Advanced Texts

I'm into my 4th year of all grain brewing, and I'm constantly thirsting for more advanced homebrewing knowledge. Even now that I'm brewing 10 gallon batches and splitting them, I get frustrated because it still takes so much time to compare the finished products.

I want to understand for instance, the flavors of hops in isolation, or what hops taste like in different timing additions. Obviously this would take me a gajillion years to brew enough examples. Same thing with malt and specialty grains. The conventional homebrewing texts say, "Brew some SMASH beers!" While there's a ton of value in that, how long would it take me to get through only a few examples when I brew biweekly? There's got to be some distilled advanced knowledge out there that states things like, "At our brewery, we found that flaked barley worked better than carapils as a body/mouthfeel builder because it has x flavor contribution in side by side results..." or, "We've found that simcoe has x flavor contribution in the 30 minute addition vs. y flavor contribution in the dry hop." Can you guys recommend anything?

What about advanced brewing texts? I'm sure there's cutting edge research papers being published all the time on hops, yeast, etc. Where can I read that stuff!!?!?!?? Grrrrr.

I don't have any recommendations for you regarding published literature (maybe check ASBC) but I have similar questions. Before I brew 5gal of my own recipe I'd like to make sure the ingredients will work out. Brewing is not like cooking where you get instant results and you'll lose a lot of time and money on a bad batch. My thoughts on this are simple: Brewing smaller batches! I am considering brewing maybe 1gal batches of a potential recipe and see how it turns out. Problem is though that my equipment is not suited for such small volumes and I'd have to improvise, thus introducing more variables.... It's not easy unfortunately!

Nobody has any suggestions? Where are the Ubernerds out here?

You're looking for a book to tell you what ingredients taste like?

I think this is probably what you should start with:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0937381500/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

There are also numerous books dedicated to the brewing of specific styles. For example Brew Like a Monk, Brewing with Wheat, Farmhouse Ales, the series of Classic Styles books. Guess what For the Love of Hops is dedicated to.

There are many others as well, just look at the catalog by Brewer's Publications.

Advanced textbooks are focused more on the science of brewing (chemistry and biology). Brewing is both a science and an art, and I think you're confusing the two. There are plenty of books on the art of brewing that will give you plenty of ideas, but ultimately you're going to have to experiment and craft some beers yourself.

I second the designing great beers book. Loads of info broken down for each style. Also includes tables of yeasts and hops.

Charlie Bamforth just published a paper about the microbiology of brewing (linked on here earlier this week). Not the hop/grain info but great stuff about yeast metabolism.

Advanced brewing techniques by George & Laura Fixx

I second designing great beers by Daniels.

Also, go to your local university and type in brewing in the search catalog. Things come up for brewing text books. A lot of them are biochemical/food science based.

Also, I've read the brewing chemistry by Fix and Fix. OK, but not terribly helpful for homebrewers general use (and I used to be an organic chemist).

While this is directed at commercial brewers, A Textbook of Brewing by Jean De Clerck is a great book (heheh BOOKS). It is decades old and still a must have/go to for tons of brewing info.

http://www.siebelinstitute.com/prod...ypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=21&category_id=9

I was always frustrated with the hop descriptions that we have available to us. Pungent aroma? Floral and citrus? Great... you just explained 95% of American hops... I do have to say that is getting a lot better though. Try the Bud Light hop experiment with a bunch of different hops. I did it with a group of friends and it was both fun and educational.

http://www.bertusbrewery.com/2013/03/dry-hopped-bud-light.html

Another thing you can do is sit down with some of the commercial beers cloned from the "Can You Brew It" episodes on Brewing Network and evaluate and make notes on the beers as you evaluate the recipes and see what you pick up. You can evaluate a ton of different ingredient combinations without brewing a single beer.

Every time I have a new beer I find particularly enjoyable, I will visit the brewers website to see what I can learn about it. Sometimes they are surprisingly descriptive about their ingredients and or process.

Just a few ideas.

http://extension.ucdavis.edu/unit/brewing/pdf/111_163_Brewing_Info.pdf

page 13.

Thanks for some great ideas, guys. I added a nice list to my evernote including the following:


Brewing Michael Lewis and Tom Young, 2nd Edition
Introduction to Food Engineering, 4th Edition, Singh and Heldmann
Technology Brewing and Malting 4th Edition Wolfgang Kunze
Brewing Science and Technology Series II & III vol 1-4 Institute of Brewing & Distilling, "Blue Books"
Standards of Brewing, Charles Bamforth
Brewing: Science & Practice Briggs, Boulton
Craft Brewers Lab Methods
Handbook of Brewing, W. Hardwick, Diekke
Essays in Brewing Science, Michael Lewis & Charles Bamforth
A Textbook of Brewing By Jean De Clerck

As for Designing Great Beers—I've got the book and I've read it. There's some great recipe design ideas, but I'm also interested in the "metagame" of why certain recipe decisions were/are made.

Questions like: if you want more body in a session beer, do you use flaked oats, flaked barley, carapils, use crystal malts or just mash higher? What happens when you combine those methods? What are the flavor contributions/distinctions of using any one of those methods? Are some going to give you more residual sweetness, mouthfeel, both? Commercial breweries have learned this stuff backwards and forwards long ago, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of literature out there on the subject.

Keep the recommendations coming, I'm hearing some good things.

Also, does anyone know anywhere one can read recently published brewing papers?

You can read the Journal of the Institute of Brewing for free:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2050-0416/

>.Questions like: if you want more body in a session beer, do you use flaked oats, flaked barley, carapils, use crystal malts or just mash higher? What happens when you combine those methods? What are the flavor contributions/distinctions of using any one of those methods? Are some going to give you more residual sweetness, mouthfeel, both? Commercial breweries have learned this stuff backwards and forwards long ago, but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of literature out there on the subject.

These are great questions that I'd like to know.
The easy answer is either you conduct the experiments yourself, which is time consuming.
Or maybe you can get some club members, fellow brewers interested.

Use the same recipe, except vary one thing, such as add Carapils, or add flaked oats. Then compare these variations. Even that may be dependent on the recipe, and is subjective, with just a small sample of brewers.

I would be up for participating in an experiment like this, I like in northern NJ and work in NYC.

I'm posting this because I haven't seen anyone bring this up yet, but If you're looking for published academic research you'll have a hard time getting your hands on it. The companies that publish academic works restrict access, and unless they get paid big money, do not generally make content available to the public. It doesn't mean that it isn't available, rather, you're going to have a hard time finding it. My experience is with the Humanities, and it may be different for science-related material, but I doubt.

It's no different in the sciences. The information is typically published by a non profit such as the American Society of Brewing Chemists which must, as it has no source of funds other than membership dues and fees charged for services and access to its publications, hit up the public for those services and that access. Keep in mind that not that many people join the MBAA relative to the number that, for example, join the AHA. If you speak at an AHA conference your admission is free. If you speak at an MBAA conference you get 50% off the registration.

The information is available through university libraries for example. This is great if you live in Davis but not much help if you live in the woods of Main. From time to time these oganizations open up their archives to everyone. I believe the IBS did that.

suregork said:

You can read the Journal of the Institute of Brewing for free:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2050-0416/

Click to expand...

Thank you for the link!
I took a look at it but it's not technical enough for me, too easy and light weight.

Like article this for example -
Breeding of a high tyrosol-producing sake yeast by isolation of an ethanol-resistant mutant from a trp3 mutant (pages 264–268)




Some of them I can actually understand the title, and even some of the article:

Assessment of changes in hop resins and polyphenols during long-term storage (pages 269–279)