Against All Hops

Are you a home brewer who’s tiring of the usual suspects, cycling through the same styles and flavors? Are you a professional brewer who’s cranking through the same catalogue of beers year after year, just adding more hops with each rotation? There might be a bit of salvation here for you. Join brewer Butch Heilshorn and discover gruits: incredible botanical beers that were brewed throughout the world for most of human history. Butch provides techniques and approaches for the intermediate to advanced brewer to create these unique out-of-the-box brews. These increasingly popular beers use a wide array of plants, often local to the brewer, to delight palates and ignite imaginations. Butch’s philosophy espouses a practical reverence for the earth, a deep appreciation for the plants he regards as brewing partners and a decidedly anti-authoritarian streak, encouraging brewers to use his recipes as a jumping off point for their own adventures in botanical brewing—the ability to capture the essence of a particular time and place. YA BETCHA YOU’LL DIG THESE BEERS!

The first fully illustrated guidebook for craft beer drinkers, pairing hyper-detailed photography with profiles of 50 of today’s most popular hop varieties. Hops are the most important ingredient in the beer we love, offering a spectrum of distinct aromas, flavors, and bitterness. Whether it’s a floral Cascade, spicy Saaz, juicy Citra, or a combination of different varieties, hop character has become the driving force behind craft brewing. The Book of Hops profiles fifty of the most sought-after hops from around the world, with intricate photography and notes on taste, composition, use, and origin, plus examples of the wonderful beers that showcase them. With contributions from today’s most important brewers and growers; a handy primer that breaks down the science, story, and production of beer; and hand-picked craft beer recommendations throughout, this fully illustrated guidebook is all you need to discover and fully savor your next favorite brew.

Grow a beer garden! Enhance the flavor, aroma, and personality of your homebrew by cultivating your own hops, herbs, and malt grains. With expert advice on choosing and maintaining the best plants for your needs, Joe Fisher and Dennis Fisher show you how to turn a small patch of backyard, or even a few window boxes, into a renewable brewing supply store. Discover the satisfaction that comes from brewing tasty beers using fresh homegrown ingredients.

Charting the birth and growth of craft beer across the United States, Acitelli offers an epic, story-driven account of one of the most inspiring and surprising American grassroots movements.

The original India Pale Ale was pure gold in a glass; a semi-mythical beer specially invented, in the 19th century, to travel halfway around the world, through storms and tropical sunshine, and arrive in perfect condition for a long, cold drink on an Indian verandah. But although you can still buy beers with ‘IPA’ on the label they are, to be frank, a pale imitation of the original. For the first time in 140 years, a keg of Burton IPA has been brewed with the original recipe for a voyage to India by canal and tall ship, around the Cape of Good Hope; and the man carrying it is the award-winning Pete Brown, Britain’s best beer write. Brazilian pirates and Iranian customs officials lie ahead, but will he even make it that far, have fallen in the canal just a few miles out of Burton? And if Pete does make it to the other side of the world with ‘Barry’ the barrel, one question remains: what will the real IPA taste like? Weaving first-class travel writing with assured comedy, Hops and Glory is both a rollicking, raucous history of the Raj and a wonderfully entertaining, groundbreaking experiment to recreate the finest beer ever produced.

Winner of 2014 U.S. Gourmand Drinks Award • Taste 5,000 years of brewing history as a time-traveling homebrewer rediscovers and re-creates the great beers of the past. The Brewer’s Tale is a beer-filled journey into the past: the story of brewers gone by and one brave writer’s quest to bring them—and their ancient, forgotten beers—back to life, one taste at a time. This is the story of the world according to beer, a toast to flavors born of necessity and place—in Belgian monasteries, rundown farmhouses, and the basement nanobrewery next door. So pull up a barstool and raise a glass to 5,000 years of fermented magic. Fueled by date-and-honey gruel, sour pediococcus-laced lambics, and all manner of beers between, William Bostwick’s rollicking quest for the drink’s origins takes him into the redwood forests of Sonoma County, to bullet-riddled South Boston brewpubs, and across the Atlantic, from Mesopotamian sands to medieval monasteries to British brewing factories. Bostwick compares notes with the Mt. Vernon historian in charge of preserving George Washington’s molasses-based home brew, and he finds the ancestor of today’s macrobrewed lagers in a nineteenth-century spy’s hollowed-out walking stick. Wrapped around this modern reportage are deeply informed tales of history’s archetypal brewers: Babylonian temple workers, Nordic shamans, patriots, rebels, and monks. The Brewer’s Tale unfurls from the ancient goddess Ninkasi, ruler of intoxication, to the cryptic beer hymns of the Rig Veda and down into the clove-scented treasure holds of India-bound sailing ships. With each discovery comes Bostwick’s own turn at the brew pot, an exercise that honors the audacity and experimentation of the craft. A sticky English porter, a pricelessly rare Belgian, and a sacred, shamanic wormwood-tinged gruit each offer humble communion with the brewers of yore. From sickly sweet Nordic grogs to industrially fine-tuned fizzy lager, Bostwick’s journey into brewing history ultimately arrives at the head of the modern craft beer movement and gazes eagerly if a bit blurry-eyed toward the future of beer.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Easter Island is home to the Easter Bunny's magical workshop--where do you think Santa got all his good ideas? Easter bunny Jr., aka E.B. (Russell Brand), would rather pursue his dream of becoming a rock star than hop along in his father's footsteps. Fred (James Marsden), an unemployed slacker, is trying to figure out what to do with his life when he accidentally injures the soon to be Easter Bunny and decides he's the one to take over the job. When these two collide, E.B. and Fred both discover what it takes to grow up.