Brewing Science: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Book Review)
Thursday, January 14th, 2021
Right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a great opportunity to pick up a free digital copy of Brewing Science: A Multidisciplinary Approach by Michael Mosher and Kenneth Trantham from Springer. It was a phase we’ve passed through, but the idea was to give an opportunity for people to learn new or expand old skills during the lockdown. And I’m a book kind of guy so I grabbed this (along with a couple of unrelated text books). That being said, having spent 10 years at University I know that a text book is just a part of the learning process and having read one doesn’t make you that much smarter without the practicals, exercises and self-guided research required of an actual student.
I’m not sure I’d pay the textbook price for this one unless I needed it as a student. However, this textbook has a great rundown of brewing processes and chemistry from a commercial perspective specifically targeted at new brewers training to enter the industry. So, while there’s a bit of chemistry and physics involved, there’s no real reason you need to be able to do all that mathematics. It’s interesting to understand some of those brewery constraints about pressure in piping systems and so forth, but anyone should really hire a professional to design the brewery rather than trust their own mathematics and physics. In short, it’s more complicated than you would intuitively think.
