Home Brew Forum

Hi there,

Are there any books people recommend on the history of brewing, beer culture and the like? I've got a lot of brewing books, but very little on brewing history.

Cheers,

CJR

'Radical Brewing' by Randy Mosher is a pretty interesting mix of history of beers styles and recipes, I'd recommend it

Martyn Cornell's books. He does a great blog too, as does Ron Pattinson.

The closest I can get is IPA by Chris Steele. It's a very good read and goes back to the early 18th century - only as regards IPA of course.

EDIT: Sorry, Mitch not Chris.

'Old British Beers and How to Make Them' is a good place to start, along with anything by Clive La Pensee, I've just ordered his 'The Historical Companion to House-brewing', which I've wanted for a while.

Eadweard wrote:Martyn Cornell's books. He does a great blog too, as does Ron Pattinson.

I have Martyn Cornell's "Amber, Gold and Black: The History of Britain's Great Beers" on its way to me from Amazon. It looks very interesting and gets some good reviews.

Cheers everybody.

I've already got Radical Brewing as well as, thanks to Christmas Amazon vouchers, a number of other books for my brew shelf. I'll take a look at these others too.

jimp2003 wrote:

Eadweard wrote:Martyn Cornell's books. He does a great blog too, as does Ron Pattinson.

I have Martyn Cornell's "Amber, Gold and Black: The History of Britain's Great Beers" on its way to me from Amazon. It looks very interesting and gets some good reviews.

I was about to buy that from Amazon but couldn't get free postage so was a bit miffed and didn't buy, did I make a mistake?

To the OP, I recommend "Tasting Beer" by Randy Mosher, excellent for both history (nutshell variety) and er how to taste beer. One I think is quite an important one is the new book by Ron Pattinson "The Home Brewer's Guide To Vintage Beer", which is a result of his extensive research in to actual Brewer's Journals and explodes a number of myths in brewing (some of which are repeated by Mosher) with the added advantage of translating real old recipes into ones that can be followed by homebrewers with measurements for our brew length.

Someone bought me Pete Brown's "Man Walks into a Pub" for Xmas. It's quite amusing. Maybe not a balanced historical tome, but I learned a lot about the social history of beer and drinking (and the temperance movement which seems to be a bugbear of his). I quite enjoyed it as it's a book you can read all the way though in one go. I think he's written a number of books on the general subject (or possibly the same book a number of times).

Ian Marchant's The Longest Crawl is one of the most evocative books on all things beer, related to the iconic pub crawl. His version is an epic saga and one that will entertain any aficionado of all the things they love about pub's and beer. At less than £3 a bargain (second hand).

"Radical Brewing" is a good thing. I have read it. many interesting tips