Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation (Brewing Elements Series)

Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation is a resource for brewers of all experience levels. The authors adeptly cover yeast selection, storage and handling of yeast cultures, how to culture yeast and the art of rinsing/washing yeast cultures. Sections on how to set up a yeast lab, the basics of fermentation science and how it affects your beer, plus step by step procedures, equipment lists and a guide to troubleshooting are included.

Customer Reviews:

Useful Homebrewing Book

By G. Schmidt - January 5, 2011

This is a pretty good home brewing book. It's NOT a yeast biology textbook or a yeast-ranching manual, though, and I think the other recent review is a bit unfair in its expectations. (If you're looking for that kind of information, it's out there. Start with George Fix.) It is technical enough to get its point across without requiring me to dig out old college textbooks to understand its references.

If you're an intermediate- to advanced-homebrewer, this is worth having. (True beginners should probably concentrate on big-ticket techniques first.) It will teach you everything you need to know to get the best performance out of yeast purchased from reputable sources and help you shepherd it through a typical 4 or 5 generations.

Good, but could have been better

By R. Mooney - March 1, 2011

I was really anticipating this book which may have unreasonably raised my expectations.

The first half of the book can be reasonably skipped by most people who have had almost any brewing experience and felt somewhat like filler to me.

The second half where there was actually some discussion of techniques and process was interesting. I would recommend this book to serious homebrewers for the second half, if only as a reference to help learn what you should go lookup in more detail. If nothing else the last couple of chapters are a decent survey of most basic yeast handling techniques. If it had been about as long, but more process and technique information it would have been better for my purposes.

don't get excited by the authors, this book is lacking.

By Y T - December 16, 2010

This book was very disappointing.

If you're hoping it will contain the information necessary to maintain yeast without reliance on commercial sources (after obtaining a culture) then it will be grossly inadequate. The over simplification of techniques (often times a complete omission) make this book useless to a professional; this simplification is so incredible that it is not much more than a primer for the homebrewer. Considering it was written by prominent professionals with a academic backgrounds in science, it is appalling that it reads like a hybrid between an amateur forum post and an advertisement for White Labs.

The book was truly lost for me upon reading the sentence: "An easy way to determine the proper amount of yeast for your batch and how big a starter you need is the free Pitching Rate Calculator at [...]" (p144). Anybody buying an entire book dedicated to beer yeast is far beyond needing a reference to that website.

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