German Brewing

Basically, it's a chemistry centric book written for first or second year chemistry students. That it is based on beer merely represents his passions for brewing. He is a total beer nerd. So the book focuses on chemistry basics, with details of the mash, boil and fermentation. If I was there, I would totally take the course for the hell of it. It falls just short of a detailed paper looking at a specific reaction with testing results - but pretty solid, as far as I got. Sat with Brungard during it - and he was startled by some of the redox illustrations - especially the estimates of dioxide and hydroxide elements with limit dextrose, alpha and beta activity.

Personally, I like the book, but my chemistry from college was, well under a fog of beer and vodka (hurray Architectural Materials study). So it is a really straightforward but detailed refresher that has a key focus on brewing. His presentation was the most perfect lay-person's detail of the pH system in the mash. I bet he would do backflips to meet someone with a serious approach to home brewing and that brews awesome German lagers. Where Kunze and Narziss assume a lot of background knowledge, this is much more explanatory, even into some of the secondary enzymatic activities.

If you reach out, tell him that I met him at NHC and sent you - he will be excited! His wife is a doll as well.

I was listening to a podcast by Sam Harris this morning and a section of that podcast caught my attention:

"It does not require any special knowledge of psychology or neuroscience to observe that human beings are generally reluctant to change their minds."

A lot off his talk was very familiar, of course. It was nice to hear him confirm that Sierra Nevada takes similar measure to lodo brew. I think he missed the boat by not talking about spunding, but basically summarized it when talking about bottle conditioning. He did confuse speise and krausen, so I'm not sure he was citing from experience.

Overall, very well done and well received.

Yeah his talk was fantastic, my favorite of all NHC.

His book is great, I'm only 4 or 5 chapters in but I do recall a blurb about LODO brewing being the net frontier (my wording).

Found the quote I was thinking of:

Page 262:
"Improvements in flavor stability may come from brewing processes that take advantage of antioxidants that are naturally available in wort and beer. One way to help these antioxidants survive the brewing process is to exclude oxygen from the mashing and boiling steps. This is likely to be the trend in brewing in the next decades."

Last copyright date is 2013.

This must be an American book? Cause zee Germans have known about this for decades....