The Homebrewer’s Garden: How to Easily Grow, Prepare, and Use Your Own Hops, Malts, Brewing Herbs
You can view this book's Amazon detail page here.
Tags:
- Started reading:
- 23rd January 2010
- Finished reading:
- 15th February 2010
Review
Rating: 3
I was fairly disappointed in this book. It was easy enough to read, and the information presented was clear. I however can’t help but thinking this is one of those books where someone “just wanted to get published”. In doing so they took the path of least (might I say ABSOLUTE LEAST) resistance and tossed together a bunch of information from the internet. For someone who has never done any gardening there “may” be something here of value otherwise I would suggest you pass on this one.
If you are already a gardener then I would argue that you already know 90% of what you need to know to grow hops or different grains. The 10% you don’t know can easily be found on the internet in multiple places. This book offers no new insights and merely charges you for both what you already know and what you can get for free on the web with less effort that it takes to open the book in the first place.
The above, as damning as it sounds, is not even my largest problem with this book. The book itself is, minus the appendixes and other errata at the end, 170 pages. It should have been obvious to me that this was at best an introduction and for that fault I will take full blame. However, of the 170 pages 42 of them were simply descriptions of herbs that mostly comes across as a seed catalog. The grains chapter adds another 13 pages of similar (although slightly more in depth) descriptions of different grains. Finally there are 29 pages of recipes. So all told of the original 170 pages there are 84 that are virtually worthless. That is a half of a percent short of 50% of the book!
I can honestly say that if I had picked this book up in a bookstore it wouldn’t have garnered my attention through the first thumb through. Seriously, if you want lists of herbs, grains, and recipes Google is your friend. You will find everything from this book and literally 1000′s more.
In case the person who bought this book for me sees this review I just would like to say that my opinion of the book in no way detracts from the fact that you cared enough to buy it for me. I did, after all, pick the book myself.
