The Complete Guide To Growing Your Own Hops Malts And Brewing Herbs

Provides information on a variety of hops, grains, and herbs and offers instructions on their growth and harvest and the essentials of home brewing.

If you have a backyard, or even a sunny porch or balcony, you can grow your own hops, brewing herbs, and malt grains to enhance the flavor, aroma, and uniqueness of your home-brewed beer — and ensure that you have the freshest, purest, best ingredients possible. Simple instructions from experts Joe and Dennis Fisher guide you through every step of the process, from setting up your first hop trellis to planting and caring for your herbs, harvesting and drying them, malting grain, and brewing more than 25 recipes specifically designed for homegrown ingredients. This fully updated second edition includes a new section featuring color photography of the plants, expanded information on growing hops in small spaces, innovative trellising ideas, an expanded section on malting, new profiles of prominent grower/brewers, and up-to-date information on grain-growing best practices.

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.

With information on siting, planting, tending, harvesting, processing, and brewing It’s hard to think about beer these days without thinking about hops. The runaway craft beer market’s convergence with the ever-expanding local foods movement is helping to spur a local-hops renaissance. The demand from craft brewers for local ingredients to make beer—such as hops and barley—is robust and growing. That’s good news for farmers looking to diversify, but the catch is that hops have not been grown commercially in the eastern United States for nearly a century. Today, farmers from Maine to North Carolina are working hard to respond to the craft brewers’ desperate call for locally grown hops. But questions arise: How best to create hop yards—virtual forests of 18-foot poles that can be expensive to build? How to select hop varieties, and plant and tend the bines, which often take up to three years to reach full production? How to best pick, process, and price them for market? And, how best to manage the fungal diseases and insects that wiped out the eastern hop industry 100 years ago, and which are thriving in the hotter and more humid states thanks to climate change? Answers to these questions can be found in The Hop Grower’s Handbook—the only book on the market about raising hops sustainably, on a small scale, for the commercial craft beer market in the Northeast. Written by hop farmers and craft brewery owners Laura Ten Eyck and Dietrich Gehring, The Hop Grower’s Handbook is a beautifully photographed and illustrated book that weaves the story of their Helderberg Hop Farm with the colorful history of New York and New England hop farming, relays horticultural information about the unusual hop plant and the mysterious resins it produces that give beer a distinctively bitter flavor, and includes an overview of the numerous native, heirloom, and modern varieties of hops and their purposes. The authors also provide an easy-to-understand explanation of the beer-brewing process—critical for hop growers to understand in order be able to provide the high-quality product brewers want to buy—along with recipes from a few of their favorite home and micro-brewers. The book also provides readers with detailed information on: • Selecting, preparing, and designing a hop yard site, including irrigation; • Tending to the hops, with details on best practices to manage weeds, insects, and diseases; and, • Harvesting, drying, analyzing, processing, and pricing hops for market. The overwhelming majority of books and resources devoted to hop production currently available are geared toward the Pacific Northwest’s large-scale commercial growers, who use synthetic pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers and deal with regionally specific climate, soils, weeds, and insect populations. Ten Eyck and Gehring, however, focus on farming hops sustainably. While they relay their experience about growing in a new Northeastern climate subject to the higher temperatures and volatile cycles of drought and deluge brought about by global warming, this book will be an essential resource for home-scale and small-scale commercial hops growers in all regions.

If you have a backyard, or even a sunny porch or balcony, you can grow your own hops, brewing herbs, and malt grains to enhance the flavor, aroma, and uniqueness of your home-brewed beer — and ensure that you have the freshest, purest, best ingredients possible. Simple instructions from experts Joe and Dennis Fisher guide you through every step of the process, from setting up your first hop trellis to planting and caring for your herbs, harvesting and drying them, malting grain, and brewing more than 25 recipes specifically designed for homegrown ingredients. This fully updated second edition includes a new section featuring color photography of the plants, expanded information on growing hops in small spaces, innovative trellising ideas, an expanded section on malting, new profiles of prominent grower/brewers, and up-to-date information on grain-growing best practices.

From Rosalind Creasy--a name synonymous with California's garden-to-table movement--comes an accessible guide to cultivating and preparing herbs. If you buy only one herb gardening book, this should be it. Creasy takes you from seeds to stove top, from preparing the soil to elegant dining suggestions, with easy-to-follow instructions and inspirational ideas every step of the way. Each section of this book presents vivid photos and practical information, including: How to design and grow an herb garden in just about any space--from a spacious plot to a tiny balcony--and in just about any climate A tour through many beautiful private herb gardens, including some of Creasy's own, as well as the garden of herb luminary Carole Saville and others A fully illustrated encyclopedia of edible herbs--from old favorites like basil, rosemary and sage to more exotic herbs such as lemon verbena and Mexican tarragon A savory selection of healthy herb recipes for side dishes, such as blends, butters and vinegars, main dishes from around the world and even cocktails and desserts Maintenance and organic pest control methods A list of resources for seeds and supplies A guide to growing, cultivating and preparing hops This herb guide is full of practical tips and tricks presented in a beautiful format--perfect for the gardener, aspiring gardener or home chef.

In the 1970s and ’80s, the brewing industry shifted was from large corporate suppliers to smaller, independent “microbrewers,” typified by producers such as the Boston Beer Company and Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Today, the market is going even smaller—with tiny, independent brewers setting up shop in neighborhood brew houses nationwide, focusing on crafting unique, flavorful brews specifically for their extremely local clientele. The reality is that beer is in the midst of a renaissance in this country, driven by a new class of these dedicated craft “nanobrewers” and growing communities of drinkers looking for something more from their daily brew—something higher-quality, more unique, more local. These microbrewers rent out small spaces or buy industrial equipment to install in their garages. They’re accountants, middle-school teachers, and plumbers who are passionate about beer and who dedicate their free time to producing three or so barrels of their own brew at a time. They sell their bottles to close friends and gift it to family members for birthdays and holidays. They enjoy what they do and they’re proud of their product. What’s it like inside these small-time brewing operations? What happens behind the scenes? What goes into making high-end craft beer on a small scale? True Beer takes an on-the-ground look at the ultra-small side of the craft brewing movement from the inside out by profiling a number of independent American breweries in detail and using that as a jumping-off point to examine the art and science of brewing, the local farmers and providers behind the scenes, the market itself as well as national trends in nanobrewing, and modern craft beer production. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Good Books and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of cookbooks, including books on juicing, grilling, baking, frying, home brewing and winemaking, slow cookers, and cast iron cooking. We’ve been successful with books on gluten-free cooking, vegetarian and vegan cooking, paleo, raw foods, and more. Our list includes French cooking, Swedish cooking, Austrian and German cooking, Cajun cooking, as well as books on jerky, canning and preserving, peanut butter, meatballs, oil and vinegar, bone broth, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.