. Yet these are quibbles in a massive and beautiful read.

There are also many humorous aspects, such as the imaginative captions the authors appended to the fabulous photographic spreads that are bereft of any beer or brewing images. My personal favorites are the “long road for America’s craft beers” and the caption for the causeway to Lindisfarne, which alone is worth the price of the book.

Every beer lover and every brewer should have a copy of this book. In addition to helping leave behind any stridency, the Atlas will introduce all to the global revolution and the worldwide community of craft beer, craft brewing and craft beer lovers.

Bauweraerts, the founder of the Chouffe Brewery, has produced a very interesting autobiography (ably translated by Cathy Behan). Pierre Celis was the Belgian counterpart to Fritz Maytag, someone who took a ruined old brewery and transformed it into a craft-brewing powerhouse. Bauweraerts is comparable to Ken Grossman, in that he is the first modern Belgian craft brewer to be a success.

When Bauweraerts created Chouffe Brewery in 1982, it was the first new brewery in Belgium since Celis revived Hoegaarden as the Celis Brewery in 1966. The event was so unusual that when Bauweraerts made his first 49-liter batch, he had five alcohol tax agents witnessing the event, just to make sure tax collection procedures were properly followed.

In fact, Bauweraerts writes, he had to get special permission from the regional alcohol tax collection agent to brew a batch of less than 100 hectoliters. “Our little brewery came nowhere near the capacity of even one-tenth of the normal minimum quantity at the time,” he writes.

The Chouffe Brewery has, from its outset, been known for its quirky sense of humor. The postal code for Achouffe, where the brewery had its start, is 6666, so Bauweraerts and his colleagues decided that six was their lucky number. They sell clocks warning customers not to drink before six—and of course every digit on the clock is a six. Three devoted Chouffe fans even took their favorite beer with them to Mount Everest—and made sure to drink their beers when they reached 6666 meters!

Chouffe’s humor also extends to its recipes. When the brewers learned that competitors claimed to be using impossibly high amounts of a relatively rare variety of Belgian cherries, Chouffe posted a recipe for one of its beers, which claimed to use precisely nine Brussels sprouts in the boil. A homebrewer adapted the recipe—and made sure his version had a half a Brussels sprout in it.

My Chouffe Story tells of the growth of Chouffe, which was taken over by Duvel Moortgat in 2006. There are accounts of how Bauweraerts and his colleagues sold Chouffe all over the world, as well as detailed descriptions of all the beers Chouffe has ever made.

Chris Bauweraerts is a charming writer, and My Chouffe Story is a very enjoyable history of one of Belgium’s quirkiest and most unusual breweries.

It is poetic kismet that Myers penned this beery tribute to North Carolina, as anyone who has met him will immediately sense his passion for beer. His résumé includes the North Carolina Brewers Guild, the website www.topfermented.com, Cicerone Certification and brewmaster/owner of recently opened Mystery Brewing Company in Hillsborough, NC. The book reflects his personal connection with those that drive the industry in North Carolina, with a complete collection of individual brewery vignettes, many with first person accounts from the brewers themselves. This alone makes it a unique guide, a touch of rich conversational intimacy. Myers seats you on the barstool and in the brew house of every stop, showing that every brewer is different, yet all have a fairly similar story to tell. Each brewing establishment is given three or four pages, and every portrait captures the mood and philosophy of the venue. In addition, all are prefaced with a cover page of all information needed to access the brewery (website, address, hours of operation), and a regular and seasonal portfolio of brews. The book is conveniently organized by region: The Mountain, Piedmont, Triangle and Coast. He also lists the thirteen breweries in the works, a testament to his thorough and tenacious research, and a nod to the robust state of the state.

Sprinkled amidst the main text are important and noteworthy aspects of the North Carolina scene such as the Brewers Guild, a blossoming hop farming industry, and touchstone festivals and events. Also of note is a short tribute and account of Pop The Cap, the 2005 watershed legislation that lifted the 6% ABV limit that kicked the statewide industry into high gear. Myers artfully captures and conveys to the reader this vital and interesting moment. A brief history and timeline of North Carolina brewing sets up the book quite nicely in the first few pages. Myers’ beer advocacy also shines through with a few pages on the brewing process and beer styles, an appendix listing of stellar bottle shops (essential for both residents and visitors) which rival any in the United States and the abovementioned breweries pending, and a glossary of brewing terms.

There may be no more devoted and jovial Pied Piper for beer than Erik Lars Myers, and North Carolina is lucky to have him. His barnstorming book is not only a touring essential for the state, but also a perfect reflection and manifestation of his attitude, vision, investment and energy for the craft. Put both the book and a trip to North Carolina on your bucket, or rather, pint glass, list of essential attractions.

This is perhaps what makes Beer Cocktails such an appealing addition to the mixologist’s library: it’s the first of its kind. Organized into four sections—light lager, weissbier, and pale ale; Belgian beer; stouts and porters; and barleywine, brown ale, bock, and pumpkin beer—authors Howard and Ashley Stelzer lead readers from the basic Black and Tan to the nuanced One Sunset, a drink with seven different ingredients. Opening with a brief overview of brewing, beer styles, bar tools, and glassware, this slim yet handsome volume is cleanly designed and illustrated with more than 20 full-page color photographs. The novice bartender might have found pictures of the various types of glasses useful too, but this is a relatively minor quibble and one that’s partially remedied by the inclusion of a liquid conversion table in the backmatter.

While commonplace concoctions do make the occasional appearance in Beer Cocktails (do we really need the Boilermaker explained again?), the 50 recipes within are more often successful with inventive ingredients and playful names like the Empress’s New Clothes, a citrusy, spirited beverage that incorporates a dose of Russian imperial stout. In some cases, a bit of additional history on the recipes, their inspiration, or evolution would have been welcome, yet overall the writing is brisk and lighthearted beer quotes from M.F.K. Fisher, Dave Barry, Washington Irving, and Fritz Maytag add to the book’s lively character.

Altogether, roughly 30 beer styles are represented, and several recipes include variations for the budding mixologist with an urge to experiment. The Stelzers also account for seasonality, describing how to prepare warm Colonial Flips and Lager Grogs as well as the steps to follow for a De Pêche à la Mode, their take on the Bellini which features peach lambic, vanilla ice cream, peach preserves, and brandy. Granted, the Skippy, a frat party staple also known as the Pink Panty Dropper, could’ve been left out of this edition, but the Chic-Choc, with root beer schnapps, chocolate vodka, Dogfish Head Chicory Stout, and a bacon garnish is an inspired potion for the barfly (or reviewer) with a sweet tooth. In fact, I think I’ll have another.

Prague: A Pisshead’s Pub Guide is an excellent choice for any beer tourist spending a few days in the capital of the Czech Republic because it chunks the city’s best beer halls into 15 manageable pub crawls. Using Bahnson’s guide you can drink like a local in the city’s best pubs even if your flight landed just an hour ago.

Bahnson got the idea for the book back in 2003 while talking with some of his students about beer—“pivo” in Czech—and the best places to enjoy it. He says the book took longer than he thought it would to complete and he was languishing a bit before it occurred to him that the great pubs should be organized by crawls to make them easier for people to enjoy.

“I’ve visited every pub in the book,” Bahnson said over a beer at the Pivovarsky Klub. “You really have to if you are going to write a real guide book. Prague is a city with many pubs and these are my favorites.”

On a recent visit to Prague, I used Bahnson’s book to find a number of neat spots I might have missed. Most beer fans will find their way to U Fleku, Zlatého Tygra and Zlý Časy on their own. But this insider’s guide will also turn you on to places like Bredovský Dvůr, U Bergnerů, U Sadu and U Medvíku.

Prague: A Pisshead’s Pub Guide is worth reading before heading to the city even if you only consume the two pages that deal with the “language of pivo.” Menus become easier to understand once you know the difference between Lehké Pivo, Výcepní Pivo, Ležák, Speciál and Porter.

The section on pub manners will also give you a leg up on making new friends at any Czech bar. “Dobrý den” (good day) is a universal greeting and “Pivo prosim” is a polite way to call for a beer. Warnings on where to sit—and not sit—ordering and how to tip will save you rookie embarrassment.