Book Review: Extreme Brewing

Sam Calagione is an icon for entrepreneurship, passion and of course, beer. Calagione is the founder of Dogfish Head Brewery, which has taken craft beer to a whole new level ("Off-centered ale for off-centered people.") It's amazing to me that Sam started a brewpub when he was about my age 15 years ago; what's even more admirable is that 15 years later, he has intentionally avoided "selling out." You can tell that he's in the business for one reason: passion.

I finally got around to reading one of the handful of books that he's put out: Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast's Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home. Though the title may lead you to think that you'd have to be home brewing for years in order to take something out of this, that's not the case. The first section of the book explains the ingredients of beer, the equipment you need to brew it and the basic process of brewing (A-Z, 26 steps). Then it gets into what makes an "extreme" beer with brief explanations of different styles and the proper way to enjoy them. This first part of the book is like a condensed homebrewing and beer guide.

The second part of the book gets into recipes, providing about 25 interesting ale, lager and specialty beer recipes, a portion of which are provided by experts from other craft breweries in the country. Finally, the last part of the book provides about 15 food recipes that use beer.

Overall, I thought this book was a good read. A few of the reviews on Amazon basically pan it for lacking in-depth information on brewing, which I agree it doesn't but who said it would? I think it does a good job of being a basic resource for extreme beer without assuming you have any homebrewing knowledge before reading it, which is fairly difficult to do in under 200 pages with almost half of that strictly dedicated to recipes for beer and food.

Now from my viewpoint as an amateur homebrewer who has been brewing for under 2 years, although I think these aren't recipes that you should try on your first effort, I think if you're looking to adopt the hobby, first of all, it definitely doesn't hurt to read up on various recipes to learn about the brewing process for different beer styles. Second of all, my ultimate goal concerning my hobby for home brewing is to eventually work myself out of using recipe kits to create my own recipes for unique brews; reading unique beer recipes helps to inspire creativity.