Book Review: The Homebrewer’s Garden

This book came to me as a Chirstmas gift this year.  I’ve been struggling with growing hops the last two years.  While the hops bines usually grow well I have not had the yeilds I would have liked.  As you can imagine, I was very excited to get this book to help me with the finer or more complex details of growing hops.

This book was a very simple read, easy to understand concepts and language that was clear & concise.  I was able to read the book in several hours, one day of Jury Duty.  The book is  divided up in to four basic sections, Hops, Herbs, Malting and Recipes.  I got the most benefit from the hops sections since that is what I was most interested in.  There was tons of great information from planting to harvesting, soil minerals to pest control.  I was looking for information on pest control & treatment, pruning and soil care.  This book covered all with good detail.

Admittedly I skipped much of the Herb section, but it has lots of great information on how to include different herbs in your beer.  The malting section was very interesting; I knew the basics of malting but this book had good detail about how to do it at a homebrewer level.  The only thing I found missing from that section was smoked malt.

The last section which I skimmed, was a collection of homebrew recipes.  On the surface it appears to do a nice job of incorporating may of the ingredients/techniques described in the book.

A good book for me and would also say a Great book for the homebrewer looking to make a start of really putting the “Home” in homebrewing,

Post to Twitter Post to Plurk Post to Yahoo Buzz Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Facebook Post to Reddit Post to StumbleUpon

Leave a Reply