The New Brewing Lager Beer

If you have read all the basics like Designing Great Beers, How to Brew, and Tasting Beer, but you still feel the need to know more, this is the book to get. The topics of this book are put in the context of lager brewing but most of the topics are applicable to ales as well. Gregory Noonan goes into great detail of every step of the brewing process. This book is not for beginners. There are 7 chapters on ingredients alone (including a 40 page chapter on brewing water). Also included, chapters on malting (interesting, but not really practical to the homebrewer), crushing grain (yes, an entire chapter devoted to just crushing grain), mashing, boiling, fermentation, secondary fermentation, recipe formulation, brewing procedures, cleaning and sanitizing, and equipment. This book is basically a Seibel degree in a box.

Best coverage of decoction mashing I've come across.
Good coverage of everything. Many things covered in detail.
If you are an all grain brewer, you will learn a lot from this book.

This is really an advanced book because the author discusses very specific topics in great depth. For example, there are many chapters on each type of malt, a chapter on crushing, a chapter on malting, and a chapter on water All this mad a lot more sense after I'd been brewing for a few years. The chapters on decoction mashing are the most interesting.

This is a wonderful resource for the brewer who is eager to learn and invest more time into their hobby. This goes into much more detail than other "how-to" books. My brewing really picked up in quality after reading this and uses the techniques.

Unless you are going to become a beer scientist in your beer laboratory, don't even open it. If you are a beginner, it will make you give up immediately and if you have a few dozen batches under your belt it will make you feel like everyone of them was an abject failure. This is not for a hobby home brewer. Most of the book is only understandable if you are a chemist or biologist. I will say that the author is without question a master and authority on beer, but is unfortunately on a completely different planet than I am.

This is one of the best resources for someone wanting to get serious about brewing lagers. This is a more advanced book, so this is one to add to you collection after you have made it through some of the beginner books and want more in-depth technical details.

This is a book for experienced all grain lager brewers. You will learn how to do different types of decoction mashes. There are 40 pages on water chemistry. The author gets down to the hardcore chemical and technical foundations of brewing. This is the perfect book for the advanced all-grain home brewer.

Noonan's book is very well done and jumps from the intense technical analysis of chemistry interactions to a thorough review of the brewing process and the nuances of lager brewing. Not for the beginning brewer, make sure you have a firm understanding of all-grain before jumping in. Overall, a very good book to take you to the advanced level and a good review of what you may have missed in your brewing career. Acceptable recipes provided. Also, a new version would be desired to add the latest research and understanding. I recommend this book.

This is a book all all-grain brewers should read, not just Lager brewers. There is a lot of detail on water chemistry and brewing science. This is the opposite of RDWHAHB. I very much enjoyed reading it, as it reinforced some concepts and made me look at others in greater detail.

I've been brewing for a while and this is not an easy book to get through. It's very detailed and technical. If you are an advanced lager brewer it's a great book. If you are a novice extract brewer you won't get much out of it.