A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Brewing Elements)

Very informative book on one of the most basic components of home brewing. Provides a great understanding on why certain beers are best when brewed in certain parts of the world and how their water sources make them as good as they can be.

Anyone who has the two previous Brewing Elements books should get this for the set.

This book and the entire series are great books loaded with information that all brewers/distillers need to know. Easy to read and understand although the water book is pretty technical but they break it down so even simple folks like myself can understand it.....Highly Recomended Series of Books!

Great for brewers who are expanding their skills and already have all the basics down. Goes from explaining your types of water sources to correcting your water and even how breweries treat their waste water. A must have for any serious brewer.

I thought this book would answer all the questions I've had about water and its relationship to homebrewing, but it's written more for professional brewers than homebrewers. There is a ton of excellent, in-depth technical information that is lost on a homebrewer such as myself. Chapter 7, Adjusting Water for Style, contains the only information that I find useful as a homebrewer. If you are looking for easy-to-read information on water for homebrewing, I suggest John Palmer's other book, How to Brew (specifically, Chapter 15, Understanding the Mash pH).

I bought this book to maybe better improve my water for home brewing. As I admit it may help a little but not much. I have some chemistry education but most of this is over my education. I have reverse osmosis water and want to know what to add to make a better brewing water for certain beers. This book kind of points you there but I feel comes up short. Like the other reviews, maybe two chapters apply to the home brewer and the others are nice to know stuff for larger scale breweries. If your like me save your money and do your research on the web. You've been warned

I had such high hopes for this book... but unfortunatelly I have to say it is not very well suited for homebrewers...
I'm not talking rookie homebrewers. I'm talking homebrewers with years of practice having read most of homebrew info on whats
available around (not that this is any credential, just saying)
Also I feel one of the goals of the book is to push the envelope on the current info related to water and brewing and assembling all in one place, which is a nice start. The goal is noble, the approach could have been slightly better IMHO.

The book covers lots of detail and technical complexities related to water in brewing, but does not explain the technical (chemistry) in enough depth to be fully understood by a homebrewer, which is the target audience aimed by the authors.

Not complaining that the topic is complex, which it is indeed, my critique is that if you are going to write a book for homebrewers (no matter how simple or advanced) you should care to explain the very fine bits doesnt matter if it takes 1000 pages, cos homebrewers dont normally have chemistry background. Not something easy to be done...

If the book just throws a bunch of information and assumes everyone is familiar with it and has the pre-requirement background info on chemistry etc, and then leaves the reader hanging and looking for explanations, then I'd rather buy a pro book like Kunze or a hardcore
water chemistry book for that matter...

After reading the book, by page 100 you get the impression the authors start rushing the topics and throwing one concept or definition after another withouth much care to explain the whys and hows. The pace then accelerates until you see yourself overwhelmed with information that you either dont understand and/or know what to do with it... dumping concepts and notions of residual alkalinity and then starts taking about Z residual alkalinity, and mentions graphs that you dont know where they came from or how were created, and calculations that can only be performed with the help of graphs that came out of the blue sky.

This is not like the other books of The Brewing Elements Series which are relativelly easy to grasp,
I have an engineering background, but after reading the book I still dont grasp several concepts. Frustrating...

Funny thing is that I'm currently attending a "pro" course on Master Brewing, and the "water part" of the course is based on this book,
but the professor (a professional working on mega brewery industry) couldnt explain half of the book...

Anyway... I think the book would have been more digestible if they started with basic details on water and then right to the practical stuff for a homebrewer, and then moved all the hermetic technical stuff to appendices where it could be browsed as needed. Just to be more paupable and not scare people away (yes, I read the introduction and remember the authors explicitly said: " this is not a beginner book" )

It was a good attempt for a first try though (and I always like to end with the positives), and it has the merits of being a very specific topic related to brewing that you'd have to dig through several other tomes to get through. Hopefully it will improve for next editions.

I was really impressed at the depth and clarity of this book. Of all the Brewing Elements book, this is the most practical, helpful and serves as an ongoing reference. The other books, particularly the hop book, are basically a nice story that you read once and put down. The Water book, on the other hand, has such an incredible scope of information that you can look at this book over and over and learn something new each time. The complexity can be daunting, but the quality of writing and editing is superb. It's written in clear, concise, and easy to understand language.

The topic of brewing water is somewhat difficult to understand especially since there's so many online sources of somewhat dubious quality, filled with anecdotes. "Water" brings a lot of the expert advice and commentary together and I have no doubt as to the accuracy and validity of the information here. Whether you are a serious homebrewer or pro brewer, I think the breadth of information here is widely useful.

I checked it out from the library, and I'd wish I just purchased it because a month wasn't enough time to really appreciate the contents. It's really the only Brewing Elements book I'm planning on buying outright.

Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers (Brewing Elements)

In 1884, J.A. Nettleton published Every Brewer His Own Analyst, A plain and brief Summary of Reliable Chemical and other Practical Tests Which are applicable to All Brewing Waters and Materials, To Worts and To Beer, And which can be performed readily by every Brewer, (Ford, Shapland & Co., London), devoting thirty-two of the sixty page booklet to the science of brewing waters as it was known. Since then, brewing chemists have endeavored to further understand and explain all aspects of beer's principal ingredient.

The newest contribution to brewing water wisdom is Water, a comprehensive guide for brewers by two authors well known in the US Craft Brewing world, John Palmer and Colin Kaminski. Palmer previously penned How to Brew and co-authored Brewing Classic Styles for Brewers Publications. Kaminski designed more than 180 home-brewing gadgets at Beer, Beer and More Beer homebrew supply shop (Concord, California).

The book begins with chapters on brewing water overview, sources of brewing water and how to read a water report. The authors encourage brewers to "...contact the [municipal] water department at least monthly to get current information"... and..."the water department is usually happy to supply information on the Secondary Standards for brewers." Primary standards are those that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Clean Water Act for drinking water has set maximum contaminant levels, whilst Secondary Standards are those that are unregulated or merely aesthetic in nature.

Chapters 4 & 5 explain the fundamental importance and relationships between malt color, malt acidity, malt buffering capacity, liquor/grist ratios, malt mill gap settings, mash pH and residual alkalinity. The authors introduce and define the concept of "Z Residual Alkalinity" which takes into account the brewery's target mash pH (usually pH 5.2-5.6) rather than the standard pH 4.3.

Revealing a humorous side, the authors introduce Chapter 6, Controlling Alakalinity, with a tongue-in-cheek "Declaration of Non-Adherence", mimicking the US Declaration of Independence. Jocularity aside, methods of reducing brewing water alkalinity including acidification, boiling, lime softening or dilution with reverse osmosis (RO) or de-ionized (DI) water, as well as several methods to use when alkalinity needs to be increased with sodium bicarbonate, chalk, sodium or potassium hydroxide or slaked lime are discussed in detail. Chapter 7 then applies these chemistries to some six dozen different beer styles. Real brewery examples of source water treatment, brewing, bottling and boiler water requirements, and wastewater treatment scenarios are outlined in the final chapters of the book.

Since water analysis may be reported in a wide range of units, the authors have done much of the chemical unit calculation work for brewers by providing a nifty table of factors to convert between ppm and milliequivalents/litre for the important calcium, magnesium and carbonate water hardness ions.

Though at least one terrestrial and several shipboard breweries brew with distilled seawater, it is not mentioned in the book. As most futurists predict that fresh drinking water will only become more constrained by the earth's population, perhaps future works will expound on this option.

As recommended by the authors, brewers should have a basic knowledge of high school chemistry to read this book and grasp much of the science discussed within. A handy glossary and chemistry primer is also provided in the appendix to remind the reader of forgotten chemical concepts. Acidification of sparge water; ion, salt and acid calculations; and water charge balance and carbonate species distribution are also provided in appendices for those that can't get enough of brewing water chemistry. For the rest of us, this book fits the bill nicely.