Preface to the Fourth Edition

The first edition of How to Brew was written in the late 1990s and subsequently published online at HowToBrew.com in June of 2000. It was very well received and immediately generated requests for a hard copy. The second edition was self-published in 2001 and began selling at homebrewing supply shops around the country. Brewers Publications became interested and a thoroughly revised third edition was published in 2006, and it has been a best seller ever since.

However, brewing technology does not stand still. This fourth edition that you are holding incorporates the many advances in both home and craft brewing that have occurred in the past ten years.

• • The variety of malts, hops, and yeast strains available has exploded, doubling or tripling in number.
• • We have advanced our understanding of the yeast cycle and fermentation, so that warm maturation of lagers is now common practice, producing a clean lager beer in three weeks instead of three months.
• • American IPA is now the most popular craft beer style and has changed the way we dry hop beers, from long and cold to short and relatively warm.
• • Brew-in-a-bag (BIAB), which I first wrote about in 2007 as part of Brewing Classic Styles with Jamil Zainasheff, has become a mainstream brewing technique for all-grain brewing, using less equipment and higher water-to-grist ratios to shorten the brew day.
• • In 2013, Brewers Publications released the Water book, written by me and Colin Kaminski, as part of the Brewing Elements series, and that knowledge has been incorporated into this edition of How to Brew.
• • Brewing equipment has undergone a renaissance as well; part of the hobby of homebrewing was innovating and repurposing common kitchen items into brewing equipment that you built yourself, and while it still is part of the hobby, there is a lot of purpose-made stainless steel brewing equipment to choose from these days.

When I first wrote How to Brew, most people were brewing beer in order to have beer styles that were otherwise not available. Import beers were available in specialty bottle shops, but were often old and oxidized. Today, craft beer is everywhere, and, despite the preponderance of IPA, many ale and lager styles are readily available. Today’s homebrewer is brewing for the pure pleasure of creating a beer, rather than to fill a void in availability. Therefore, my focus in this latest edition is to help you understand how to brew the best beer.

To do this I have listed my “Top Five Brewing Priorities for Brewing Great Beer” in chapter 1, and each chapter thereafter builds on those priorities to help you understand where the different ingredients and processes fit into the overall scheme of things. Some chapters may be more technical than you are expecting, but hopefully I did a good job of laying out the big picture to illustrate what is most important, so that you can skim through or skip over those pages until you have gained more experience and are actually interested in that subject.

I have learned a lot over the past ten years and I hope this edition will help you understand more about your brewing and enable you to brew your best beer ever.