Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Book Review)
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019
As a home brewer with a couple of University degrees (BComp MBAS) and neither of them in chemistry my first comment about this book is “Holy fuck!”. This book being Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers by John Palmer and Colin Kaminski. No, seriously, this actually is as advertised… a comprehensive guide to the chemistry of water at all stages of the brewing process from the tap to the disposal of waste. It’s also a book that you can take from stage one of your brewing career through to building and running your own brewery on a commercial scale. So, I’m impressed. And I learned a lot… but it’s a tough read for the non-chemist.
So, from a home brewer’s perspective, I’m not sure exactly if you have to take the time to read Palmer’s book about water. But at the same time I know you’ll get a lot out of it if you can only wade through the highly complex explanations. I’d love to read another version – an edited university text book with side notes and diagrams. Not quite the Dummies Guide… but a graduates step into the concepts that build into the knowledge that makes water chemistry make sense.
