Gifts: Beer Books!

The holidays are upon us and we know how hard it can be to think of the perfect gift for your friends and family.  We'll be posting some ideas for beer lovers' gifts this week to help you get through the holiday season!


Today we're featuring some great books about beer and all the encompasses it.  We've got some of these books available at The Bruery Provisions and others are available through Amazon or other book stores. 


If you are looking for something a bit more special, this Thursday, 12/8, we'll have Joshua Bernstein, author of Brewed Awakening, in for a book signing!  Plus, we'll have a special 'Brewed Awakening' flight featuring some rare beers that people usually have to wait in line for!

For the novice beer geek! This brand new book is perfect for your friend who is trying to track down all the 'must have' beers. Loads of craft examples of different styles and hard to find treasures. 

For the novice beer chick (or dude). Written by "The Beer Chicks", The Naked Pint is a great book for the beer novice looking to learn the basics of beer styles and history be they a chick or a dude.

For the novice know-it-all. Tasting Beer is one of the unofficial textbooks for the Cicerone certification and is an easy read full of information from history to styles to how beer is made. One of the most comprehensive beer books out there without being too complex.

For the novice beer traveler. This new book is a great look at the different breweries across this great country of ours. A fantastic read for your friend who likes to visit breweries while cross the USA.

For the foodie! Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery penned this lengthy book that gives an extremely comprehensive look at how to pair beer with food and food with beer.

For the beginning home brewer! Cooked up by a craft beer couple who has spent years brewing out of their compact San Francisco apartment, this is a great start for someone who is just getting into homebrewing and needs some inpiration.

For the novice homebrewer! This book is one of the standards for learning to homebrew. Concepts on recipe formulation and everything involved in the process.

For the crazy homebrewer! Radical Brewing is just that. Does your friend need some inspiration to become the next head brewer for The Bruery? This book will lead them on the path to craziness.

For the homebrew (or professional brewing) expert. Is your friend an incredible homebrewer? They'd probably enjoy this guide on yeast :)

Another one for the homebrew expert. While some of the other books teach you the fundamentals of brewing a beer, this one gets down to the nitty gritty. We still sift through it on occasion ourselves.

And last but not least... for the expert brewer who loves sour and funky ales! Another guide on yeast, but this one focussing on the funky stuff. One of the hardest forms of brewing to perfect, this book at least gives a brewer a leg up on nature.

For the entrepreneur! Schmaltz brewing has been around for 13 years and Jeremy Cowan shares his stories of the beer world between the He'Brew and Coney Island brands which have both been influential on the retail shelf.

Another for the entrepreneur! Inspire your favorite homebrewer to go pro with this book by Sam C of Dogfish Head Brewery (whom we recently collaborated with on a beer!)

Faster, Bigger, Better, Bolder (Gradually, Quietly, Steadily)

Today we are very excited to be releasing the beer that we collaborated on with Sam Caligione and Dogfish Head!  Read here for the original post on just what we got up to or just read below for the real story.

Thanks to Arne Frantzell and The Full Pint for these comics!

Dogfish Head

As mentioned in our previous post, we are attempting to revive this blog and make it a great destination for you to learn about what we are doing as a company as well as some tidbits about craft beer and all that surrounds it. So, we're going to jump backwards a couple of weeks here and talk about an epic day in our life as a brewery that occurred in mid-June.

We've done a couple of collaboration brews at this point in our short life. About 2 years ago we had Wayne from Cigar City Brewing out at our place to create what eventually became Marron Acidifié and earlier this year we had Sean Lawson of Lawson's Finest Liquids out here to work on Acer Quercus with us. Both of these beers were very exciting to make as it's extremely fun to be challenged with ideas from a brewer that we don't typically work with. As with many things in life, we sometimes need a change in the way that we do things in order to bring back a little more heat to our fire, and getting to collaborate with other great brewers really helps the creative process in this way.

When Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head brewing asked us about doing a collaboration with him, there was no hesitation. Sam is not only one of the biggest names in the craft brewing industry, but his passion for styles beyond the norm are very similar, yet totally different from what we do here at The Bruery. We knew it would be a fun process.

A number of phone calls were made between Sam and Patrick and some of the other folks at our respective breweries. We each came to the table with several ideas for beers that we thought were out of the box enough to be what someone would expect when our two breweries combined forces, yet still sounded tasty. The list of ingredient ideas being traded back and forth over the telephone lines between California and Delaware was enough to make any TSA official who may have been listening in become a bit suspicious.

When it all came down to the final few ideas, the answer became quite clear. A Japanese inspired beer that we could brew with a laundry list of herbs, spices and fruits lending themselves to the citrus, spicy and umami flavors often associated with the profound subtlety of Japanese cuisine. Plus, we could donate a portion of the proceeds to the brewers and breweries in Japan who were suffering from the large Earthquake that recently hit their northern shores.

Sam planned his trip out west to coincide with the National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego and arrived at our brewery straight off of a plane from Philly Beer Week. He's a busy man.

We were prepared with all of the possible ingredients needed for the recipe that had been discussed. Everything from kumquats to ginger to chili powder to sesame seeds to seaweed. Flaked rice, brown rice syrup and some standard malts. And of course, sake yeast.

Sam came roaring into our brewery with the smile and friendliness that we all came and knew to love from his short-lived television show, "Brew Masters." He asked us questions about every inch of our brewery while being taken on a small tour.  He made a point of learning every employee's name and all in all, he was just an amazing guest. You'd think that he had had more than 2 hours sleep the night before...

The rest of the day was simply a pleasure. We began by tasting through some test batch beer that had been brewed previously on our 10 gallon system and mixed in some of the possible spices to get a feeling for what flavor we enjoyed the most. Sam helped Kevin mash in between discussions with Patrick and Tyler about everything from the beer at hand to the bocce ball tournament that we were all participating in that coming weekend.  Kumquats were emulsified, random Japanese treats were munched and, of course, several beers were imbibed.

Overall, the day was a big success.  We all had a great time coming up with a recipe together and getting to know each other while discussing war stories from the brewing trenches, plus it was probably the most hands on brewing that either Sam or Patrick have done in some time and it's always fun to put your boots back on.

The beer is currently in the final stages of fermentation and hopefully we will be releasing it upon the world soon.