How to make brilliant beers at home

The Modern Homebrewer, Andy Parker and Jamil Zainasheff. CAMRA Books, £18.99

With a pint of beer costing – depending on where you live – around £6, it’s not surprising a growing number of drinkers are thinking of filling their kitchens with the delightful aromas of malt and hops.

This timely book will help you perfect your home brews, for the authors have won many plaudits for their beers. And even if you prefer to head to the pub for a good pint, their book is still worth a read as it details all you need to know about beer styles and the essential ingredients required to make them.

Andy Parker is British based and was named Brewer of the Year by the British Guild of Beer Writers in 2022. He started out as a home brewer before turning to commercial production. He now runs Elusive Brewing in Berkshire where he indulges his love of beer with not only British beers but his interpretations of American and Belgian brews.

Jamil Zainasheff is a prodigious writer about beer in the United States. He ran the Heretic Brewing Company for more than 10 years, winning awards at the Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Cup. He now travels widely to visit breweries and to judge in home brewing competitions.

They begin the book with a much-overlooked ingredient: water. We are so obsessed with hops these days and to a lesser extent with malt that we tend to forget that even the strongest beer is made up of 93 per cent water.

Andy and Jamil describe how water develops as it falls to the ground as rain and percolates through layers of rock and soil. The water or “brewing liquor” found in a brewery will have different levels of mineral salts depending on the terrain where it’s found.

The salts are composed of calcium, magnesium, sodium, chloride and bicarbonate. Beer styles didn’t happen by accident but were developed by the water available. London and Dublin became major brewing centres as a result of high levels of carbonate in the local water whereas the likes of Pilsen and Munich brewed superb lager beers with soft water with low levels of salts.

A fascinating chart shows that while salts in London and Dublin water go off the scale they scarcely trouble the dial in Pilsen where the first golden lager, Urquell, was brewed in the mid-19^th century.

The authors explain that it’s possible to use special water treatments to create the type of liquor required for different styles. Reverse osmosis, for example, removes all the minerals from water and the home brewer can then add the salts needed to make either a black stout or a pale lager.

Brewers call malt “the soul of beer”. Important though hops are, it’s the transformation of barley and other grains into malt with fermentable sugars that make the production of beer possible.

Andy and Jamil take you through the different types of malt and how to mill grain at home if you want to take that step. They describe the way in which malting can produce malts ranging from the palest Pilsner malt to the darkest roasted grains used to make black and stout beers. They explain how the use of caramel malts, such as crystal, have to be used with great care to avoid the finished beer being too sweet or cloying.

We may be on safer ground where hops are concerned as a result of so much attention being paid in recent years to the “hop forward” beers of North America. But the authors have to do more than discuss the aromas and flavours of different hop varieties. They describe how in Britain new varieties have been developed in order to deliver the fruity character demanded by many of today’s drinkers.

But this is a home brewing book and participants are led through the merits of using whole hops, pellet hops or extracts. Along the way we pick up vital information about the characteristics of different varieties due to the soil in which they are grown.

And so to yeast, the vital ingredient that transforms malt sugars into finished alcohol. Andy and Jamil explain that there’s far more to yeast today than “bottom” and “top” yeasts. They say there’s a vast number of cultures available to make a wide variety of beer styles that go beyond simple ale and lager. Choosing the right yeast will enable you to produce a clear or hazy beer, a German-style Kölsch or a California IPA.

Equipment is a vital consideration where home brewing is concerned. While the authors give detailed descriptions of making beer with mini versions of commercial breweries they understand that many people will look, for reasons of space and time, to use simpler equipment.

Jamil started out using a malt extract kit and the De Dolle Brouwers – Mad Brothers – in Belgium began by buying a Boots kit on a visit to London. They have gone on to develop superb beers, including a range aged in oak. Andy and Jamil take readers through all the systems available, from boil-in-a-bag to the real McCoy.

If you are keen to start brewing at home you will relish the final section based on recipes for a wide range of beers including such tasty example as Oakham Green Devil, Anspach & Hobday’s The Porter and Kernel’s and Utopian’s true lagers.

I shan’t be joining the ranks of home brewers. I lack the patience and the space at home to brew properly and I have had too many disasters in the past.

Many years ago, in the foreword to the late Graham Wheeler’s home brewing book for CAMRA, I said I was to home brewing what Attila the Hun was to land conservation.

But good luck if you have more skill and commitment than me. And if you create Andy Parker’s Oregon Trail at home I will be knocking on your door.