Home Brewing with BeerSmith: How to Brew and Design Great Beer at Home

by Bradley J. Smith

Are you looking to take your beer brewing from average to outstanding? Would you like to learn the latest brewing techniques? Home Brewing with BeerSmith is a compilation from over 70 of the best articles from the BeerSmith blog on detailed brewing methods, how to design beer recipes, and creating specific beer styles from around the world.This edition includes everything from how to get started with a simple batch to the latest all grain brewing methods, hop techniques, kegging, tips for making better beer, and articles focused around specific beer styles. Its a powerful compilation of brewing knowledge.Brad Smith has written over 125 articles on home brewing, wrote the top selling BeerSmith beer recipe software, and his weekly blog articles and newsletter at BeerSmith.com attract over 50,000 brewers each month.

Genres: Brewing, Beer

254 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 2010

Reviews

[Paul Sheldon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been a home brewer for about 3 years now, and have used BeerSmith from the very first batch. It is great software and makes a lot of complex calculations much easier. Creating new recipes, or adjusting existing ones to suit your taste become simple with a tool like this.

After 3 years of working my way through the basics, I decided it was time to learn some of the finer points of BeerSmith. Water profiles, mash profiles, whirlpool hopping, equipment profiles... all of these affect your efficiency and the quality and predictability of the final beer.

So I went looking for a book about home brewing with BeerSmith, and found "Home Brewing with BeerSmith" by the software's author Brad Smith. Perfect! With a title like that, you would think this book is about home brewing with BeerSmith right? Wrong. "Home Brewing with BeerSmith" is not a book about home brewing with BeerSmith.

Instead, the book is a loose collection of selected blog posts from the BeerSmith blog. There are a wide variety of topics covered, albeit in a somewhat haphazard fashion (the author admits this in the introduction) and the articles tend to jump around despite being organised into chapters. The result is a general book about home brewing that fails to cover any topic with any real depth, and barely mentions BeerSmith at all. Where BeerSmith is mentioned it is in general comments such as "brewing software such as BeerSmith" will calculate this for you, or give you that information. There are no screen shots from the software, no list of features, no explanations on using the software.

As a book about home brewing with BeerSmith it isn't one, simple as that. As a general book about home brewing, it is disjointed and doesn't cover the topics you would expect in such a book. There are much better, more coherent general home brewing texts available.

[Todd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of the BeerSmith software program, and Mr. Smith's online articles and emailed newsletter are often very informative. That's why I'm disappointed with this book. Poorly organized, with a "copy&paste" feel from various online discussions and bulletin boards sloppily pasted together in book form. His newsletters are here, but the layout and organization feels rushed and sloppy, it's not easy to find what you are looking for. Seeing as how this exact same info is on the Internet -- and search engines make it easy to find on the Internet, this book doesn't have much in the way of utility for me in the final analysis.

If you want to help make sure the author can keep food on the table and keep on supporting his great software program, cool. But otherwise there are many hundreds of better books on the subject.

[Hugo Ricardo Tibocha Gaona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended to beginners

Enthusiasts of beer.To who likes learning and practice at home but are interested in put their beer in the market